Fashionista

3 hours ago, Len Cnut said:

I suppose the idea is an even amount of albums for each side sort of em keeps em in the same weight division.

Basically, also time wise, Let It Be was in 70 and Sticky Fingers was released in 71 but recorded mostly in 69 and 70 (pushed back a year in release due to legal issues with Andrew Loog-Oldham)* so it's the last Stones record to have an origin in a time when the Beatles as a group still existed and were still "competition." 

*Speaking of delays, Beggar's Banquet was supposed to come out in July '68 (recording finished in June), but the record label rejected the cover, and the band then shot this pic as an alternative cover idea:

 Mick didn't like how the pic came out, more fighting ensued and the record came out in December.

1999:

Rose: We've been working on, I don't know, 70 songs.

Loder: Oh!

Rose: The record will be about, anywhere from 16 to 18 songs, but we recorded at least two albums' worth of material that is solidly recorded. But we are working on a lot more songs than that at the same time... in that way, what we're doing is exploring so, you know, you get a good idea, you save it, and then maybe you come back to it later, or maybe you get a good idea and you go, "That's really cool, but that's not what we're looking for. Okay, let's try something new." You know, basically taking the advance money for the record and actually spending it on the record.

20000

The rebuilding - and ongoing reinvention - of Guns N Roses has been a difficult and, quite obviously, slow and expensive process. Rose does point out that the expense will be less glaring if, as he expects, he gets another record out of the hours and hours of material he's committed to tape, possibly one that's even more industrial and electronica-influence than Chinese Democracy. 

2001

Axl: We hadn't written songs or recorded for many years. There were band changes and there were many changes in the record company. People in the record company had many opinions and they wanted to make the best possible record. Every time that we thought that we had the correct songs, then somebody thought that we could make it better. We started over, we continued adding songs, continued recording and recording. I think that when we release the album, it's gonna be something that I'm gonna be proud of and confident in. Then, we will also have an extra heap of songs. This band has played only been together for six weeks before Rio. So it is still very new for them to play together as band, with Robin (Finck) and Buckethead. That was a surprise. Obviously, that was the correct decision to make, but it was not originally planned to have three guitarists.

2002

Axl: It's gonna be a big rock show, yeah. We've... There's, there's a lot going on in, on the staging of it, you know. And pyro and different things like that, so it will be a, a big show.

But also this show is something that is, is designed to be growing. You know, over the next couple of years. It's like, this is the start of something, but then remember we will be putting out a record and then... About a year of so after that, we'll be putting out another one. So there'll be a lot more material added to the set with a lot more things going on. This is the beginning, and we need to be showing people, you know, a lot of the older material, but it will grow.

40 minutes ago, The Macaroni Incident? said:

In November '99, Axl told Kurt Loder the band was working on 70 songs.

Notice how the number got smaller and smaller over the years.

Brian May (who is a reputable source, who worked with Axl in 2000 and has no reason to lie for Axl) said there was two albums' worth of vocals.

18 minutes ago, Free Bird said:

Axl once claimed CD should be part of a trilogy and I think he even said the albums are done, right? 

Later on he just talked about two records...

That CD 2 was rejected by the record company is just a rumor. Nothing we can relate on as a fact.

He never said a trilogy. He said in 2002 two albums and then a third bonus album (probably remixes). Baz used the word 'trilogy.' Baz also described Sorry as Doom Metal.

12 hours ago, Len Cnut said:

I prefer The Beatles but I’m not sure exactly how you’d go about quantifying something like that, they weren’t really doing the same things, I dunno, how do you compare talent, they’re certainly comparable.  The Beatles seemed a lot more easy-going whereas The Stones, to a point, seemed quite puritanical about their pursuit of RnB, something that people like John Lennon sort of took the piss out of, you can see him subtly doing it on The Rock n Roll Circus with all that ‘your own soul brother Keith Richards’ stuff.  

I dunno, I don’t think its a question I can give any satisfactory answer to that.  A lot is made of The Stones being the better live band, I’m not sure I even agree with that, live performance was sort of developing a lot during the 1960s, especially the large scale stuff, The Beatles broke up before it was even vaguely developed but the evidence is there with a lot of their live work as far as I’m concerned.  

They’re comparable, that much can’t be argued.  Musically I find The Beatles to be superior though but, I dunno, that run of Stones albums you pointed out to be is like one the greatest album runs I’ve ever heard so its not lacking to me on any level.

By the way, listen to this. This to me is pretty, and one of the tracks at the Circus where you can hear Brian (the way his guitar complement's Keith, especially on the intro), and so much better than the album version:

What ya think?

A pro shot of the Oct 89 shows opening for the Stones woul be cool as those are the last full length AFD lineup shows. That, Panthages 91 and 8/3/91

A question for Len: Do you think it is heresy to say the Stones (as a band not as individuals) were on par with The Beatles? Obviously Lennon, McCartney and Harrison did much better solo work than Jagger and Richards, but do you think as band they were of roughly equal talent? Let's say we limit the Stones catalog from England's Newest Hitmakers to Sticky Fingers to be fair, does that run compare with Please Please Me to Let It Be?

On 8/4/2018 at 7:59 AM, Len Cnut said:

Listened to Emotional Rescue again, it got better on a second listen.  I used to be quite critical of The Stones lyrics but they are really quite brilliant.

RS meets MJ and Miami Vice for a nice bit of sleaze. 

On 8/4/2018 at 9:52 AM, DieselDaisy said:

Mincing around with bad 1980s Stones records! 

No such thing as a bad Stones record.

On 8/4/2018 at 3:44 PM, DieselDaisy said:

Probably the most intriguing record in their discography. People call it a ''Pepper rip'' but it doesn't sound a whole lot like Sgt Pepper, does it, outside Harrison's ''Within You Without You perhaps''? It is full of these oriental self-indulgent jams - Jones's influence. The Beatles brand of psychedelics was more precise.

If you swap out "Sing This All Together" and "Sing This All Together (See What Happens) for "We Love You" and "Dandelion" (recorded during the sessions, you have an amazing album.

On 8/6/2018 at 3:09 PM, DieselDaisy said:

I love Mick's ''Mickisms'' on Brussels's Affair,

''Aye-aye-aye-aye''.

''Keef's gonna sing a song called 'appy''

''Blow blow blow it too''.

''Are we gonna do Duh Duh Duh Duh Duh Keef?''

And his GCSE French.

Listen to how heavy those guitars are for '67. Go to 3:26. And Mick is doing Mickism, "I Can't me no satisfaction, ya'll"

On 8/2/2018 at 6:09 AM, Len Cnut said:

I think they were both great for what they did.  They were bringing different things to the band I feel.  The only thing I can say is that...Brians inventiveness, it seems, is a well that had to run dry at some point, it was just so cool, the little touches, I don't think anybody can keep comin' up with such out of the box touches for any long term thing though I do think drugs killed it long before its natural death, whereas Taylor had a grounding in a particular groove to where you feel like if he got up and joined The Stones again today he could probably do what he did back then all over again.  I love em both though, I think they were essential for their eras.  I mean, to say I don't care for Mick Taylor would mean I have a problem with all their guitar work, or most of it, during their golden period in the 70s.  And to say I didn't like Brians or didn't care for his would mean I thought the stuff that made them was lacking on some level, which it certainly wasn't, that was the shit that got me into The Stones. 

I will say this though, musically, Brian had as much blues in his bones as Keith and Mick, perhaps more, he really understood, even that early on, about 'the gaps', the air between the notes, the breathing space, all the stuff that Keith has started to speak about since the 90s onwards when discussing the blues, you can hear it more in Brians guitarwork than anybody elses, Brian was a little Cheltenham Elmore James with a funny haircut.  He was just a generally cool character, looked like a fop, talked like a grammar school boy, played like a black man from Mississippi raised in Chicago, he was kind of a one off. 

He was still throwing gems on the albums he was on, it was as much a lack of interest as it was drugs. Like, he sat on a floor reading while the band recorded You Can't Always Get What You Want cause he thought the choir shit was phony. But when it came to play it live, on guitar, he gave a bluesy undertone to it. He was actually against the whole experimentation thing; he is pinned as a psychedelia guy, but, in his words, he used whatever sound he felt a song needed.

Even at the end, that instinct for inventiveness was still there, listen to this:

At 1:48 this unearthly wail comes over the slide guitar and then does a solo, and if you listen with headphones, you can hear it droning on, hitting each melody, and it comes thoroughout the song. That's Brian on a mellotron set to a flute setting. He was using a tron to get a sound similar to Morrocan pan flutes, while using a pitch modulator to push the notes beyond their normal range, watch how it was done here:

Or doing sitar on Street Fighting Man, and then dubbing a tambura in so they play off each other.

I greatly enjoy the Taylor years but I feel like guys like Mick Taylor were a dime a dozen in the 60s and 70s. Like, look at Black & Blue, Wayne Perkins sounds so much like Taylor that most think it's him (especially on Hand of Fate).

Gibbo's Channel as well. Everyone else please chip in. This may well help

I know I might catch some flack for this but I genuinely like Melissa. She seems to be really talented in various ways, a passionate musician/multi-instrumentalist, and a really awesome enthusiatic member of the band. If her tweets are genuine she seems to have a cool attitude and seems to be genuinely into being there and seems to be genuinely cool toward us fans. She also is a really good singer (check out her version of Sorry) with a good head for arrangement. I really hope she is utilized in the studio in some way by GN'R.

Anyone else love her?

On 7/31/2018 at 8:27 PM, DieselDaisy said:

She is almost a caricature of a female millennial.

Imagine to yourself the combined social media - tweeting, texting, #s, emojis, heart hands, appalling grammar, selfies - of not only your younger sister but all of your sister's facebook ''friends'', and distill all of that into one person and sirs, ladies, I give you Melissa. 

Then ask her to join the most dangerous band in the world!

She is a Millenial. She was 2 when AFD came out.

2 hours ago, DieselDaisy said:

And Guns N' Roses have about ten years' on Queen (and still counting). Queen should be releasing Innuendo 4 right about now. 

Queen should've died with Freddie.

My 93/95 GN'R record

Neither Can I (It's Five o' Clock Somewhere)

Dime Store Rock (It's Five o' Clock Somewhere)

Beggars and Hangers On (It's Five o' Clock Somewhere)

Good to Be Alive (It's Five o' Clock Somewhere)

I Love You (Believe in Me)

Skin N' Bones (Pawnshop Guitars)

This I Love (Chinese Democracy)

Soma City Ward (It's Five o' Clock Somewhere)

Speed Parade (Ain't Life Grand)

Lower (It's Five o' Clock Somewhere)

Fuck You (Believe In Me)

Cure Me or Kill Me (Pawnshop Guitars)

Black (Pawnshop Guitars)

Believe In Me (Believe In Me)

I Hate Everybody But You (It's Five o' Clock Somewhere)

Back and Forth Again (It's Five o' Clock Somewhere)

A little on topic since it involves Gilby: I realllyyy wish Skin N' Bones was recorded by GN'R. Imagine Axl N' Gilby dueting on it. The song has a very GN'R Lies feel and great lyrics by Gilby. Even if just as a B-Side. 

My 10 (not in order)

My Michelle

Rocket Queen

Garden of Eden

November Rain

Double Talkin' Jive

Pretty Tied Up

Used To Love Her

Mr. Brownstone

Think About You (swap w/ Bad Obsession at times)

Dust N' Bones

Axl looks like a total Hippie in that pic, like a young Jerry Garcia.

1 hour ago, Len Cnut said:

I enjoyed that very greatly, thank you sir.

If Brian had it together like that everyday he could've remained in the band and maybe been alive. Their rendition of Still A Fool sounds like it could fit on Exile. I've never cared much for Mick Taylor. A great guitarist but not a musician and an incredibly boring personality who never struck me as a real Stone in attitude, or like he was ever fully committed to the band. He's on record saying he only planned on staying with them a few years too....

1 hour ago, Len Cnut said:

Shitloads of fuckin' money and a desire to put out a standard of work that perhaps exceeded their collective talent levels?  Got to admire the ambition though.  And lets face it, they sort of gave you a lot at once so it made up for the quiet time.  Whats it, 16 songs per album?  thats 32 tracks, a year and a half is a good time within which to give you an average album or 11 or 12 tracks and they gave you 32 after 4, on the balance of things they made up for it though it perhaps suffered for some in terms of being too much all at once.  Has any other major band put out so much shit at once?  The only one I can think of offhand is The Clash who put out London Calling, a double album, in 79 and Sandinista, a triple album, in 1980.  

The Doors put out 62 tracks in 4 years (67-71). GN'R 50 in 4 (87-91). Stones released 94 songs in the four years between 64 and 68. Beatles 108 between 63 and 67. Nirvana 50 between 89 and 93. 

Y'know, Axl planned in '90 to take FIVE YEARS to figure out the followup to the UYIs. So maybe in Axl's head the followup to AFD needed to take time. They didn't even begin proper band sessions until '89 and didn't do real recording until '90....

27 minutes ago, ludurigan said:

 

1) its absolutely fantastic. exactly what the song needed as every other recording that steven did for GNR. oh and dont let them fool you with the "cut and paste from 50-60 takes" talk, they probably used 5 or 6 takes and lied to us like they do since forever

2) it sounds good but i always go to Rio 1991 when i want to listen UYI songs played by GNR. still hoping for a future release of UYI featuring izzy guitar. but that would be too embarrassing for slash (imagine a stick on the cover saying something like "For the first time the original Guns n Roses Use Your Illusion recordings before Slash and Axl fucked with it!") so it will likely never happen

3) Farm Aid is the best live version of Civil War. UYI version is also good but if i had to choose i would pick the Farm Aid version

 

The story about CW has been consistent over 25 years. 

We gave him a year to get his shit together. He couldn't play any of the new shit anyway. It got to a point where the material was way beyond him. I can't believe this little f?!ker. I read the shit he said about us in Circus (...) He said in that article he's sober now, but every time I've seen him, he's been wasted. I don't know what he's wasted on; I don't even care. I lost all concern and feeling for the guy. And I know a drug lie when I see one. We couldn't get any work done at Rumbo [the original studio where the band started work on Use Your Illusion three years ago]. He cost us a fortune. We had to edit the drum track to 'Civil War' just so we could play to it. At Rumbo, Steven would nod out to the point where he would be on a stool, but his head would be touching the floor. He'd say, 'I'm tired. I'm sleepy,' and he couldn't play. That was basically it. We gave him so many chances to turn around. We took him to Indiana, to play Farm Aid, and he jumps on the drum riser and almost breaks his f?!king neck. Look, Steven was a part of what made Guns N' Roses happen. He had a great energy. He wasn't an insanely great drummer, but he had tons of attitude. When the sex and drugs and the whole bit started to get out of hand, he went right along with it. But there's a certain time when you really have to control your life. I'm not preaching - I'm in no position to preach - but you must be aware of your own existence and take care of your own business. You just can't be loaded all the time and expect everything to be okay. Trust me, I know. As far as the rest of us, we bounced back, we straightened up. Steven never did. We always told each other when it was getting real bad. Everybody was there for the individual who needed help. That's how we're survived as a band. But Steven would never cop to anything, as far as telling us how bad it was. And now he's suing us. Thank you very much [Slash, RIP March 1992]

At this time I had nearly managed to get clean up, from everything. When I was looking at the band, I would see Stevie, who was a good guy, who's been struggling with us during all these years, but couldn't handle it anymore. He was a real millstone, he needed to clean up! Fuck... We all tried to help him, to support him. But no, finally, we'd been on the road with this guy for years and we lived this dilemma: "OK. We leave him six months doing nothing without any guarantee it gets better, or we forget about the double album and we burry the band?" Actually, the industry's machine woke up and the answer was: "We take someone else to cut these records." It's wasn't an easy decision. [Izzy, Rock & Folk, September 1992]

When we started rehearsing the material [for Use Your Illusion] that's when Steven's house of cards came crashing down. He was utterly useless when put to the test: most of the time he'd fade away from the proper time signature somewhere in the middle of the song or just forget where he was altogether. He was just incapable of locking in with Duff or me like he used to do. It was pretty dire; something had to be done . [Slash, autobiography, 2007]

Farm Aid was the last show we ever played with him. When we got back to L.A., Steven got even worse - I don't know, maybe because he knew the end was near, or maybe because heroine is that shrewd of a devil. There were a few more rehab stints, but they were short-lived, maybe twenty-four to forty-eight hours at a time. The last straw came when we were asked to donate a track to a charity album called 'Nobody's Child,' (...). By then we were completely alienated from Steven. In that session, there was us and there was him. After it was finished, before Mike Clink could mix it, he found that he had to cut and paste the whole drum track together [Slash, autobiography, 2007]

When producer Mike Clink and I had pieced together the drum track for 'Civil War' earlier that year, it was clear Steven was not going to be able to perform with us if he didn't turn things around. When we had played a couple songs to a huge crowd at Farm Aid in April, he was a mess onstage. After that we thought we could scare him straight. We told him we were auditioning drummers and figured he's snap out of it as soon as he heard that. When that didn't work, we hired a professional sober coach, Bob Timmons, who had helped Aerosmith get clean, to talk to him. [Duff, autobiography, 2011]

Man, I was fucked up, and I have never denied that, I couldn’t really deny it because it was pretty fuckin’ obvious…But I wasn’t the only one. I remember one day Slash called me to go to the studio and play Civil War, I think it was. I’d been given an opiate blocker by a doctor. I still had opiates in my system and it made me so sick. I must have tried, like, 20 times to play it, but I couldn’t. I was very weak and I didn’t have my timing. Slash and Duff were shouting at me and telling me I was fucked up. [Steven Adler, Classic Rock, 2011]

Also:

We tried for the longest time to give Steven a vision and a function. There was a combination of factors going on. One was that he could just not connect to the kind of material that Axl was writing. “Coma”, “Estranged” … he’d just roll his eyes. And, of course, the fact that he had no control over his heroin habit. [Alan Niven, quoted in Mick Wall, Last Of The Giants, 2016]

Also, from Steven's own mouth: "It took me forever to get the song [Civil War] right, and they got frustrated with me."

1 hour ago, killuridols said:

Those dates are all wrong, though!

She broke into Axl's house in 1999 or 2000.

The dates are correct

 ROSE W. AXL    Civil Harassment (Unlimited)    05/12/95

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dtxBnc3VdJc

Mr. Brownstone proshot Alpine Valley 1991 Izzy higher in mix than Slash

Yesterdays first ever live performance, Jan 1988, Coconut Teazer:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bCWg0f6klPs

01.14.88 - Coconut Teaszer, Hollywood, CA
set: I Got A Line On You, Wishing Well, Communication Breakdown, Scarred For Life, Sentimental Movie, Yesterdays, Knockin' On Heaven's Door, Born To Be Wild, Honky Tonk Women
audio/video recording?: audio
notes: This band is known as the Drunk Fux - Axl, Slash, Duff, Izzy, Steven, West Arkeen & Del James. The first performance of 'Yesterdays,' Axl mentions they will try to record it next week. Axl sings lead on 'Yesterdays' & 'Knockin' On Heaven's Door,' and shares vocals on 'Honky Tonk Women.'