Watch Guns N’ Roses Play ‘November Rain’ at First Covid-Era Show

Guns N’ Roses played their first show since the start of the pandemic Saturday night at Hershey Park Stadium in Hershey, Pennsylvania. The band basically stuck with the standard setlist they’ve been doing since reuniting with Slash and Duff McKagan in 2016 for the Not In This Lifetime tour, though they did premiere a cover of the Stooges’ “I Wanna Be Your Dog” during the portion of the night where Duff takes over on lead vocals.

Check out fan-shot video of “November Rain” above. It begins with Rose having a little trouble with his mic placement and calling out a tech to fix it. Earlier in the set, they played the Use Your Illusion I deep cut “Dead Horse,” a cover of Velvet Revolver’s “Slither” and “Welcome to the Jungle,” which opened with a bit of Link Wray’s instrumental classic “Rumble.” The sole encore was “Paradise City,” making the set a few songs shorter than a typical Guns show.

The band is staying on the road in North America through mid-October, playing a mixture of football stadiums, basketball arenas, and festivals. They head to Australia and New Zealand in November, and then Europe in the summer of 2022. This is technically a different tour than the Not In This Lifetime tour of 2016 to 2019, but it’s the same exact lineup of musicians and the staging and setlist remains virtually unaltered.

Guns N’ Roses haven’t released a new album since 2008’s Chinese Democracy. Slash had said that the band has cut demos for new tracks, but nothing has been heard by the public. “Duff and I did some jamming and we also worked on the Guns record,” Slash said in December 2020, “and I’ve had a couple of ancillary recordings and jams on top of that, so there’s been a lot of stuff going on. I’m really not good at slowing down and just sitting around.”