Just saw this statistic....

“After the 2016 Not in This Lifetime... Tour reunion tour (during which most songs from the album were played), Billboard reported the album's digital streams jumped from 8 million streams to 24 million, as well as 7,900 additional copies sold”

Those streaming statistics are impressive for an album no one truly cares about anymore. It shows some people are curious about the CD songs they are performing.

elevendayempire wrote:

davegnfnr2k wrote:

Axls vocals on CD where all over the place and different.
Just listen to Madagascar, Riad, the blues, teh title track, scrapped as examples.

if axl re-did all teh vocals which is doubtful and he did them around the time he did that looney toons song, his rasp is pretty good.

Also he had good rasp in 2016 with AC DC too

I think he can easily wheel out the rasp in-studio, given that they can literally do as many takes as he needs to lay down the track.

agreed plus they can audio tune him and put on any effects to give him extra rasp too

Waits for  "WTF happened to... Absurd?" Thread

James wrote:

Ha!....it never crossed my mind to look for the video. I'm shocked that it's even on there.

Yeah you're right.....it makes a little more sense if he's referring to 96.

From CD Whispers in 96...

"One particular evening, after they were done for the day, I went [...] to dinner at Chasen's [with Keith Richards.] [...] I'd been at the studio rehearsing all day, so when the conversation swung around to my band, I let it all out. Keith took it all in, and then looked me deep in the eye. 'Listen,' he said. 'There's one thing you never do - you never leave.' [...] Keith inspired me; I felt like I had to try harder. The next day I tried to refocus my outlook and I showed up at The Complex ready to make it work at all costs. [...] Axl never showed up to rehearse and the attorneys' negotiation of our 'employment contracts' had taken a really insulting turn." (Slash, autobiography)

---

"By September 1996, Slash was so miserable that he swore, 'I'm going to confront it. Either Paul goes, or...' (Q Magazine, 05/01)

On 09/16/96, Slash shared the stage with Neurotic Outsiders in Phoenix, Arizona. Three days prior, Duff and Matt had returned to the road after a few days of in-between jamming with GNR. Slash's appearance might've marked the end of the Axl/Slash/Paul Huge/Duff/Matt/Dizzy -lineup.

"Right now, Axl and I are deliberating over the future of our relationship. [...] I have only been back in the band for three weeks and my relationship with Axl right now is sort of at a stand still." (Slash chat, 10/16/96)

Yeah...not a lot getting done as the band circles the drain.

They both deserve blame. Axl should not have been pushing the employee angle with lawyers at the time....and Slash needed to take Paul Huge to the side and have a private discussion....fight it out if you have to.

I do take his side on that issue....Gilby didn't need to be fired. Yeah he ran his mouth to the media when he shouldn't have....but a good talking to couldve sorted that out.

Once he was gone though...work on plan b.

It really does boil down to the Snakepit material. Slash took them, did his own thing quickly, and it was successful.

Now he's demanding Huge exit stage left. Axl wasn't going to cave in. A miscalculation certainly.... especially with Duff and Matt siding with Slash on the issue... even after Slash was gone.

The CD sessions do show that Huge did bring potential to the band. Having said that, it wasn't worth breaking up the band.

Hard to believe such a quality poster only has 9 posts. Did you used to post on the old forums years ago? Your name seems vaguely familiar.

Either way...you should post more often.... especially if things start heating up in the GNR world.

Thanks. I've been reading this forum for a while, but didn't post. I've really appreciated the quality of the discussions - and, of course, Chinese Whispers has been an invaluable source for the CD saga, which I didn't follow in real time. I'm one of those fans who "moved on" after the mid-90s (not that I didn't like the band anymore, but just real life, other music, etc., so I wasn't constantly looking for news and updates). Then the reunion happened and my interest was somehow reawakened. I starting reading stuff and posting at mygnrforum (I guess because it was the first forum I came across - and the most active at the time). I've also been at a-4-d.com; we've been creating a database of GN'R articles/interviews there (we've collected about 3,500 so far, from 1985 to today), which is the basis of an "in their own words" band history in progress. Long story short, all of a sudden I found myself nerding out on GN'R.

*

What seems to have been the main issue with Gilby is that Axl didn't think he was good enough as a writer. However, Gilby's dismissal wasn't as instantaneous as Slash presented it in his book later. According to Slash interviews of the time (as well as some other sources), it looks like there were some back and forth discussions between Axl and Slash regarding Gilby's future in the band: Axl suggested to bring in someone else (presumably Huge) to write with and also keep Gilby on the side as a touring member. But, of course, the conflict over the initial rejection of the Snakepit material (that Gilby had been part of) followed by Gilby's lashing out in the press (which he tried to retract from soon afterwards) didn't help.

This Slash interview from 1995, in particular, which surfaced on Alice Cooper's podcast about a year ago, is very enlightening about what was going on (from Slash's side, at least):

Slash: [...] There’s always been friction between Axl and I in some cases. It’s like a love/hate thing. We’re very close but we’re very distant just because we’re completely different people, and that’s what probably makes us more or less dynamic as, you know, performers together and musicians together. But we don’t always see eye to eye and it usually takes some time till we fall into a sort of niche where we’d agree, you know? So Axl and I, there was some conflict of interest over my doing this record and making a priority of that instead of concentrating on my relationship with Axl, and Guns N’ Roses in general, and doing a Guns record. He wanted that first before I went on to do this. But before I went on to do this, he had encouraged me to do a solo record because he wasn’t ready to get to work yet. Then, once he did want to get to work, he was like, “I want this song, and this song, and this song,” the songs he'd turned down. I said, “Dude, the album is finished already, it’s done.” So that pissed him off and we had – you know, Gilby got fired, Axl got to fire Gilby and that was one of the main key things that separated me and Axl by miles.

Then finally, as time went on, I started trying to work with Ax up at the Snakepit studio with this guy, Paul Huge, who I couldn’t stand but tried to make things work. And finally, because of the fact that nobody besides Axl liked this guy, it built friction between Duff and Matt and I, which has never existed before. So once I saw that happening, I said rehearsals are over. Axl was out of town for a week or something, and he came back and he goes, “What time is rehearsal?” I said, “There is no rehearsal,” so that started another fight. Plus I took that guy, Paul, off the payroll, so there was a big conflict of interest there.

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. So I took some time out from Snakepit and rehearsed with Guns, and Zakk Wylde was playing with us at the time. And that was fun, because I know Zakk really well and I like him a lot, he’s a great player, but we don’t sound like Guns N’ Roses with him in the band. So I was sort of like, “Well, whatever, here’s my schedule and I’ll be back in August” and I’ve been gone ever since. But Axl and I did have a huge fallout where a lot of stuff came out in the open, and we came to an agreement, so it was really healthy – not really an argument, but a discussion about where we were at.

[...]

You know, I would love for none of this to have happened. It’s personally, on a pride level, very damaging and I don’t expect him, even if he was asked to come back, to come back. But he was never officially fired. Axl just didn’t want to write with him. Gilby never even got a chance to write, except for with me.

And Axl’s always wanted to get two high profile lead guitar players together, which is a great concept, except for it turns the band into an over the top, obnoxious guitar band. You know, it’s just too much, because I’m gonna play in the way that I’m gonna play and I would expect that whoever comes in wouldn’t hold back on how he plays. And so having a good rhythm guitar player letting me do my thing is probably the best way that Guns work. Trading guitar solos is cool between guitar players, but when it’s like two break neck guitar players clashing it out, it doesn’t leave room for the music or the songs, and I’m not into that, I think is boring. Anyway, for a guitar playing thing it’s great, but I mean as a whole guitar records bore the hell out of me, when it’s just nothing but diddly diddly diddly all the way through (laughs).

Anyway, so as far as Gilby is concerned, I wouldn’t expect him to come back even, like I said, if he was asked, only because his feelings were hurt. Axl didn’t want to write with him and I had to go and tell Gilby myself that this was going on, so he didn’t hear it, you know, in the field or something or turned into some sort of weird rumor. So I went and told him and then – well, I think the thing that really etched in stone Gilby’s dismissal from Guns was the fact that he had words with Duff and he had words with Axl, and that sort of cemented the fact that he wasn’t in the band. But Axl still thinks, like he does with everybody, like, “Well, maybe we’ll have three guitar players, or maybe we’ll do this or maybe we’ll do that,” or “Gilby can come out live,” but whatever. And I come from a different point of view altogether: that you get the guy that fits naturally, you write together, he plays on the record and he does the tour. It’s not like we get a bunch of hired Guns just because Axl thinks that me and him are the only things that are really important in Guns N’ Roses, you know. I don’t think - it has always been a band to me, you know, so we’ll see what happens.

There's also this from Doug Goldstein:

Doug Goldstein wrote:

Gilby toured with us to complete the "Illusions" tour. Shortly thereafter Axl and Gilby spoke about what Axl wanted to try next. After Izzy's departure Axl felt Guns could use a little help in the writing department. Axl thought the addition of another guitar player (#3) would help the situation. Unhappy with this, Gilby stated "I don't want to be in Molly Hatchet" and quit. (Letter to Newsweek in response to review, Jan. 6, 2000)