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nicklloydnow · 10 months

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“IN THE ANNALS OF ROCK HISTORY, Chinese Democracy is a punchline and a cautionary tale. Guns N’ Roses spent more than 14 years working on it. At the beginning of the process, they were still arguably the biggest rock band in the world. By the end, they were Axl Rose fronting a collection of musicians who could’ve staffed a rock & roll fantasy camp.

Much of the band’s core when they began making the album — Slash, Duff McKagan, Matt Sorum, Gilby Clarke — either quit or were fired (or both) along the way. New members reportedly had to be approved by Rose’s spiritual adviser, an aura-reading psychic from Sedona named Sharon Maynard, who was often referred to as “Yoda.” At various points, the band’s lineup included ex-members of Nine Inch Nails, Primus, the Replacements, Devo, and the Psychedelic Furs. The list of musicians who auditioned, contributed, or visited the sessions includes Dave Navarro, Brian May, Sebastian Bach, Moby, and Shaquille O’Neal.

You could write an entire book about the tenure of avant-garde guitarist Buckethead, who communicated with bandmates through a hand puppet, and for whom a chicken coop was constructed in the studio, where, according to Zutaut, the guitarist would record his parts and watch porn. Zutaut also once claimed that, after Rose’s wolf puppy took a shit in said chicken coop, Buckethead resisted efforts to clean it up, claiming he loved the smell.

The entire project wasn’t only time consuming, it was wildly expensive, with costs reportedly running to a quarter of a million dollars per month at some stages, and a final tab of at least $13 million. The protracted recording process was a function of, among other things, Rose’s desperate effort to match the sound coming out of the speakers to the sound in his head. A less charitable reading was that he’d simply lost the plot, and without a strong creative counterweight — someone like Slash or Duff who was equally invested in the outcome — there was nobody to help him find it.

(…)

Within the insular confines of the GN’R fan community, though, there were devotees like Dunsford and Madeline, for whom Chinese Democracy wasn’t an embarrassing bomb from a megalomaniac who’d alienated his most important collaborators. It was an overlooked magnum opus by a misunderstood genius. If GN’R’s early albums bottled a certain amount of anti-social rebellion, Chinese Democracy represents a kind of counterrevolution, in which its relative unpopularity has only intensified the passion of its adherents.

Madeline told me that for years on GN’R forums, “85 to 95 percent of fans wanted nothing to do with Guns N’ Roses unless it was discussing the old lineup. Then you have people like me — we call ourselves five-percenters. All we cared about was Chinese Democracy.”

(…)

Amid this void, the less-dedicated fans lost interest, leaving a hardcore group who feasted on any scraps of information they could scrounge. Every paparazzi photo of Rose would be studied for clues to his mind state. Fans would discuss a stray quote from a band member with the dedication of Talmudic scholars.

This sense of scarcity was foundational to the fan community. Anyone with access to new music or information — or anyone perceived to — has cachet. Unreleased music is the most prized of all currencies.

GN’R fans who manage to procure unreleased tracks, or even snippets of them, fall into two basic categories: hoarders and leakers. Hoarders keep whatever they find for themselves or share only with a handful of trusted friends. Leakers distribute it to the rest of the fans. Within the community, hoarders are both despised and venerated. They’re viewed as anti-democratic elitists, but they’re insiders with something everyone wants. On occasion, a hoarder may sell unreleased material or trade it — and some make real money doing this — but they intuitively understand the scarcity principle. If they distribute music widely, it not only puts them at risk legally, it also erases the music’s value and endangers their heightened status.

(…)

By the time of Chinese Democracy’s official release, most of its songs had already leaked, occasionally in dramatic fashion — including one, bizarrely, when then-New York Mets catcher Mike Piazza brought a CD-R of unreleased songs to Eddie Trunk’s radio show. The album’s anti-climactic arrival fed the fans’ thirst for more music. Suggestions from Rose and others that the album was intended as part of a trilogy, and that there was enough music to fill several albums, convinced some fans there was a lost classic just gathering dust in the band’s vault.

In light of this, many fans have come to resent GN’R’s secrecy and stinginess with new music. “The band should’ve figured out a way to manage their community online in a more positive way, instead of keeping them in the dark for so many years,” says Kooluris. “They’ve created all these monsters who just want to pillage, steal, and grab whatever they can get because they don’t feel like they’ve ever been appreciated by the band.… It’s like Stockholm syndrome. They’re chained up in the basement, they haven’t been outside for years, so they act in unhealthy ways.

“It’s more than the music,” he continues. “These people are looking for belonging.… But these guys invest so much that it distracts them from being happy. Because you’re not going to be happy if you’re all in on GN’R.”

(…)

The studio was Village Recorder, the legendary birthplace of Steely Dan’s Aja, Fleetwood Mac’s Tusk, and Dr. Dre’s The Chronic. GN’R moved their base of operations there in 2000. Nineteen of the CD-Rs Bird found in the locker were rough mixes from the 2000-01 Village sessions. They included complete songs, instrumentals, rehearsals, and alternate versions of previously released material. The sessions were legendary among fans. Nothing had ever leaked from them. This, they believed, was where they’d find their lost classic.

(…)

Fans have now been waiting nearly as long for a Chinese Democracy follow-up as they waited for Chinese Democracy. Whispers swirl about the imminent arrival of a new full-length culled from this batch of leaked material. But is this stuff any good?

Within the GN’R community, views diverge. “There’s plenty of material that could really be a legendary album,” says Dunsford. Kooluris is less sanguine: “These fans think Axl’s got another ‘Paradise City’ or ‘November Rain’ in the vault, and he fucking doesn’t.” There’s widespread enthusiasm for the raw, guitar-driven “Hard Skool,” which was released as a single in 2021 and hearkens back to pre-Chinese Democracy GN’R. It’s a particular curiosity because many fans interpret the lyrics (“You had to play it cool, had to do it your way/Had to be a fool, had to throw it all away”) as a shot at Slash, who rejoined the band with Duff in 2016, and ultimately contributed guitar parts to the finished song.

Many of the leaked songs aren’t hard to find online. Listening to them, it’s easy to convince yourself that with a little polish, “Atlas Shrugged,” the tense, dramatic “Perhaps,” and “State of Grace,” an industrial-tinged midtempo creeper, could’ve anchored another classic GN’R album. Other tracks feel half-baked. But judging these songs based on rough mixes feels unfair. Exploring ideas that never get fully fleshed out and trying things that don’t succeed is how the creative process is supposed to work. This, of course, underscores the moral argument against leaking unreleased music. “Ultimately, there’s only one truth,” says Kooluris. “It’s stolen music. These guys try to rationalize it, but it’s not theirs.”

(…)

One of his long-running motivations around leaking music has been to stick it to “the hoarding putzes,” though he recognizes the biggest hoarder of all is Rose himself. “He doesn’t owe anybody anything, but sometimes he teases like he’s going to do something, then nothing happens, and people get frustrated,” Craig says. “It’s almost like drug addicts.… You’re so desperate for a fix you’ll do things not within the norm to get your fix. All these kids are acting like they’re members of a spy ring.… You don’t see that with Metallica or Faith No More.”

(…)

Being a music fan has changed a lot in the past 20 years. Collecting an artist’s every release was once the sign of a true die-hard. Now, we all have that for nearly every artist in existence for the price of a monthly subscription fee.

So, in this time of instant access and overwhelming abundance, what defines real fandom? How do you prove it? Well, if you’re Rick Dunsford, you do whatever it takes to get your hands on the music nobody else has. When being a fan is easy, you do what’s hard. These GN’R fans — not just Dunsford, but the whole collection of crazies — understand that.”

“This, in the Year Punk Broke A.D., was months before Nevermind, and a year before Kurt Cobain, on the exact same journey as GN’R, rocked a “Corporate Magazines Still Suck” T-shit on Rolling Stone’s cover. But even as grunge and punk revivalism supposedly unseated mainstream rock in the Nineties (or so the myth goes), Guns N’ Roses, who’d been covering punk groups the U.K. Subs and the Misfits for years, were playing in stadiums alongside Metallica (another band that covered the Misfits, as well as punks Fang years before Nirvana). Mainstream rock, with all its primordial influences, was still bigger than ever and would remain so for at least a couple more years. This box set, memorializing the 30th anniversary of Guns N’ Roses’ overwhelming and intimidating Use Your Illusion albums — arriving, in true GN’R fashion, a year late — presents some interesting alternate facts for the alternative explosion.

(…)

The albums, in hindsight, present the paradox of a band of outsiders who have become the biggest band on the planet but still want to be rebels (see also: Neil Young’s fable of Johnny Rotten, and Kurt Cobain’s fable of Kurt Cobain). It’s a portrait of an identity crisis and it eventually tore them apart. But at the time, they rose to the challenge and reaped the rewards, even if by all accounts the Use Your Illusion albums are still Too Much Music.

(…)

By this point, the band had been called up from the streets and had risen to the occasion. They were still working together, and, gosh, maybe even liked each other. Three decades since their release, we know understand how the Use Your Illusion albums represented the most of what they could do, and they secured their legend. If they had called it quits completely after the tour, like the Police did after Synchronicity, and avoided all the nasty press digs, it could have been a clean break and we probably still would have gotten Chinese Democracy. But Use Your Illusion was a testament to their determination, which is still their driving force. Not grunge, not Spin, not good taste (or even bad taste) could hold them back then or now. This is a portrait of the kings of the jungle.”

#axl #axl rose #guns n roses #chinese democracy #use your illusion

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