Paul Tobias

[Sosso]

I wonder how if Paul and Axl are still friends nowadays. Would that mean that he is still in his paycheck list?

 

Edited May 13, 2018 by Sosso

[F*ck Fear]

People really care for that Jabroni?

The guy played 2 shows with Axl.

I honestly cannot see him being paid for anything other than his Chinese credits.

[rockphantom]

Tobias was an albatross around Axl's neck! Would GNR had split in the mid-90s if Paul wasn't around?

[Nosaj Thing]

Every now and then a thread called "Paul Tobias" pops out.  I have been a member long enough to have witnessed at least 10.  They all fall into oblivion after a page or two.

Short answer: Nobody cares.

[killuridols]

Paul Tobias, Rob Gardner, Chris Weber, Tracii Guns, Ole Beich: all irrelevant guys some people insist on attaching to Guns N' Roses name, fame & success, for the weirdest reasons.

[SlashisGOD]

Agreed. Paul Tobias was one of the reasons the band broke up in the mid 90s. The guy should stay the hell away from GNR forever.

[History2010]

He's probably getting some decent royalty checks from Shadow of Your Love. 

 

Didn't someone find that he was working in real estate as of a few years ago? 

Edited May 14, 2018 by History2010

[DieselDaisy]

He had a band with David Lank called Mank Rage,

He also worked with Brain,

https://itunes.apple.com/us/album/eclectic-cinema/id1042506835

Edited May 14, 2018 by DieselDaisy

[NOVEMBER COMA]

2 hours ago, killuridols said:

Paul Tobias, Rob Gardner, Chris Weber, Tracii Guns, Ole Beich: all irrelevant guys some people insist on attaching to Guns N' Roses name, fame & success, for the weirdest reasons.

Don't care for him either but no so irrelevant when Shadow has just been released & he is credited. Hard to ignore him but he seemed to be in the right place at the right time. Sympathy solo will forever piss me off.  

[killuridols]

4 minutes ago, NOVEMBER COMA said:

Don't care for him either but no so irrelevant when Shadow has just been released & he is credited. Hard to ignore him but he seemed to be in the right place at the right time. Sympathy solo will forever piss me off.  

With the way Axl is, who really knows how much he "wrote" for that song.

[NOVEMBER COMA]

50 minutes ago, killuridols said:

With the way Axl is, who really knows how much he "wrote" for that song.

Agree, 'wrote' is the question. Izzy was clearly the prominent lyricist in, well basically all GNR outside of CD so Tobias, maybe he & izzy had a riff idea during Hollywood Rose, who knows. All I know is Slash would never have worked with him especially on guitar riffs so I am surprised it has resurfaced this year as an official single. 

[killuridols]

2 minutes ago, NOVEMBER COMA said:

Agree, 'wrote' is the question. Izzy was clearly the prominent lyricist in, well basically all GNR outside of CD so Tobias, maybe he & izzy had a riff idea during Hollywood Rose, who knows. All I know is Slash would never have worked with him especially on guitar riffs so I am surprised it has resurfaced this year as an official single. 

LOL, I don't know if I expressed myself well, but I meant that knowing the way Axl was (is) towards friends, especially people who he brought from Indiana to be around him, I wouldn't be surprised if Axl decided to give royalties to Tobias, even if all Tobias did while in the rehearsing room, was cutting the pizza and opening the beer cans

It is also a mystery to me how on earth Slash agreed to have this Tobias thing released for the box set. Maybe it was for the same reasons he accepted to record SFTD before: to have the band going, doing something, moving forward....... It kinda contradicts his feelings for Tobias from 1995. Who knows...

[NOVEMBER COMA]

5 minutes ago, killuridols said:

LOL, I don't know if I expressed myself well, but I meant that knowing the way Axl was (is) towards friends, especially people who he brought from Indiana to be around him, I wouldn't be surprised if Axl decided to give royalties to Tobias, even if all Tobias did while in the rehearsing room, was cutting the pizza and opening the beer cans

It is also a mystery to me how on earth Slash agreed to have this Tobias thing released for the box set. Maybe it was for the same reasons he accepted to record SFTD before: to have the band going, doing something, moving forward....... It kinda contradicts his feelings for Tobias from 1995. Who knows...

Looking at the recordings for the box set, I guess Shadow is the only real single option that is not an alternate version of a song from AFD. Other option I guess was Back off (also Tobias lol) but not sure how well that would go down on radio. Re: SFTD, Tobias parts were added later which makes me wonder if he & Slash were ever in the same room. Gilby was gone & like you said, Tobias was cutting Pizza's so was maybe on hand at the time. It will remain as the worst decision to this day in the GNR camp to re-record over the best lead guitarist in the world.  

[killuridols]

10 minutes ago, NOVEMBER COMA said:

Re: SFTD, Tobias parts were added later which makes me wonder if he & Slash were ever in the same room. Gilby was gone & like you said, Tobias was cutting Pizza's so was maybe on hand at the time. It will remain as the worst decision to this day in the GNR camp to re-record over the best lead guitarist in the world.  

Yes, they were.... not sure if for SFTD but Slash spoke of him in a disgusted way. He was like "ew, that guy, he sucks....". There's a video of it,, lol.

[NOVEMBER COMA]

6 minutes ago, killuridols said:

Yes, they were.... not sure if for SFTD but Slash spoke of him in a disgusted way. He was like "ew, that guy, he sucks....". There's a video of it,, lol.

lol, never knew there was a video. He never got Slash the pepperoni & miller he wanted. 

[Blackstar]

6 hours ago, NOVEMBER COMA said:

Re: SFTD, Tobias parts were added later which makes me wonder if he & Slash were ever in the same room. Gilby was gone & like you said, Tobias was cutting Pizza's so was maybe on hand at the time. It will remain as the worst decision to this day in the GNR camp to re-record over the best lead guitarist in the world.  

Before the SFTD story, probably during the summer of '94, Slash had rehearsed with Tobias for 2 weeks and then told Axl he didn't want him around. According to himself (interview August '96), those 2 weeks were all he was with Tobias in the same room.

---------

About Shadow Of Your Love:

Slash says in his book that it was the best Hollywood Rose song. Duff said that it wasn't included in the album although it was a good song.

So I guess they all like it.

It seems that it was written before Hollywood Rose:

Shadow Of Your Love was… I wrote the lyrics kinda influenced by Thin Lizzy. And that was one of the songs that I wrote with Paul Huge, he was original guitarist from Indiana with Izzy and I, and now he’s in a band called Mank Rage. And we just wrote that like in 7 minutes, you know, we did it in 7 minutes years ago and it is something we're really proud of, you know, it’s my friend Josh’s favourite song. […] I pondered the words years before that and then when the song hit it was just like it went to the (?) mental road. It was "hey, let's go!". We had 7 minutes to jam, we didn’t have any equipment so it’s like we didn’t have a choice. [Axl, Rockline radio interview, 1991].

Alan St. Lesa, a guy from the band Shire (one of Izzy's pre-GnR bands) who also knew Axl was on Appetite For Distortion a while ago and told this story:

Quote

The first time I met Axl had to be the summer of 1982. They showed up… “they”, I mean, it was him, known as Bill at the time, there was a guy named Paul, and another guy that came with them – he was not a musician, he was just along for the ride. They came at the rehearsals, the garage – you know, the famous garage in the back of David’s [Jagosz] house. They watched us [Shire] play, we were introduced and then the guy rent our instruments and [they] played a song. That’s when I first met him; that was when I first heard him sing.
I remember they started this song, this bare bone primitive song, which was the song they eventually recorded for one of their EPs, “Shadows Of Your Love”. He put his head down and started wailing, this scream was like a foghorn… you know, “My god, he sings loud”, and that was “Shadows Of Your Love”. They did this song, we talked a little bit [...].
It was so different from what I was into but I was familiar with that style. There was a lot of like – I don’t know if you are familiar with the Australian band they ended up covering, Rose Tattoo, Nice Boys… It was even more primitive than AC/DC, it was just that dah-nah-nah-nah and him screaming. And when I saw him eventually a lot of songs were like that. It was not yet that technical inventive riffing that became Appetite For Destruction and Aerosmith like, almost funk like beats, jungle beats. There was none of that. It was just straight ahead wall of sound and him wailing. [...] Yeah [it was just the two of them playing Shadow Of Your Love that day].

The interview is here: https://soundcloud.com/theafdshow/ep-29-alan-st-lesa-shire

http://www.a-4-d.com/t96-shadow-of-your-love (The quotes from Slash and Duff are also on this link)

 

Edited May 14, 2018 by Blackstar

[killuridols]

12 minutes ago, NOVEMBER COMA said:

lol, never knew there was a video. He never got Slash the pepperoni & miller he wanted. 

and...

 

[Towelie]

^^ I miss the days when Slash used to run his mouth off. PCGNR are so dull.

Edited May 14, 2018 by Towelie

[themadcaplaughs]

11 hours ago, History2010 said:

He's probably getting some decent royalty checks from Shadow of Your Love. 

 

Didn't someone find that he was working in real estate as of a few years ago? 

That guy who used to run the "GNRNEWS" Twitter account did some reserch on Tobias. I imagine this would have been 2013/2014. The dude used to hang out at MSL's forum all the time and kiss MSL's ass. From what I remember, Paul works some kind of finance job now, but still talks to Axl every now and again. Axl consulted him on liner notes for Chinese Democracy, Paul still gets a Christmas card and gift from Axl very year, and he received one of the platinum record awards for Chinese Democracy (DJ Ashba and Frank posted pictures of theirs online). 

Honestly, I have no beef with Paul. I cannot vouch for what it would feel like to hang out in a room with the dude, but it seems like the problems that caused Slash to bail were brewing long before Paul became a part of the band. Had Paul not been invited, someone else would have pissed off Duff, Matt, and Slash. 

I was lucky enough to be at the 01/01/01 show at the House of Blues. The crowd was buzzing about a lot of stuff (what would Axl look like, would they play old stuff, would new stuff sound like "my World"), but people were legitimately stoked to finally see Paul Tobias: the dude who "broke up" Guns N' Roses. After a few songs, I think everyone was a little let down to see he was just some random dude. 

Edited May 14, 2018 by themadcaplaughs

[Ericstacey]

13 hours ago, killuridols said:

Paul Tobias, Rob Gardner, Chris Weber, Tracii Guns, Ole Beich: all irrelevant guys some people insist on attaching to Guns N' Roses name, fame & success, for the weirdest reasons.

On GNR Truth, there was an obsession if you mentioned the original lineup getting back together, people would say "it's only the original lineup if Ole is in it!!".  It's like whatever.

[Ericstacey]

36 minutes ago, themadcaplaughs said:

That guy who used to run the "GNRNEWS" Twitter account did some reserch on Tobias. I imagine this would have been 2013/2014. The dude used to hang out at MSL's forum all the time and kiss MSL's ass. From what I remember, Paul works some kind of finance job now, but still talks to Axl every now and again. Axl consulted him on liner notes for Chinese Democracy, Paul still gets a Christmas card and gift from Axl very year, and he received one of the platinum record awards for Chinese Democracy (DJ Ashba and Frank posted pictures of theirs online). 

Honestly, I have no beef with Paul. I cannot vouch for what it would feel like to hang out in a room with the dude, but it seems like the problems that caused Slash to bail were brewing long before Paul became a part of the band. Had Paul not been invited, someone else would have pissed off Duff, Matt, and Slash. 

I was lucky enough to be at the 01/01/01 show at the House of Blues. The crowd was buzzing about a lot of stuff (what would Axl look like, would they play old stuff, would new stuff sound like "my World"), but people were legitimately stoked to finally see Paul Tobias: the dude who "broke up" Guns N' Roses. After a few songs, I think everyone was a little let down to see he was just some random dude. 

Interesting read. Didn't know this. Imagine getting a finance job somewhere and you find out you are working with Paul. I don't have a huge beef with him, whatever happened, happened-in the end a lot of things were Axl's call. It would be great if he gave an interview somewhere, or even wrote a book someday. I'm sure he would remain loyal to Axl in it, but it sounds like he's out of the business, so maybe he would let loose a little

[rocknroll41]

15 hours ago, F*ck Fear said:

People really care for that Jabroni?

The guy played 2 shows with Axl.

I honestly cannot see him being paid for anything other than his Chinese credits.

He played 4 shows actually but yeah your point still holds merit.

its funny how he was technically in the band for 8 years and in that entire time they only did 4 shows.

[Liquor & Whores]

17 hours ago, F*ck Fear said:

People really care for that Jabroni?

The guy played 2 shows with Axl.

I honestly cannot see him being paid for anything other than his Chinese credits.

he's the co-writer of Shadow... so I guess he got paid not long ago...

[soon]

The guy had one or two co-writes on the bands first few demos - which lead to the band being signed.  He's got a co-write on UYI One (same song as on demo, BOB).  He's got lots of credits on more then one instrument on CD.  And the new single is his other co-write from first demos.  Leaving aside SFTD and the Matt Sorum firing, it must be pretty cool to be just a normal person walking around doing ones grocery shopping knowing that your contribution to Guns span the entire history - even before Guns formed!

Like, to predate Slash, to be a reason he left, to do the album with out him and then to provide the new single Slash is back on... just wow!  

I cant imagine after all that, that he and Axl would now at this point suddenly not be tight.

[killuridols]

7 minutes ago, soon said:

Like, to predate Slash, to be a reason he left, to do the album with out him and then to provide the new single Slash is back on... just wow!  

This is like a cosmical WTF!, isn't it??

Guns N' Roses is like full of these stories of people who basically scratched their balls around Axl and they somehow are part of "GN'R history"!