Perception of GnR/Axl between 1993-1997?

[Rovim]

1 minute ago, EvanG said:

The whole argument that those so-called grunge bands being the demise of GnR never added up when you realize that GnR scored some of their commercially biggest hits in 1992, the year grunge peaked, and even in 1993 there was still a lot of demand for GnR. That scene did make GnR look a bit foolish in certain ways because being a rockstar wasn't cool anymore, and they were no longer the most dangerous band in the world, but they were still very popular among many people. And that wouldn't have changed if they released some really great songs. Heck, even Sympathy For The Devil, released in december of 1994, was a top ten hit in many countries, and it was ''just'' a cover. Imagine if they had released another You Could Be Mine or November Rain.

yup and just to add to that, even if you take a band like Iron Maiden who lost Dickinson and just kept it moving along or bands who lost direction and tried to hop on the trends of the time like Metallica, and released unpopular albums like St. Anger, they kinda derived their ability to still keep the interest of their fans just by providing new shit to consume.

I think Axl really cared about making sure the quality was consistent and that maybe also it was about proving that he could still be relevant and just as good without Slash so he zoomed in on the details of what it meant to keep Gn'R going and ironically went against the natural law of limited attention span when everyone else got a product to present when Gn'R just one day vanished from the face of the earth or at least that was how it maybe felt.

it's pretty cool to be that dedicated imho and to not give a shit about time when you have a goal in mind that you believe in, but it did come with the a price imo. It's not like Axl didn't want Chinese to be a huge commercial success. They all cared about that from the start.

it's like in the end they got paid when they provided most fans what they always wanted which is Axl and Slash, but 20 years of nothing but one product was as I see it the cost of Axl kinda turning its back on even considering a more organic approach and weird concepts like deadlines.

[evilfacelessturtle]

7 hours ago, EvanG said:

I think they would have if they had managed to keep making great albums.

To the OP's topic, I remember them still being in many teen/pop magazines in the mid 90s even though they hadn't released an original song since 1991, so the popularity was still there.

I think people get a little weird about timing just because so much good music was coming out so quickly back then. Nowadays, if a band takes 4 years off after an album/tour, nobody thinks twice. Or maybe it's just because I'm getting older and 4 years go by in the blink of an eye. I still feel like the reunion happened a year or two ago, but 2016 was 7 years ago already!

* Existential crisis intensifies *

[DizzyReed63]

This is an interesting topic after so much has happened. From what I remember, there was a split between pro-Axl and pro-Slash fans, because Slash was still out there in the public spotlight, and Axl was a mystery. We also had no internet, so it was talking amongst your friends or catching an MTV news hit, or reading about it in Maxim or Spin. An earlier post mentioned how Sp. Incident came out, and we didn't even realize it was happening - that's my memory, too. Like, WTF is this?! Cool! "Since I don't have you" did get a lot of airplay for a bit, but the band did nothing to carry momentum. 

By the time '96-97 came around, GnR bootleg traders started connecting. I was a part of that crew, and we'd mostly trade CDs and Tapes from the early and glory days, then those bootlegs started showing up on Napster. There wasn't much "hope" or chatter about anything new. Axl was supposedly a giant recluse, and the cartoon he played before the '01 Rio show basically tells the full story of that perception  

From what I remember being a giant GnR nerd carrying the torch, the "new material" chatter started w/ the OMG release, lining up with a bunch of rumors. 

[Ericstacey]

On 11/1/2017 at 1:40 PM, killuridols said:

I will respond as I was a teenager in the 90's and living in Argentina:

1) My friends never liked GN'R so I don't know what they were saying.... the same shit as always... that they were crazy psycho drugaddicts and that I should not listen to them

I think no one in the press was saying anything. They are as clueless as the fans. After 1994, GN'R totally faded away from the news.... Once in a while one mag would rehash some info or say a little gossip but that was it. Everybody knew there was a fallout between Axl and the rest of the band so it was reported everytime a member left: Sorum, Clarke, Slash, Duff. There wasn't really anything to write or talk about. You have to remember there was no Internet back then like there is now or social media where everybody shares pics or conversations or slips gossips like a gossip machine. Back then, if mags or tv or radio wouldn't mention something there was no way to know anything about anyone. So, nope. Total silence during those years.

2) I think TSI didn't cause any significant impact because everybody knew it was an album of covers, not original material and most of songs didnt have anything to do with GN'R sound so no one cared or liked it like the Illusions or AFD. Sympathy For The Devil, another cover no one cared about..... why? Because we were kids back then, most of us kids of 14, 15, 16 years old and we didn't care for listening to covers of bands that looked like our grandpas back then.... The Rolling Stones and all the bands in TSI were like huh? to us teenagers.

Besides the offer of modern music, bands of the era, groups that you could identify with because of age or whatever was wide..... It was very stupid of GN'R to think they could compete against Nirvana, Pearl Jam, Stone Temple Pilots, Radiohead, etc with music from the 60's....

3) They fell from grace because they presented an album that disappointed everybody. A LAZY ASS ALBUM with music that had nothing to do with what the kids were listening at the moment, music that was not written by them and they fuckin' disappeared from the face of the earth. No more interviews, shows, pictures.... so that's what you get when you become lazy and go sleep thinking you can rest on your laurels when your audience mainly consist of TEENAGERS.

Metallica and U2 didn't sit on their lazy asses.... Metallica changed their looks, kept presenting new albums, new videos, shows... U2 did the same, for better or for worse, they kept working and didnt vanish.

4) Yes, MTV did play their videos but there were lots of new bands and new videos, so why would they play GN'R when GN'R wasn't active?

MTV is a media corporation, they don't do charity. GN'R are the only ones to blame for their falling from grace.

I don't think there's too much science behind why they failed..... It was all their fucking fault..... they broke up, stopped working, continued fighting for decades. In the meantime other bands formed, released music and gained fans. No one was going to sit and wait for GN'R, especially when you are so young as the fans that GN'R left in the dark were when they disappeared.

 

I was 21 in 1993, and I think this is a very fair take on how they were at the time.  Were they still selling albums around 92, 93 and stadiums? Yes, but they didn't feel like a cool band anymore.  Pearl Jam and Nirvana were playing shows as stripped down bands, where GNR had the horn section, backup singers, Teddy Zig Zag, Axl changing outfits uring shows.  I always sensed anyone younger than me in the 90's had zero interest in them.  MTV was Smashing Pumpkins, STP, R.E.M.  People were kind of sick of GNR.  They put out too many videos and singles, by the time Dead Horse came out, you could sense the run was done-there wasn't much interest in TSI?  It would have been interesting to see what they would have put out in '96 or '97 but I think it would have sold like an Aerosmith or Bon Jovi record at the time-people who were younger when Appetite and the Illusion records came out had moved on in life.  I still think they dropped the ball not releasing something in 2002-they had been away, and people were ready for them again-hence the Spin Magazine "What the world needs now is Axl Rose".  

[Jakey Styley]

Were GNR considered corny by people below the age of 20 by the end of 1993? That's the sense I get from some of the posts above.

[drlaban]

24 minutes ago, Jakey Styley said:

Were GNR considered corny by people below the age of 20 by the end of 1993? That's the sense I get from some of the posts above.

People were tired of GN'R in 94-95, which makes me suspect a new album in '95 (instead of Slash's Snakepit) would've tanked (unless AFD or best of UYI quality).

[axl666]

2 hours ago, drlaban said:

People were tired of GN'R in 94-95, which makes me suspect a new album in '95 (instead of Slash's Snakepit) would've tanked (unless AFD or best of UYI quality).

I guess with all social phenomena there's a time limit on it. GNR had been a pop culture phenomena for 5 years and might have just been reaching the end of a typical artist cycle. For example, if you think of a band like Alice in Chains, Smashing Pumpkins, Soundgarden and all of the bands that in theory succeeded GNR- they all went through a similar popularity wave. Pearl Jam were pretty huge through Vitalogy, a five year period. Alice in Chains and Smashing Pumpkins also had a five year period of significant fame, Soundgarden I would argue actually a bit less. Even Nirvana's popularity was declining by the time that In Utero came out. They were still big artists but they had passed the peak of the popularity. You probably only really catch the cultural zeitgeist once in your career, and GNR did it in 1987.

I think one of the mistakes Axl made was attempting to catch the zeitgeist again. I think if he had just realised that all he needed to do was focus on his craft and being consistent in his performances they would still have been big in later 1990s. They mightn't have sold out stadiums but they would definitely have sold out arenas all over the world. 

 

 

 

 

Edited December 28, 2023 by axl666

[DTV88]

3 hours ago, Jakey Styley said:

Were GNR considered corny by people below the age of 20 by the end of 1993? That's the sense I get from some of the posts above.

I was 19 and they were still hanging on in 1993. Their videos were still all over MTV and the tour was massively successful in terms of tickets sold.
However, by the time Slash was announced as being out of the band per the infamous fax, there is no doubt they had already lost a lot of their popularity in the US.

[Ugly_Kid_Jose]

15 hours ago, Rovim said:

yup and just to add to that, even if you take a band like Iron Maiden who lost Dickinson and just kept it moving along or bands who lost direction and tried to hop on the trends of the time like Metallica, and released unpopular albums like St. Anger, they kinda derived their ability to still keep the interest of their fans just by providing new shit to consume.

I think Axl really cared about making sure the quality was consistent and that maybe also it was about proving that he could still be relevant and just as good without Slash so he zoomed in on the details of what it meant to keep Gn'R going and ironically went against the natural law of limited attention span when everyone else got a product to present when Gn'R just one day vanished from the face of the earth or at least that was how it maybe felt.

it's pretty cool to be that dedicated imho and to not give a shit about time when you have a goal in mind that you believe in, but it did come with the a price imo. It's not like Axl didn't want Chinese to be a huge commercial success. They all cared about that from the start.

it's like in the end they got paid when they provided most fans what they always wanted which is Axl and Slash, but 20 years of nothing but one product was as I see it the cost of Axl kinda turning its back on even considering a more organic approach and weird concepts like deadlines.

all the iron maiden fans were very happy about the iron maiden reunion with bruce and adrian in 1999. The Ed Hunter Tour was a drean come  true for the people who discovered maiden after 1993, and brave new world was a good album next year. After that IM have released 6 albums and some of them have very good songs.

[Rovim]

2 hours ago, Ugly_Kid_Jose said:

all the iron maiden fans were very happy about the iron maiden reunion with bruce and adrian in 1999. The Ed Hunter Tour was a drean come  true for the people who discovered maiden after 1993, and brave new world was a good album next year. After that IM have released 6 albums and some of them have very good songs.

what is your point? this is why I gave Iron Maiden as an example of a band that survived the Blaze era, with fans still supporting the band and then, after that tough few years without Dicky, they released Brave New World, which I think is a great album and good a great reception.

Gn'R could have done the same thing with Slash after taking a break from each other and coming back with a strong release, say in 1999. Just to be clear, I think Axl was too angry after Slash left to do that, but it wasn't an external problem of the public just not being interested in old Gn'R, it was that old Gn'R didn't exist anymore.

if you can't keep the band together, or key members of the band, you've got nothing, but just as an example, if Axl and Slash found a way to work shit out through Duff or some shit in like 1997-1998, and agree on a new lineup that still included Axl and Slash, I think they could have made another great album or at least good enough for the fans to still feel like the band was alive.

Slash had the inital Fall To Pieces ideas for example, Axl liked some of the Slash sessions from 1994, 1996 or whatever and also Axl said he thought they were capable of making another Gn'R album, but Slash "didn't want to work that hard" which I feel was more complicated than that, he didn't seem to agree with Axl's approach anymore.

bottom line is I believe there was no need to be relevant for Gn'R to keep being a success. Some bands in the hard rock/metal genre don't need to do that, they just need to continue to churn out pretty good to great albums every few years with enough elements of their classic sound which is why I gave AC/DC as an example, and even Metallica which released Load and Reload and sold a lot of copies with much of their trash metal sound absent from these records.

[AXL_N_DIZZY]

7 hours ago, Jakey Styley said:

Were GNR considered corny by people below the age of 20 by the end of 1993? That's the sense I get from some of the posts above.

Not so much "corny"- as over-indulgent, and "out of step" IMHO. 

[RichardNixon]

If GN'R had released an album in 1995/1996, it would have sold three million copies in the U.S. alone. Van Halen's Balance (1995) was a massive seller, and Guns N' Roses was the bigger band.

 

 

[SoulMonster]

11 hours ago, Jakey Styley said:

Were GNR considered corny by people below the age of 20 by the end of 1993? That's the sense I get from some of the posts above.

I can only speak for myself and sort of the culture I was in at the time - and I am sure other people would disagree based on what state of life they were in and where they lived - but to me GN'R became terribly uncool around that time. Back in the late 80s they had spearheaded a movement in a sense, they had taken the best, musically, from the bands around them and created a fantastic essence of those bands and that music in Appetite, and how they looked went with that. They fit in. Appetite sat extremely well in the musical landscape of that time. It was better, it was innovative, it was rawer, and it was end-to-end filled with killer songs, but it was still an outcome of the bands before them and the music they played, like Hanoi Rocks, WASP, Motley, Jet Boy, Rolling Stones, etc. UYI kind of lacked that connection to the musical zeitgeist of the time. It was a great rock and roll record (well two records) with some brilliant songs, but it wasn't a clever, contemporary answer to the musical questions of that time. It was an answer to a question no one had asked. It was more in its own place, like a big musical monolith that stood out separated from what other bands were playing at the time and the direction of music. And even more so did the behavior of the band itself stand out to their peers back in the mid- and late 90s. They didn't look and behave like what was cool at the time. While they had looked effortlessly "right" back in the late 80s, they now looked either frozen in time without the sense to evolve with the times (Duff and Matt and Slash, with their leather jackets, big hair, etc) or like they were desperately trying to remain cool by going through all kinds of styles (Axl) - and the same could to a great extent be said about their music. There was no cohesive punch to UYIs, it was in a sense a sprawling mess. So they weren't that appealing anymore. In fact, they became really untrendy and uncool. It was brutal. And again, I am just talking from my perspective at the time, all of this is relative, there were clearly regions or cultures where GN'R was still cool, but in the mainstream that wasn't the case. So MTV weren't that interested anymore. 

[EvanG]

I don't know if they became untrendy. I got into them in late 1993 and they were still all over the place. I remember so many MTV specials around them on TV all the time, and this was MTV Europe, so everyone in Europe was watching the same MTV back then. For people who had jumped on the alt-rock band wagon they maybe weren't so cool anymore, but there was still so much hype around them.

[Draguns]

I wouldn't say that GNR became untrendy in 1993 nor 1994. In the NYC area, Q104.3 was  conceived as an alt rock station in 1994. Rather than picking an alternative rock song as their anthem, they chose GNR's version of Hair of the Dog as their anthem. GNR was still trendy in the alt rock community in this area.  There was some interest in GNR when that infamous fax was broadcasted. College students talked about Slash leaving GNR. 

I think that GNR would have still been as popular as Aerosmith, Metallica, Bon Jovi, and Van Halen. 

[Rovim]

a lot of music fans, when they really like a band in a certain genre, from a certain time, don't just move on from that band simply cause the next new movement (even if it's great) comes along, even if what they like is not considered cool anymore, they're still fans.

when a great band finds a large fanbase it takes a lot for them to lose interest in many cases.

[Master Of Reality]

2 hours ago, EvanG said:

I don't know if they became untrendy. I got into them in late 1993 and they were still all over the place. I remember so many MTV specials around them on TV all the time, and this was MTV Europe, so everyone in Europe was watching the same MTV back then. For people who had jumped on the alt-rock band wagon they maybe weren't so cool anymore, but there was still so much hype around them.

I remember watching the specials on MTV as a young child. That and the Paris 92 show made me fall in love with the band and harder rock music in general. After 1994, it felt like they vanished from the planet. Being a teenager around the millenium, I started listening to Nu Metal and Alternative Rock. I never stopped listening to GNR, but even I didn't consider them being a 'cool' band at that time. I tried to introduce some of my friends to them and they all saw them as some dinosaur band from another time. Some of them never even heard of GNR despite being into the harder stuff from that era. You couldn't even find a shirt from them in the Large(EMP) catalogus. And they basically had shirts from every other big band from the late 60's till then. 

My obsession in the band came back as soon as i got the internet around the RIR gig and realised Axl had rebuild GNR. I found a shirt somewhere at a festival market and was the guy with the uncool bandshirt for a while 😂. But a year later when Nu Metal became 'uncool'. A lot of GNR shirts started popping up in my highschool. Around 2003-2004 younger people were looking for something else. Velvet Revolver did help to spark the interest in GNR again. 

[evilfacelessturtle]

19 hours ago, Rovim said:

but Slash "didn't want to work that hard" which I feel was more complicated than that, he didn't seem to agree with Axl's approach anymore.

I find that particular comment pretty hilarious. Slash wasn't the one who refused to show up at rehearsal or sing a single line. Slash wasn't the one who recorded only one album in 30 years.

[Nintari]

Between 1993-1997 Guns N Roses was considered to be your dad's band. Outdated, silly, laughable... a joke. Axl was considered to be a washed-up asshole who shit away an empire because of a galaxy-sized ego.

Edited December 29, 2023 by Nintari

[Rovim]

5 hours ago, evilfacelessturtle said:

I find that particular comment pretty hilarious. Slash wasn't the one who refused to show up at rehearsal or sing a single line. Slash wasn't the one who recorded only one album in 30 years.

my guess is that Axl was talking more about Slash not willing to be in the studio and focusing on what's the right songs or the right album for Gn'R and try everything under the sun just so it would be good enough for Axl. Slash's top priority seems to always be playing live on stage and the approach he prefers seems to be to work quick inthe studio. Axl is the opposite in many ways, just look at the process of making Chinese.

so even though Slash is one of the most hard working musicians in rock, I can see how Axl viewed it as lazy of Slash to not agree to Axl's approach of "whatever it takes" in the studio. Slash's focus was never that. The album more of a means to an end (the live show) where for Axl it always has to be a grand musical statement or at least that's how it looks like to me at times.

releasing stand alone singles is different compared to a complete album. (SFTD cover, OMG, and the NITL singles don't have the weight of Chinese)

[SoulMonster]

6 hours ago, evilfacelessturtle said:

I find that particular comment pretty hilarious. Slash wasn't the one who refused to show up at rehearsal or sing a single line. Slash wasn't the one who recorded only one album in 30 years.

In fact, Slash stopped coming to rehearsals and admitted as much:

Slash: And a lot of time went by, we started working the Snakepit album and I wasn’t coming down to Guns N’ Roses rehearsals, so Axl was getting pissed off about that [Alice Cooper Vintage Vault, 1995].

This was in the period he realized that having his own band, Snakepit, was a lot more fun than dealing with Axl. It is easy to sympathize with Slash here and understand him being fed up with GN'R, he himself would express disgust over the ballads, expensive videos, etc:

Slash: I love Guns with a passion. It just got to the point where - after two band member changes, ballads about Stephanie (Seymour), multi-million-dollar videos, the whole f**king cabaret thing that went on onstage - I just went, ‘There’s too much going on! [Kerrang! February 18, 1995].

But not showing up for rehearsals and basically blowing Axl off when Axl actually wanted to work on new music, was not really the right way to go about it. Some clear communication that he would be gone for two years working Snakepit, or even simply quitting GN'R, would have been better than this half-assed approach to GN'R and then later making it seem that Axl was the sole problem why they didn't manage to make a new album in 1994-1996.

Edited December 29, 2023 by SoulMonster

[Rovim]

8 minutes ago, SoulMonster said:

In fact, Slash stopped coming to rehearsals and admitted as much:

Slash: And a lot of time went by, we started working the Snakepit album and I wasn’t coming down to Guns N’ Roses rehearsals, so Axl was getting pissed off about that [Alice Cooper Vintage Vault, 1995].

This was in the period he realized that having his own band, Snakepit, was a lot more fun than dealing with Axl. It is easy to sympathize with Slash here and understand him being fed up with GN'R, he himself would express disgust over the ballads, expensive videos, etc:

Slash: I love Guns with a passion. It just got to the point where - after two band member changes, ballads about Stephanie (Seymour), multi-million-dollar videos, the whole f**king cabaret thing that went on onstage - I just went, ‘There’s too much going on! [Kerrang! February 18, 1995].

But not showing up for rehearsals and basically blowing Axl off when Axl actually wanted to work on new music, was not really the right way to go about it. Some clear communication that he would be gone for two years working Snakepit, or even simply quitting GN'R, would have been better than this half-assed approach to GN'R and then later making it seem that Axl was the sole problem why they didn't manage to make a new album in 1994-1996.

I think that both Axl and Slash handled it terribly and I suspect that both of them thought they knew best when it came to what the right approach was for Gn'R to go forward.

the whole "it was all Axl's fault" is a myth imho, but Axl did push on Slash and the rest of the band shit they never really were onboard with and he even talked about how November Rain and Estranged came to be: it was Axl forcing Slash and Duff and work on these elaborate tunes, so even if that was the right choice for Gn'R as a whole commercially speaking and also maybe artistically, depending on what you think about these tunes, was it right way to go about it? or bringing in Zakk Wyld and Paul Huge? there was a lack of respect between Axl and Slash and that usually leads to a strain on the relationship between band members. 

I believe there were many reasons for why it didn't work out, one of them was Izzy not being there anymore, and Axl not really sure how to make the album he wanted to make without it repeating the same thing they did in the past where the rest of the band wasn't really interested in following into battle artistically speaking.

[EvanG]

6 hours ago, Nintari said:

Between 1993-1997 Guns N Roses was considered to be your dad's band. Outdated, silly, laughable... a joke. Axl was considered to be a washed-up asshole who shit away an empire because of a galaxy-sized ego.

Maybe to some. I was 11 in 1993 and to me and my friends and kids a few years older, they were the coolest thing in the world and definitely not our dad's band. Now I can imagine that to some kids in their late teens or 20s they had become perhaps more laughable because of the changing climate in rock music, but it wasn't that way for everyone. Not too different from Aerosmith, and they were more popular than ever in the mid 90s. 

[Nintari]

10 hours ago, EvanG said:

Maybe to some. I was 11 in 1993 and to me and my friends and kids a few years older, they were the coolest thing in the world and definitely not our dad's band. Now I can imagine that to some kids in their late teens or 20s they had become perhaps more laughable because of the changing climate in rock music, but it wasn't that way for everyone. Not too different from Aerosmith, and they were more popular than ever in the mid 90s. 

Popular music begins and ends with high school and college students. I was a freshman in high school in 1995. There was only one kid other than me who wore GNR shirts, and he was a complete fucking loser. He use to call my name in class all the time and be like, hey... guess what me and my friend did over the weekend? Then he would go on to tell me they got high or drunk and jammed to Guns N Roses etc. But it was always said as if it were a dirty secret, because by then, in the US, GNR was lame. It was NIN, Nirvana, Pearl Jam, Soundgarden, Alice in Chains... stuff like that. GNR might as well have been Poison. It was that antiquated.

Edited December 29, 2023 by Nintari

[evilfacelessturtle]

17 hours ago, SoulMonster said:

In fact, Slash stopped coming to rehearsals and admitted as much:

Slash: And a lot of time went by, we started working the Snakepit album and I wasn’t coming down to Guns N’ Roses rehearsals, so Axl was getting pissed off about that [Alice Cooper Vintage Vault, 1995].

This was in the period he realized that having his own band, Snakepit, was a lot more fun than dealing with Axl. It is easy to sympathize with Slash here and understand him being fed up with GN'R, he himself would express disgust over the ballads, expensive videos, etc:

Slash: I love Guns with a passion. It just got to the point where - after two band member changes, ballads about Stephanie (Seymour), multi-million-dollar videos, the whole f**king cabaret thing that went on onstage - I just went, ‘There’s too much going on! [Kerrang! February 18, 1995].

But not showing up for rehearsals and basically blowing Axl off when Axl actually wanted to work on new music, was not really the right way to go about it. Some clear communication that he would be gone for two years working Snakepit, or even simply quitting GN'R, would have been better than this half-assed approach to GN'R and then later making it seem that Axl was the sole problem why they didn't manage to make a new album in 1994-1996.

Axl knew he was working on his solo album, and Slash was skipping rehearsals because Axl wasn't showing up and was trying to force Huge in. To say that was laziness is just ignoring all the context. How long would you keep showing up if nothing was getting done anyway? If Axl really did want to write, he would show up to rehearsal. To focus on Slash not showing up when Axl never showed up to begin with is a bit silly.

That, and I think Slash just needed space because things were getting too fucked up to deal with.

Edited December 30, 2023 by evilfacelessturtle