Mikey Whipwreck

25 minutes ago, Slugworth said:

Just heard that for the first time.

 

 

Garbage.

 

That 2009-14 lineup was such a waste of his time.

 

As they handed him discs/files, he probably just tossed em. They could've saved time by cutting out the middle man and just throw it in the trash themselves.

The idea that Axl would consider making an album full of instrumentals composed by Ashba and Bumblefoot is even more ridiculous in retrospect than it was back then.

They were a solid live outfit at times, depending on whether Axl put any effort into preparing, but whenever DJ would talk about how he was writing demos for Guns you just had to shake your head 

5 minutes ago, RONIN said:

Oh no doubt, 100% in agreement. I think in retrospect, all of us (including Interscope) wish the album had just been released in 2001. Wasn't Better from the RTB sessions? Or did it come later? I always assumed the song was from the RTB era.

CD would definitely have been a bigger hit in 2001 than in 2008. But I don't necessary disagree with Bob Ezrin and Iovine that the material wasn't really there to bring back GnR in a major way if they had released that Sean Beavan album in 2001. Yes it would have done reasonably well but I don't think it really puts nu guns on the map nor justifies Axl breaking up the old band. I think they had a number of marketing problems with CD. A new lineup, a controversial frontman out of the limelight for a decade, and a new untested sound. And the material is iffy as well - where are the singles? It may have been a bridge too far for the label. Either they release the album as is - a solid if unremarkable effort - or roll the dice again. In an abundance of caution, they figured they'd send Axl back to the studio to touch it up and then release it the following year. So in theory, I think it was an understandable decision on their part. He didn't have a hit single, period. That said, I suppose it was incredibly naive given how long and labored the process had already been. It would be interesting to get Jimmy Iovine's thoughts on what went down there.

Better was part of the Village leaks as an instrumental called Three Dollar Pyramid so it dates back to at least 2000. I think RTB was there for about 2 years, late 2000 to sometime in 2002. Maybe someone else has more detail, but it's hard to say if Better was fleshed out from the Three Dollar demo under RTB, or after Axl and Caram took over. Bucket is all over it, so we can assume the instrumental was basically finished no later than 2003.

45 minutes ago, Slugworth said:

 

The band had no clue neither. The right hand doesn't seem to know or care what the left hand is doing.

 

In the end it pretty much became a check for everyone. Tour AFD every few years while occasionally pretending the album is coming out soon

Don't disagree with this at all. But artists by nature are frequently impulsive, impractical and irresponsible. Giving someone like Axl a blank check and no real supervision, particularly in that era, was a recipe for disaster. There needed to be a few adults in the room. The right producer and a strong A&R could have gotten, at worst, a couple good albums out of this group between 2000-2006.

45 minutes ago, RONIN said:

Some great insight shared by everyone. My thoughts on this thread:

1. As Riggs pointed out, I don't think they had a viable single when Beavan was attached. As much as I enjoy the Beavan demos and feel his work was the strongest, I think Jimmy Iovine made the right call. There's a reason he's Jimmy Iovine and Axl is well...Axl. WIthout "Better", I don't think they have a marketable album. CD has no hit singles outside of Better.

Better wasn't a hit though. It should have been. It probably would have been if the band and label made any effort to promote it. But the title track charted significantly higher even though they didn't bother chopping the intro in the version they sent to radio. I don't see how spending seven years and many millions more waiting for a song that wasn't even promoted was the right move. 

An album released in 2001 with CD and Street of Dreams as the main singles probably sells more than the 2008 album. Then they could have had follow up in 2004 or 2005 using Better as the lead single and they would have collectively sold millions more, established the new band as a viable creative entity and kept Robin and Bucket around longer instead of having to replace them with lesser talents. It never would have been as big as any lineup featuring Slash. But at least it could have been seen as more than a glorified cover band 

The reunion would have happened eventually no matter what, but the 1998-2004 iterations of the band should have accomplished a lot more

52 minutes ago, OhMyGod1986 said:

It is always said that Axl didn't record any more vocals after 2006? But how do we actually know that in the time between the Village Sessions and 2006 he didn't record any vocals for all the songs like
Tonto, Mustache and co?
Then the statement that CD 2 was finished could be completely true, couldn't it?

Did the versions of Sorry, If The World and Shacklers from Village have vocals or were they instrumentals? I never located the songs from that disc or discs

We know Better vocals were recorded sometime between 2001 and 2005. Scraped and TIL album version could have been recorded any time between 2001 and 2007. The TIL remix that leaked sounds like Axl's 2009 or 2010 vocals but no way to be sure. 

9 minutes ago, Seb91 said:

To be fair to Bucket, I get the impression that he's incredibly shy and is very much an introvert which is probably why he wears the mask and used the puppet to speak. I can really relate as I have social anxiety really badly. His demand for the coop, whilst odd, I think highlights his desire to have somewhere he could be alone and get some personal space.  I think the thing with Bucket is that given his desire to be under the radar and not the centre of attention I doubt even if it was a regular band in terms of organisation that he'd have stuck around too long as doing big tours and being in the spotlight all the time like that seems to go against how his solo stuff has been organised. I have no doubt though that had he been properly cemented in the band he'd have been huge as his playing is second to none. 

The guy is without a doubt the best guitarist Guns has ever had (and I say that as a massive fan of Bumble and Slash). Bucket's the only guitar player who's able to get a really high emotional response out of me through their playing like David Gilmour and he's up there with Steve Vai technique wise and Bucket's the only player I think that could genuinely be said of. That's why the guy's so damn exceptional - he's got the melodic chops and soul in his playing like Gilmour paired with the technical ability of Vai to really go to town with the heavier stuff. A lot of his more experimental stuff also really reminds me of Robert Fripp/King Crimson. I used to listen to a ton of shredders as a kid - Vai, Bucket and Satriani are the only ones who I still listen to really regularly (if we're talking instrumental guys) because they know when to hang back. Malmsteen's cover of While My Guitar Gently Weeps is just excruciating because there's no attempt to fit with the song - just neo-classical shred at a million miles an hour the whole way through. 

Was listening to a 2002 bootleg the other day and Bucket's Nightrain was certainly mindblowing - it was like Nightrain 2.0 with Bucket! 

Buckethead is talented enough that you tolerate his eccentricities and odd behavior. Outside the context of GNR he's demonstrated that he eats, sleeps, breathes music. He wants to write, record and release new songs. And prior to his health issues he was consistently on tour. 

You are not going to keep him engaged by having him in the studio re-recording parts for the same song over and over again. I have little doubt that he would have stayed in the band longer and been a productive member had they completed the 2002 tour and released a new album shortly after that. The stories of him going MIA and being unreachable came after the plug got pulled on the tour and it was obvious the album was not coming anytime soon 

1 hour ago, Martin Riggs said:

I don’t really get the below quote. Jimmy has famously said he doesn’t think music executives should be involved in the process of creating the music. He intentionally keeps them (and himself once he got to that level) out of the studio. Why would Axl expect him to be involved? It just sounds like an excuse as Axl was lost and didn’t have any obvious hit singles to propel the album. Better was probably written to alleviate this issue but they bungled that as well. I’m sure he deluded himself and others into blaming the big bad record label but I bet it was mostly his inept leadership. 
 

 My summation of the whole thing is that Interscope, when they took over Geffen, really led Axl to believe that Jimmy Iovine would be involved, and would help get this record done and make it happen. But basically what he did was let it completely fall apart. Then he had this great idea to bring in [producer] Roy Thomas Baker to make it sound better. All hedid was re-record everything three or four different times, trying to make it sound like something it didn’t need to sound like, and spend $10 million in the process. My two cents on the whole thing is that I really think Jimmy Iovine fucked the whole thing up.

I'm not sure whose idea RTB was. But he certainly didn't seem to help the process. The best "inside baseball" article I can recall is the one featuring Tom Zutaut, who came aboard in 2001 after RTB was already involved. He tells the story of how Axl had been asking RTB for 6 months to get the drums on one track to sound like Smells Like Teen Spirit and they couldn't get it right. So Zutaut stepped out, bought a copy of Nevermind, brought it back and played it for them. Problem solved. Or how they were spending $75,000 a month renting gear that hadn't been touched for 3 years. Nobody thought to return it until Zutaut got there. Situations like that, there's plenty of blame to go around. It shows the label had no clue what they were doing and the producer was there just to collect a check.

Axl deserves a huge amount of the blame for the endless delays especially from 2002 and beyond, no question. But fundamentally, Tommy is correct, especially in retrospect. How many of the songs recorded from 1998 to 2000 that ended up on CD were significantly improved by all the tinkering and re-recording? TWAT was really the only one, due to Bucket's solo which really makes the song. And his stuff on Prostitute brought it up too. But they would have been better served putting out a 12 track album with the more aggressive industrial, nu metal tinged songs that would have been better received in 2000 or 2001 and done a follow up a few years later. It may not have set the world on fire but it would have done alright and would not have had all the baggage attached to it 

Here's the Tommy interview I mentioned where he talked about the negative impact Jimmy Iovine and RTB had on CD

https://slpmode.com/a-v-club-interview-tommy-stinson/

3 minutes ago, bmus1 said:

Can you expand on this?

Tommy had an interview about this a while back. Basically that the band thought the album was ready and any additional work or cleanup could be handled in post production. But the label thought it should be more epic or something, so RTB was brought in and he had everyone meticulously re-record all their parts, which seemed to hurt morale as everyone in the band thought it was a huge waste of time 

21 minutes ago, Gordon Comstock said:

Some of my favourite albums have songs that were written several years before they were released, using old songs isn't necessarily a bad thing, but if that's all a band is willing to release then of course some fans will be frustrated...

I think the larger issue is not that they're old but that they've been widely available online for years prior to the release. The freshness and excitement of new music is severely diminished

If The General kicks ass I don't think anyone will care that it's old. But if we'd had the BucketFinck version since 2019 the response would be very different at least among the superfans, who realistically are the only ones that still care if GNR releases new music in 2023

9 minutes ago, Blackstar said:

Then why only some of the titles supposedly in this list were shared in public (e.g. Tonto, Going Down) and not all of them? Perhaps, Nothing and S.O.G. had not been talked about in public or mentioned in rumoured track lists before 2019.

Let's say I buy that "Perhaps" was overlooked because people didn't consider it to be a song and same with "Nothin'", but why S.O.G. wouldn't be talked about if it was in another version of the screenshot?

I distinctly remember seeing a screenshot of an email like this about 10 years ago. I misremembered SOG being on there, but I believe this is snippet is what I saw. MSL was cagey and had his own agenda, so it doesn't surprise me that he didn't release the full list of song names or the actual screenshot. But this may well have been his source file. I feel like I saw it a year or two after he revealed those song names 

It's been so long though, and there was so much BS floating around back then, it's hard to remember definitive details 

12 minutes ago, Sweersa said:

You would need to see my laptop to know that I had that screen shot (well, mine actually has more than what is seen here, it's cropped) and it's dated 2011. 

I'll back you on this. I distinctly remember seeing this screenshot many years before the Village leaks. 2013-2015 and 2016-2021, I stopped checking the forums with any regularity, but I remember seeing this about 10 years ago

Would not be surprised if this was the source document MSL used when he dropped Tonto and Going Down as unreleased song titles

12 minutes ago, ZoSoRose said:

We only got a list from MSL of names in 2011 and Perhaps was not on it

MSL mentioned Cuban Skies, Going Down, Tonto among others if I remember correctly. At least two of those were confirmed to be real. But the email screenshot surfaced some time after that, with a few additional song titles listed 

2 minutes ago, Blackstar said:

I don't think it was discarded as it was a near finished song with lyrics and vocals. But I don't think there would be a reason to change its name either.

There are other tracks missing from that list that supposedly were at an advanced stage of completion, like Seven and Oklahoma/Berlin.

True, should have said withheld or set aside for a future album. I hope it gets a release, it was my favorite unreleased track from those sessions along with Perhaps 

5 minutes ago, Blackstar said:

Thanks! I stand corrected on SoG being on there. So either was discarded or is one of the other unheard ones (Monstrocity?) 

Definitely don't think it's The General, based on The General being described as a Brain song and according to the Village track list SOG was dated 3/27/00 which was the same month Brain joined the band

35 minutes ago, rumandraisin said:

There's a cleaned up version of the cell phone leak I came across on Reddit. The clean up attempt seems to have removed the vocals but it's still worth a listen to, it absolutely is not State of Grace. Still, people will still suggest that the General is State of Grace until it's released. 

Huge drums and a great electronic drum beat... Reminds me of how Madagascar mixed real and live drums. Actually, exactly like Madagascar. Same tempo too. 

I hope the strings remain and the drum loop stayed in. 

There's no way this song could disappoint really, the clearer cell phone mix is brutal. 

Does anyone have the CD2 tracklist that's a screenshot of an early 2008 email from Axl? I've seen it on here multiple times but can't locate it at the moment 

Anyway, that proved to be legitimate (100% remember seeing that circulating around 10 years ago, everyone thought it was fake but previously unmentioned songs like Perhaps and Tonto were on there) and I'm pretty sure State of Grace and The General were both listed on there

6 minutes ago, agustingloger said:

Perhaps really have more impact than ABSURD and HARDSKOOL. To the point 80% of the youtube "content creators" doesn't even know about ABSURD and Hardskool existence

Amazing what some basic promotion can do 

It's also a better, and catchier, song than the other two which helps 

9 minutes ago, vloors said:

Dr dres detox work didnt cost anywhere near Axls 13+ million (most expensive album ever). I am with Jimmy on this one. When does the buck stop on Axls spending.

Dre ended up shelving detox and he released the album Compton instead. But he also produced many tracks for labelmates and promoted artists. He brought talent (eminem 50 cent kendrick lamar and others) aboard interscope and his own aftermath label.

I never said Axl was in the right, I said I can see him perceiving this as a slight and being upset 

Not sure what Detox cost, never seen it listed anywhere, but CD is nowhere near the most expensive album ever. Michael Jackson's Invincible cost over $30 million 

On 8/16/2023 at 5:26 AM, Seb91 said:

Thinking about it, there are some parallels between The Smashing Pumpkins and GN'R. The 2006 comeback was just Billy and Jimmy so a bit like the NuGuns era, then Jimmy eventually leaves and Billy's the last person standing and it seems a full-on reunion's nigh on impossible so we're into NuGuns territory. Revolving lineups and then James guests for a few songs (not too dissimilar to Duff getting back into the GN'R fold) and then there's a reunion eventually. However, like the GN'R reunion it's more of a continuation than a reboot - Jeff's still on guitar and he's been in the band since 2007 and Jack Bates is on bass rather than D'arcy (which seemed unlikely, a bit like Adler) or Melissa. The Pumpkins have been a bit more prolific after their reunion though 

This is a good comparison. Both bands had relatively brief but incredibly successful runs at the top and imploded due to egos, creative differences and substance abuse. Axl and Billy have a lot in common as well in terms of their backgrounds and sometimes contentious relationships with the press, bandmates and fans 

The biggest difference is Billy writes, records and releases a lot of music and is not afraid to empty the vaults 

10 minutes ago, JAxlMorrison said:

I kind of assumed it may have been about Dre taking his time and getting favoritism from Jimmy Iovine, and Axl never receiving the same treatment? Maybe? 

Tend to agree with this theory. Dr. Dre's Detox album was considered the hip hop version of Chinese Democracy, except that it was never released and was eventually scrapped altogether. I can see Axl being upset that Jimmy Iovine cut off his funding and gave him the cold shoulder, but continued to support Dr. Dre financially and otherwise under similar circumstances 

Just now, Seb91 said:

Yeah, plus Bumble did work on OMG like he did with Absurd so Axl was obviously still thinking about it and wasn't in soundchecked in the NuGuns era? Whilst it's already been released I could see them putting it out if the plan is to have enough singles to put out a compilation album. 

It was soundchecked at RIR 2011. Possibly elsewhere too

18 hours ago, GNFNRUK said:

I don’t know much about mixing but do you think that’s maybe why the bend is there? Because it was somehow evident on Axl’s vocal track where he’s singing “you’re all alone”? I’m guessing they’d have still been able to remove it somehow with modern technology though?

Based on what we know about how CD was recorded, all of the instrumental tracks could easily be isolated and removed via Pro Tools. Robin's leads and licks are gone from the rest of the song, so that portion being left in there is certainly intentional. As others have said, probably a gesture of respect to Robin for his work on the song 

8 minutes ago, AxlRoseCDII said:

How true is the rumor that Axl submitted CD2 but it got rejected? If there’s any merit to it then it makes sense why the trilogy plans fell apart, but knowing this band it’s probably just an excuse.

My speculative guess is that it's a half truth. I do believe Axl wanted to get a second album out a year or two after CD. Same Bat Time, Same Bat Channel.

But by early 2009 he was publicly bashing the label for what he viewed as a botched rollout where promises supposedly weren't kept. He and management probably wanted assurances of certain promotional budgets and marketing plans that were unrealistic based on the state of the music industry and the level of demand for a non-reunion GNR album in 2010 or 2012.