sweet

yea it is (increasingly) embarrassing that they can't/won't tour their own homeland

but SA shows makes sense on many levels

it a shame we all can't have our cake & eat it.. but that's how he wants it.. well he gets it. i don't like it any more than you men..

that's completely unfair

richard would prob be the first gnr band member i would get rid off if i had the power. i think he's totally superfluous & actually do agree his contribution to GnR is relatively lazy (& the fact he has tried to distance himself from the fanbase really was a dickhead move)
i even prefer that asshat ashba to 4tus

BUT, just because someone is a session player doesn't diminish their talent or aspirations. james burton, page, hendrix were all session men @ one time or another - & actually, in comparison to their careers 4tus released ORIGINAL material he created/wrote before any of them did in their respective careers. 4tus has released albums with his OWN bands a long fking time ago now, before he joined the Psychedelic Furs*

not, of course, that i'm comparing 4tus to those guys. i just think it's unreasonable to chastise a fine musician with that attitude. (i wonder whether your disdain for him is more born out of the axlite fans who believed the BS after BH left that 4tus was gonna be an amazing addition than his slight contributions to the GnR cause?)

off topic slightly - what's weird about this board is, tho i disagree with mikka on this (& especially his treatment of ali in this thread) there was another post of his i agreed 100% with recently... tho i can't remember where i saw it now.

*back on topic & going back to what Axlin said a few pages ago:

again i think this a wildly unfair criticism. again think on james burton & the amount of dross he has played on & amount of tribute gigs he has played for the likes of roy orbison etc.
my point is: the important thing is not the validity of the players playing the music, it's the songs & the impact they have on the listener.

unfortunately for 4tus (or me), imo, his playing on songs that mean/meant a lot to me he more often than not spoils them slightly - that's due to his style of playing & his ideas, not due to him being lazy or not caring/being a money grabbing charlatan. knowwhatimean?

& what if tommy/BBF/4tus/frank/Mother Goose/Ashba & Frank suddenly decided they'd had enough of Axl's procrastination & collectively walked away. would you guys be happy then? Axl & Dizzy left standing because they're really the only 'true' members anyway?!
bollocks to that.
session musicians & replacements are more common in rock music than bands sticking together. it's just this abstract unattainable romantic notion of a band/gang of guys sticking by each other like a long sexless marriage - how many line-up changes did the stones go thru ffs. GnR is only strange as it's the frontman who held on - & really the lack of contributions to the bands discography aren't richard's/ashba's/tommy's nor BBF's fault: it's axl's fault those guys haven't been allowed to prove theyre more worthy of being in GnR.

"Oh, please – I'm in Guns n'fucking Roses. This is all like a walk in the park!"

brilliant
dealt with the humour we've become accustomed to from ron

i wrote-off my car to IRS one night
it was a hell of a drive til that one corner.. then it was a hell of a ride as i flipped n rolled. it was perfectly timed with that big axl scream. then big thuds (either from the roll or when i bounced off a hedge) knocked the stereo off until i landed, a few seconds later the radio kicks in again & i'm upside down n my car & the song starts blasting out in the pitch black night.

tommy was never a hugely creative force in the replacements, westerberg was the song writer. it's only since GnR that tommy has really branched out into his solo work.

it's p obv it's the fat cheque & the interest garnered from being under the GnR umbrella that has these guy's hanging on.

tommy really didn't get very much money from the replacements days at all, so gnr in a way is the industry paying back to tommy what it owes as the 'mats were one of those incredibly influential bands with the sales figures of a tito jackson, like the velvet underground except miles better. or like big star.

from what he has said about the project, tommy did pour a good bit of effort into it. of course not that you can really hear it in the end result..