mystery

I feel you in that this band can never do things in a straightforward and easy manner. There always has to be some bullshit and a cloud of uncertainty to the things they do.

This is semi-related to Perhaps as this relates to the same general time period. I was reading this Dave Dominguez interview from a few years back and he noted that he didn't recognize much of the music from Chinese Democracy from the time he was there. One of the notable exceptions was Better which is a song that had music for it way earlier than most people thought and could have existed in some form as early as 1998.

Does anyone have information on the time-frame the General would have been recorded? It wasn't part of the Rough Mixes so it was post-2000 at least.

I think the CD artwork reveal might've been summer 2002 just before the VMA performance. Someone more knowledgeable probably has the exact date. Pretty sure it was described as the same bike with the band's name written on the wall.

Regardless of how he sounds now, I'm blown away with how much better he looks at 61 than 10 years ago at 51. He didn't look super healthy during the Nu Guns era circa 2010-14. He pretty much hid himself in hats and sunglasses and looks more youthful now even if his voice is going.

You got to see the holy grail of concerts where all we got are cool pictures, the last performance of Oh My God, and the last performance of Silkworms for almost 20 years until it became Absurd in summer 2021.

When Jimmy Kimmel directly asked Axl about his cornrows and Axl later talking about his Halloween tree in the same interview

The band feels much more comfortable showing actual footage of themselves this year rocking out and having fun.

I'm a wrestling fan and was watching this interview with Chris Jericho who's a wrestler and part of the rock band Fozzy. In addition he was part of the Eddie Trunk interview with Axl in 2006, had Slash on his podcast to talk about dinosaurs, and has a good knowledge of rock and metal in general. He's interviewed by fellow wrestler Swerve Strickland for his podcast and at 15:00, co-host Monteasy makes a point about stealth album drops while mentioning Michael Jackson and Slash. Chris Jericho starts talking about Chinese Democracy's release and the lack of promotion which caught my attention. It's mostly accurate and I feel like he's talking in good faith as he's actually a fan of the band.

I think the reason for this is band shirts being much more available than back in the day in places like Walmart, Kohl's, Target, Old Navy, H&M etc., back in the day you'd most likely have to go to a show or order a shirt through a catalog. Band shirts and logos are meant to be fashionable and eye-catching and I imagine most bands are cool either way since its advertising and they're likely making money off it.

I'm wondering what other worthwhile unreleased songs they have when the General comes out and if they'll continue to be drip fed like the recent singles? Is Atlas Shrugged next? It's a song that continued to be worked on after the Rough Mixes and was allegedly almost included on Chinese Democracy according to Bumblefoot. The rough mixes version sounded like a work in progress lyrically so it'd be interesting to hear what a final version is like.

People couldn't really look into the future to compare a 2012 performance to present. It may be better than his present performances but this was 2 years after 2010 where he had a ton of rasp in the early part of the year. The hard part to believe is this was less than 4 years from the NITL tour which feels way further spaced from 2009-14 than it actually is.

It's always really interesting to see just how much Axl changed his singing for Chinese Democracy when you listen to a song like Perhaps. The recording of it would have been within the same 10 year period UYI and TSI were recorded 1990-93-1999-2000 but its such a dramatically different approach. I actually like it and it fits the raw, biographical vibe of a lot of the Chinese Democracy songs better than high octane rasp but it took a bit to get used to.

There definitely seems to be more use of it during the verses that aren't there in the studio version

The funny thing is they could have released Perhaps during that era and that kind of works as a back cover to a physical single.