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Re: The 3rd Chinese (How Are You Grenade) Has Surfaced! (FAKE?)
Axl would do well to quit all pretensions & unload his archives as multitracks to the web. Throw in preferred mixes and do at least one track monthly. Charge $0.99 for a download, cause some folks still pay for music.
The stuff gets heard, the audiences are there.
Will they do it?
Of course not.
Re: The 3rd Chinese (How Are You Grenade) Has Surfaced! (FAKE?)
Agreed. A modern NIN-format for releasing music would be money in Axl's pocket, cut out the middle man, and fans would be rewarded with not only new music, but multiple takes, outtakes and remixes of those songs.
But i'm sure Universal would have something to say about that, and alot of the nutswingers like to blame them - "the man" - as the problem.
But the reality is Axl and his people are completely incompetant at being on the ball with modern technology and where music is heading in the digital world.
I mean come on... these people expected a 1991-style rollout for CD in 2008, an album, which had even the janitors at The Roxy laughing in hysterics.
Re: The 3rd Chinese (How Are You Grenade) Has Surfaced! (FAKE?)
"I don't think anything Tommy said after the album's release is bullshit."
- ok, fair enough. i should have been more specific in what i said. it's just from my recollection he seemed to point the finger of blame @ RTB & the label while ignoring the failings of his bandleader (& his & his bandmates role in not standing up to axl's whims). but i see he was asked specifically about RTB.
Failings of Axl and not standing up to his whims? While plenty of blame can go around including Axl, Tommy's POV seems to paint Axl as more passive in this CD saga than the control freak, prolific, perfectionist that had been eluded to in the past.
Another quote from Tommy...
My two cents on the whole thing is that I really think Jimmy Iovine fucked the whole thing up. It was a bummer. Most of the songs that are on the record now were done 10 fucking years ago. But all the talking heads in the mix were saying, "Make 'em sound better! Make 'em sound better!" So we kept redoing this and that. And it ended up coming back down to the same fucking songs that they were 10 years ago, except that now they were a super-dense mishmash of a bunch of instrumentation.
If there was any point Axl should have stood up and not caved in, it was there. If the "Make em sound better!" quote is referring to that 99 period, it's understandable. Those songs were mediocre at best and what we didn't hear was probably similar quality. However, once a reworking of it happens in 2001-02, Axl(or SOMEBODY) should have took a stand and said "enough is enough. This is it. Take it or leave it." Especially since it was the same songs and nothing was being scrapped so new songs could be worked on. It's like Axl and his rotating cast got on a merry go round and were too afraid to ask UMG to stop the ride. Once certain members tired of it, they simply jumped off while the merry go round was still going.
So while the buck may technically stop with Axl, it's understandable why Tommy points some of the blame in other directions.
Re: The 3rd Chinese (How Are You Grenade) Has Surfaced! (FAKE?)
EXACTLY!!
Agree with both you and Tommy. Absolutely no reason those songs shouldn't have been released in 2002. Not only were they the same songs but they wouldn't have so much going on in every song. Things wouldn't have been buried.
The thing is totally insane. I do remember hearing Axl thought the album was ready at one point and someone at the lable told him he could do better. I guess that was Iovine.
Re: The 3rd Chinese (How Are You Grenade) Has Surfaced! (FAKE?)
If some geek is sitting around making all this up, they seriously need to commit suicide, because they are a waste of fuckin' oxygen.
I still think it's real.
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As for the Tommy thing, Tommy's statements have definitely put Axl in a better light. For years the label, the industry, music enthusiasts, and fans blamed Axl for the chronic delays. For the label - it's easy to blame Axl.
And for Slash, Duff & Matt - it makes sense in the late 90s. Like James said, those tracks were WEAK. They did need more work. So they re-worked them, and brought Bucket in, and they were probably done by Rio III.
But if everything, Axl, Tommy, Brain & Chris have said over the years is true, about how Uni was desperate for a single, and they brought Ezrin in who said "there's no hits on here", the pressure was put on Axl, not the other way around.
It was obvious Geffen/Sanctuary/Interscope/Universal wanted to deliver a UYI-like Guns N' Roses album to help save ALOT of jobs at the record company - bottom line tho - CD was just not that kind of record.
I'm sure Iovine's interference of "make it sound better, make it sound better" was really his way of saying "where's Slash? where's that traditional GN'R sound? I need a Sweet Child O' Mine to push"
He wasn't going to get it, even if it had been the UYI/TSI-band making it.
In other words - CD or any late 90s/early 2000s GN'R release was DOOMED from the on-set, because too many hands were in the cookie jar, the more and more history gets told.
Re: The 3rd Chinese (How Are You Grenade) Has Surfaced! (FAKE?)
I think Iovine saying it could sound better was aimed at Axl as producer and hinting that he might need someone to help him, which, as the story goes, Axl refused. And ran over the sample CD's with his Lamborghini.
The more I think about the Ezrin thing it pisses me off. He didn't know what to do with Janes Addiction, he didn't get them. So, he produced a very nice sounding album, that had no soul and erased everything JA was. Where were the big hits for Army Of Anyone? He co wrote all the tracks, same with the Strays album.
Talk about ego, the thing about not liking Janes Ritual album and saying he was going to turn them into a "real" rock band has always rubbed me the wrong way. I think he could have been a great help in quality control for the songs on CD as a co-producer, but he has no business working on songs from their inception in this modern era, which is what he really likes to do. And from what I remember, he didn't like Sean Beaven's work.
Re: The 3rd Chinese (How Are You Grenade) Has Surfaced! (FAKE?)
Screw the Ezrin comment. He was there in 2000 so I am not sure Bucket had done all his work by that point. Plus, "3" good songs which could potentially be singles is all you need...the rest are album tracks. Once Bucket put his stamp on the album, it should have been released. Thus, the album was ready with a good 12 tracks, like Zutaut said, in 2002. The period between 2001-2002 is where it should have been dropped. 
