war wrote:

i can't believe anyone would use slash's book in defense of slash for any slash vs. axl debate

Why - because he messed up a couple of calander dates for events that are more than 10 years ago? In the book he states his motivation for leaving GNR very clearly  and I can't believe that in the face of that - people want to make out there is some other reason.

As for his work being "sub-par" after GNR...I think if you look at his contribution - the guitar parts - it isn't - the reason some of the songs may be lesser overall is they wern't made with the talents of Axl as well, but that's problems for the lyrics and melodies.

The solo is "street child" is beautiful, the "Fields of Joy" solo with Lenny Kravitzs was great....the solo in "Serial Killer" is easily on par with a a "Back of Bitch" style UYI solo....the riffing and solos on "It's Five O'clock Somehwere" is very much like a follow up to AFD and in a lot of songs is technically harder and more proficient. While i'll admit for the most part VR is stylisticlly more poppy and moving away from slash's core roots of 70s-blues-rock and thus a a bit different, If you look at the guitar parts of his solo work - and divorse them from the songs as full units...you find slash has definately kept par since GNR and has probably actually improved.

If you want to compare...its easier for Axl to write good songs without slash than it is for slash to without axl - as at the end of the day - there's more freakishly good guitarists out there than there are freakishly good singers. So it's easier for him to recruit a replacement to add what is missing.

That said...compare things from similar time frames...1999 demos vs the 1995 - would have been GNR record - of Snakepit1 - "It's five o'clock somewhere". Now its apples and oranges which is better. Snakepit's lyrics arn't the best in the world...and look..the demos guitar parts aren't so flashy either....the bottom line is slash excells at writing blues rock guitar, axl is standout at melodies and lyrics, and back when they could work together, the two complimented each other perfectly. Sadly they can't anymore.

Oh I believe there are 3-4 albums worth of material, and I believe Sebastian heard that material.  He just jumped the gun and assumed they would all be released, if not at once, in pretty quick succession.  Sebastian said that awhile back though, I wonder why Axl waited until last week to tell him to cool it with that?  Maybe they don't talk all that often these days, as Baz is on tour and such.  Or maybe the 4 album thing was a plan at one point.  I doubt it though, Baz probably just heard what he thought were finished songs and came to his own conclusions.  He was clear that Axl is focussed on the ONE album at the very least.  There's obviously more material that could be released down the line, but we've got to take step 1 first.

Just to clarify a few things.  Sebastian said it's 100% true that Axl told him that he doesn't have 4 albums ready for release and when he talks about the album to say that he has one record done that he's super proud of and he'll get it out as soon as he can.  The DJ also asked him why Axl doesn't go on TV and fight Flavor-Flav (alluding to Baz's many celeb-reality show appearances).  Baz said that Axl "doesn't give a fuck about TV dude", that he's old school, sort of like a rocker in the 70's back when there was mystery to musicians.  Then the DJ makes fun of Axl and says that he should hang out in the real world sometime because he can't stay secluded forever, and if you stay in "awesome world" you become stagnant and end up braiding your hair.  It was pretty funny.