Dean

Being In Guns N’ Roses (1998-2014)

You mentioned doing multiple things at once. I’m impressed that you’ve completely overlapped so many times. You were in Soul Asylum when you were in Guns N’ Roses. How did you balance doing everything then?


STINSON: Well, with Guns N’ Roses, there was always a lot of down time. We’d tour — bang, bang, bang, bang, bang, and then not tour for big chunks of time. That gave me time to work on other records, do other bands, whatever. I didn’t sign exclusively to them to begin with.

Oh, okay — you weren’t on a retainer then.

STINSON: Yeah. [Laughs.] Well, originally, I was on retainer, but the retainer didn’t keep retaining. So I was able to do other things and be like, “Well, I gotta make some bread here. I gotta do this other gig. Do you mind?” “Yeah, okay.” So it worked out.

How was being in Guns N’ Roses different from all the other bands you’d been in or fronted?


STINSON: Fundamentally, not at all when it really comes down to it. The one takeaway that I had from Guns N’ Roses — which I still really can’t say enough about this — I learned how to collaborate with people in a way that I would’ve never had collaborated with otherwise.

When I first joined that group of people — and it evolved a little bit over time, but all of us came from different backgrounds of music. Robin [Finck] came from Nine Inch Nails. Paul Tobias had grown up with Axl. Dizzy [Reed] had come from the LA scene. [Drummer] Josh Freese was the one that got me the gig. We’d all come from different places. Basically, Axl liked the different things that all of us brought to the table, and we wrote together in this way.

Cut to songs having pieces of all of us in ’em. To his credit — and he won’t ever accept this as credit, I don’t think, because I don’t think he quite understood what he was doing — but Axl really was a great producer in this. He liked what all of us brought to the table and he found a way to, “Okay, I like this part here. I got a vocal melody here, but it needs to go. Maybe Tommy, try something like this, or Paul.” He would get us to push forward in a way. It got to be a little bit time-consuming, but that’s not why it took so long to make that record [Chinese Democracy], to be honest with you. He did a thing where he got us all involved in the music. There wasn’t a song on there really that had just one guy writing it.

Even my own song — I brought a couple different songs to the plate and even that, he liked most of the song, but [would say] “Robin, what do you think?” And Robin would put his two cents in there. It was a really interesting way of doing it that I’d never done before in that capacity.

It was a really cool thing. Love that record for that reason. It has a lot of stuff going on in it. Whether you like the record or not, it took a lot of group effort to make it. Axl works that way, because I think in the past with the old band and that thing, everyone was vying for importance and vying for their song, blah, blah, blah. And he was the singer that had to decide, “Well, I like that one. This one needs work.” But everyone was trying to get him to sing their song. That got to be troubling, so it was more like he had to find a way to make everyone work together. He’s really great at that.

He hasn’t made another record since, which I think it’s unfortunate. He’s got a lot of talent to work with right now to make a really great record.

I re-listened to Chinese Democracy before we chatted here. That makes the record make so much more sense now. I feel like maybe that it’s been long enough now, people can listen to the record with less of the biases they had at the time and listen to actual music and get a sense of what’s there. Because it is really interesting. It’s dense.


STINSON: There is a lot going on in that record. I think people are going to realize it’s a really great record down the road. It’s going to be looked at historically as their best record, I think. You can look at the first records and stuff like that. They have the hits on them. But what is interesting about Chinese Democracy is there’s a lot of him in those songs. He sang a fucking ton about his life, and about life in general in those songs, moreso than just a rock ‘n’ roll song about a fucking drug addict, that kind of thing or “Sweet Child O’ Mine.” There’s a lot more going on there, depth-wise from him, mentally, than those earlier records.

There’s a quote that’s often attributed to Richard Fortus about that you were the “ultimate musical director” or “band leader” during rehearsals for Guns N’ Roses. Did you view yourself that way?


STINSON: You know, I kind of had to. In the beginning, certainly, because we went through two different drummers. When Brain [Mantia] came on, it was clear that if I’m playing bass with him, I got to get on the same page with him, and we had to work hard at it, and then get everyone to play along and play the right parts had to be important. I think because I had the gumption to do it, I took on that role to some degree. I guess for all practical purpose, that became my role in a way unwittingly.

But someone had to corral everyone and make what came out make sense. I was able to do that. I was able to assert myself that way and get everyone, “You gotta play. This is the way it is on the record. This is what you gotta play. You can’t be back there behind the beat. You can’t be doing this, that, and the other thing.” So I was able to pull it together that way, and I think Axl appreciated that as we went along.

What led you to be able to do that? Was it being in the Replacements? Was it fronting the bands?


STINSON: Well, I saw all these different characters and I saw what they played and what they sounded like, and I was able to go, “Well, we’re here to play these songs for their fans, for the Guns N’ Roses fans. We better get it down good if we don’t want to get killed.” So that was where I came from with it, was like, “Okay, our rhythm has to be fucking tight,” because Duff [McKagan] and Matt Sorum or Steve Adler, they held down a pretty tight fucking rhythm section. I mean, when they were on, I should say. [Laughs.] The guitars fell into place in a particular way.

And the parts — you can come in there and think you know a Guns N’ Roses song until you fucking break it down, and break down what Izzy was playing versus what Slash was playing versus what is going on. There’s a lot there. There’s a lot of fucking different parts in those songs, and you can’t noodle through them. You can’t just fuck around. You gotta nail it. In my mind, it was left to me, because I had the most experience of a lot of them. For my coming into the group later than the original bunch of guys — when I first joined the group, I had a lot more experience than all of them except for Dizzy pretty much. But yeah, so I just took it on.

You also got to sing lead a few times with Guns N’ Roses, on your solo track “Motivation” and then a “Sonic Reducer” cover. How much fun was that then? Did you enjoy that?


STINSON: I had fun with it. I mean, it either that or do a bass solo. [Laughs.] I was not about to fucking sit up there and do a bass solo. But Axl runs around so much on stage, he needs a fucking break in every few songs to get his wind about him and do his thing to keep moving. That’s why those shows are so long. But he wanted something out of me that I had to do, so I thought to do whatever came to mind.

The first time I did anything outside of anything, I think we did a fucking Sex Pistols song, I’m blanking on what it was right now. But he really liked that. He’s in the talk-back as we’re playing the song, “That’s fucking great, I love that, blah, blah, blah.” He’s back in his quick-change booth, getting oxygen, getting water, whatever. [Laughs.] So from that point on, I’d switch it up every couple tours or whatever.

Awesome. What was the most fun Guns N’ Roses song to play live from a bass standpoint?

STINSON: I always liked playing “You Could Be Mine.” I always thought that was a really fun song. It’s bass-heavy in a particular way, and [laughs] just had that rock ‘n’ roll thing that I could dig into pretty good.