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4 minutes ago, t-p-d-a said:

yea love the guitar and the drums

4 minutes ago, t-p-d-a said:

yea love the guitar and the drums

It may not be your kind of rock, but it still is.

3 hours ago, ToonGuns said:

Are we criticising an album from the 80's for sounding like an album from the 80's?

I know we all love Guns and love to pick apart every single little thing to find fault / something to debate, but expecting them to be able to foresee the future to know how to mix and master their 1987 album so it sounded like an album from the future is asking a bit a think!

There's plenty of albums from the 80s that have a more timeless mix.

Prompted by the desires for some (in the UYI boxset thread) to see the UYis either partially or totally re-recorded (with some saying they want Adler digitally added in, Dizzy removed, and Axl's songs 86'd) I thought we would have this discussion. These two albums were massive and represented the peak of GN'R's popularity as a global rock band, yet it seems among us hardcores there seems to be a split of opinion. Personally, I love the UYIs as is. There's really not much I'd change except I'd have added It Tastes Good, Don't It either on the records or as a B-Side. But let's have an honest discussion. Do you like them? Are they bad albums? Were they missteps in GN'R's history, or triumphs?

4 hours ago, Euchre said:

I've thought about this before as well.....pick the dozen songs that the band like the best, strip them back, have Adler re-record the drums and Izzy record rhythm where he was cut out, mix it afresh in a rawer way and have it sound like it should have if all the drama didn't happen (ie a genuine GNR effort).

Axl takes the remainders and modernise and package them however he likes. EP of all the ballads would work for some for example - and a series of EP's was one of the bands original intents.

Package it up with the original re-mastered or whatever so you aren't trying to erase history (as much as I personally don't care for Sorum/Reed, I think it would be silly to try and pretend they didn't exist or contribute - and the piano does work on some songs) and you've got the beginnings of an interesting anniversary box set - and will settle a lot of stuff once and for all.

This revisionist pushback against the UYIs is reallllllyyy annoying. No one complained about the UYIs until Slash started bashing them in his interviews and books. They were successes. They represented the height of GN'R's popularity. They do not need to be rerecorded. Leave them alone. 

"A genuine GN'R effort." It was. Again, revisionism. It's not a "fakeGN'R" record. 
Don't George Lucas GN'R's discography. 

I don't know if this is the right place to say this, but I've been a GN'R fan for 16 years. Not as long as many obviously, but still. I paid and saw GN'R in 2002 and 2006.  I wish I had seen the band in 2011, but I was unable to due to life issues. But I've not bothered to see the reunited lineup because for one, it's just nostalgia, and secondly, because it's too fucking expensive. I don't understand why GN'R has felt the need to charge top dollar for everything, from the shows to the boxset. It's like they're a rich person's band nowadays. I mean, who was the market for a 1k boxset? Who's the market for 150+ tickets? Certainly not the "little guy" like myself who lives paycheck to paycheck. Say what you will about "NuGN'R" but at least in that era things were affordable.

3 hours ago, UsedYourIllusion said:

I personally think it sounds more like Rocks by Aerosmith than Quiet Riot or Poison...

It sounds more like Pump than Rocks. Go listen to AFD and Nevermind back to back. AFD sounds horribly dated and overproduced by comparison, like it came out 2 decades before rather than 4 years.

On 8/27/2018 at 11:16 PM, RONIN said:

It's amazing how a rookie band like Nirvana with probably 1/5 of GnR's recording budget had such a kickass mix with Nevermind that still stands the test of time. And then you have UYI which had all this money thrown at it and multiple mixes and it still sounded dated and crap within a few years. Michael Jackson's Dangerous, another overproduced album, had the same issues - the mix is bleh. It's like the more money Axl and MJ threw at their albums, the smaller and more dated the sound became. 

Reminds me of that old Slash quote from the mid-90's where he talks about how he kept telling Axl that the more he overproduced the songs, the smaller and less epic they sounded. 

The UYIs were never gonna sound like Nevermind. Totally different bands, genres and methodologies.  Even AFD is overproduced sounding compared to Nevermind. The only truly raw record GN'R ever did was Lies. The production for the UYIs fit the music/songs.

On 8/27/2018 at 1:47 AM, RONIN said:

I'd pay top dollar for a great UYI "naked" mixes remaster with Adler's drumming semi-restored and Izzy louder in the mix.

I want to hear the Illusions as it was originally conceived before Axl raped it in the studio with his bloatware and added Sorum's shit drumming.

It's highly likely that outside of rehearsals, Civil War was the only song Steven actually recorded for those records. Unless you cut his drum parts from rehearsal takes, digitally toy with them timing wise and such to fit the finished versions, you're not gonna get Steven on there. And even if you did do all that, would it be a real performance, in a sense? It would be Steven's performance as cobbled together by computers. "Axl" didn't add Sorum's "shit drumming." Slash and Duff chose Matt to replace Steven, who could not master the new material, and who due to drugs could not function in the studio.

7 hours ago, ludurigan said:

i dont think gilby has anything to do with the version in circulation

i dont think there is not even ONE SINGLE GNR STUDIO RECORDING FEATURING GILBY CLARKE in circulation.

all the studio outtakes in circulation are from GNR ERA

fantastic song/fantastic version by the way, better than 90% of everything on the illusion albums

oh and if you just search a bit harder you will find much better quality than youtube from that same version

 

 

 

Personnel

Guns N' Roses

• W. Axl Rose – lead vocals, keyboards on "Since I Don't Have You", kazoo on "Human Being"
• Slash – lead guitar, co-lead vocals on "Buick Mackane (Big Dumb Sex)", talkbox on "Hair of the Dog", backing vocals on "Attitude"
• Duff McKagan – bass, backing vocals, acoustic guitar, lead vocals on "You Can't Put Your Arms Around a Memory", "New Rose" and "Attitude", co-lead vocals on "Raw Power", drums on "You Can't Put Your Arms Around A Memory", production
• Matt Sorum – drums, percussion on "Hair of the Dog", backing vocals on "Human Being" and "Attitude"
• Dizzy Reed – keyboards, piano on "Since I Don't Have You", percussion on "Look at Your Game Girl", backing vocals on "You Can't Put Your Arms Around a Memory"
• Gilby Clarke – rhythm guitar, backing vocals

3 hours ago, UsedYourIllusion said:

If SIDHY was played as the intro for Saskatoon on March 26th of '93, does it mean it was already mixed by then? That's a quick time to mix and record a song, then press a version on a tape for playing at a concert

William - How did you come about to the song "Since I Don't Have You"? I really like that one.

Slash - That's a good one.

Axl - That song, for some reason… When we started rehearsing, living in a little craphole on… Craphole, like that?

Steve Downs - Yeah.

[everybody laughs]

Steve Downs - We can use that one.

Axl - Off Sunset and Gardener. It was just a song for some reason I wanted to do & Slash wanted to do a long time ago, and we don't really know… we felt indicated…

Slash - No, the reason why was 'cause I heard you singing it when you were living at my house.

Axl - Oh.

Slash - And since you sang it with so much… [inaudible]

[everybody laughs]

Axl - I don't know why I really liked that song, I just did and then… We were on the road, we had three days off in Boston, and the song just fit things at the time and we had some time so we went in and did it without having any clue of what it was gonna sound like musically. Because it's a completely different string arrangement and everything in the original. And we went in and just had fun with it.
 

Slash - There's a good story going behind that song because I think that was one of the first songs that really started to turn this "Spaghetti Incident" thing into an actual album.

Steve Downs - Really?

Slash - And we did it on off time on the road and recorded it in Makeshift studios in Boston. Brought rental gear down there 'cause all our gear was on the track. And that was how badly we wanted to do it. We just… you know, pulled out whatever we had. And talking about Gilby's guitar… We used his practice guitar and we used rented gear and this and that. We couldn't find a guitar store in Boston.

6 hours ago, Gordon Comstock said:

Hardly a perfect album lol, but it does sound the best. Better than AFD, especially on vinyl IMO.

Kinda frustrating that it's a better production/final product than the UYI albums even though they were largely recorded at the same time.

Only these four were recorded during the UYI sessions:

Black Leather
I Don’t Care About You
Attitude
New Rose

The other 9 were recorded during and after the tour. SIDHY was recorded in March '93, Buick Makane probably sometime in '93 as well, Look At Your Game Girl was done probably after the tour at Axl's house. Also, Slash did the final mix on the songs himself.

Rock will live again, when it rediscovers the roll.

3 hours ago, AxlRoseCDII said:

Never said it was a dead genre. However, rockers are definitely not commercial and definitely not what the mainstream listens to these days.

It's just evolved man. A song like Thunder by Imagine Dragons is considered a rocker nowadays. Diehard guitar people may not consider it rock, but its fans consider it such.

Imagine Dragons is considered rock, at least by people I know, younger people, and this has close to a billion views:

8 hours ago, Len Cnut said:

Hip Hop permeates our culture, its ubiquitous, like washing powder, its everywhere, in car and clothes commercials, in the language that we speak, in the charts, even in the music that we call a different genre.  And when I say our culture I mean internationally, you can listen to pop music from here to the far east and you’ll hear hip hop beats and some other cultures appropriation of rapping.

Could make the same points about rock, though. Rock slang is mainstream slang now, people wear rock band tshirts, etc etc. Could say rock permeates other genres as well. Like others have said, this decade is different in that there is no real one dominant genre of music anymore.

3 hours ago, AxlRoseCDII said:

Yet “commercial music” is getting close to a billion views per videos. Proportions are everything.

Still, 20 million or so views is still a lot. Definitely not a 'dead genre.'

3 hours ago, Len Cnut said:

Hip Hop is EASILY dominant.

Depends on the age group. The younger people, the teenagers, listen to a bit of everything. People in my age group (20s) listen to Hip Hop more than anything else, but the next generation listens to a very diverse set of music. Hip Hop is going through a phase I think similar to Hair Metal around say...1990 or so...It peaked and it's still popular, but something else is around the bend. And honestly I think POP overall is bigger than Hip Hop or Rock, at this point, across all age groups (like Taylor Swift and electro pop etc).

I kinda wish the 06 lineup released a loose, jammy sorta Grateful Dead record.

15 million views:

19 million views and 18 million views

13 mil views:

On 8/27/2018 at 6:54 AM, AxlRoseCDII said:

Of course the most of us like rockers, we’re on a Guns N’ Roses forum. However the general public? Not a big amount truly listens to them anymore. It’s about rap music for the teenagers these days. (God damn I just made myself sound like a 80 year old man)

Look at this playlist. All new rock. Each song has over 1 million views.

On 8/26/2018 at 4:02 PM, Len Cnut said:

In general terms people don't like rock music full stop.  It was overtaken long ago by hip hop as the dominant music of popular culture.  Rocks in a nostalgia phase now more than anything, older people, essentially a gradually diminishing audience, are the ones listening to it predominantly.  Pop cultures a reasonably young thing, only 60 to 70 years old so it'll be interesting to see where rock music goes, whether it was just be left in history or whether there'll be a revival of some sort.  If there is a revival it will be very different than the sorts of revivals it had before now, through punk and grunge and such, chiefly because the next one will be so far removed from the last one.

I don't see it myself, everything has a space and a time in history and when its gone its gone.  And I'm comfortable with that quite honestly.

People listen to a little bit of everything nowadays. The music business as it existed in the 80s and 90s is dead. There is no one dominant genre of music anymore. There are no real music scenes, either, the way there was in the 80s and 90s and 60s and 70s. It's not rock that is dead, it's music in general as a social and cultural force that is dead. And really, music as a socially important force only lasted from roughly the 20s through the early 00s. Today music is background noise. It isn't important in the way Bob Dylan was in the 1960s. Music is dead, and yet it is more diverse and alive than ever.

Imagine Dragons is what rock has evolved into, and that kind of sound is huge now. Rock has just evolved, that's all.

On 8/26/2018 at 5:47 PM, J Dog said:

Yeah, I’d say it almost feels like the opposite to me, fresh start is too dramatic but something along those lines. It actually sounds like they’re trying to move forward past the 60s as a band. I llike their sound on that album.

LA Woman was the second album of what was a renaissance for them. Morrison Hotel was released in February 1970 and they had ditched psychedelia for a hard rock sound; LA Woman was the album Jim had ALWAYS wanted the band to make - a true blues record. But go back and listen to Morrison Hotel - that is a 70s record, and the 60s are gone.

4 hours ago, MaskingApathy said:

The one that was used for the GnR pinball machine was the finished version.

The pinball version was actually recorded in 93 or early 94. You can tell by Axl's voice. Also, I asked Gilby once on Twitter and he said it was the last track he worked on as a member of GN'R. He said they intended to release it fully but "never got it right."

12 hours ago, DieselDaisy said:

There is a song on Duff's solo album with Slash, and a song on Slash's with Izzy, and a song on Duff's (2nd) with Izzy, and a song on Gilby's with Axl, and a song on Gilby's with Slash, and a song on Gilby's with Duff etc etc - I could go on! 

Why can't they all just get together on one bloody song!!

The Outpatience song with Rose and Slash is fairly close to being a Guns song actually.

There was def enough quality material being put out by all the guys in 93-96 to make a good GNR record. Even if you exclude Izzy, given their hard feelings toward him, this right here would've made an amazing mid 90s Gn'R EP:

1) Beggars and Hangers On

2) I Love You (Duff on vocals)

3) Skin N' Bones (Gilby & Axl duet)

4) Neither Can I

5) Cure Me or Kill Me

6) Fuck You

7) Anxious Disease (West on backing vocals, Shannon as well if he was still alive) 

8) Back and Forth Again

Best part? Axl doesn't have to write any lyrics since he had writers block, just tweak some melodies and you have a B grade GNR record to tide fans over while they work on something stronger. Have different rhythm guitarists on each track if need be. It would be their version of Black and Blue. 

By the way a bit off topic but did you know that John Lennon recorded a song called "Street of Dreams" in his last recording session in 1980? The song only exists in bootleg circles from what I understand, but I just heard about it tonight and the title (what with the Lennon tribute in Catcher and Axl's fascination/sadness with regard to Lennon's murder) lead me to wonder if Street of Dreams as a song title was at all inspired by the Lennon number