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#901 The Garden » Smoking cessation » 642 weeks ago
- apex-twin
- Replies: 25
One month down.
Still get cravings now and then.
Anybody tried this?
#902 Re: Guns N' Roses » Robin Finck first substantial interview on how he got GNR gig » 642 weeks ago
"I played with Robin a few times and he's a great guy." (Duff, Hard Force, 07/99)
Theoretically, those tapes do exist.
Exactly. Robin was Axl's ticket to a new band. DJ is a ticket to nostalgia land.
Axl's idea of an AFD reunion would be himself, Duff, Izzy, Frank and DJ.
Robin would've made a wonderful lead guitarist in a new Axl-fronted band, without the baggage of the old. Robin and Bucket just aren't the guys you hire to glamorize on the hair metal heyday and ride the nostalgia train - they're in fact exactly the opposite. Looking back, this should've been obvious. At hindsight, smart money would've put the GNR name on hiatus for one album, then return to it with some new players & musical direction.
Of course, everything I just said would require releasing new music, and that's hard with a person like Axl.
#903 Re: Guns N' Roses » GNR to headline 2014 Rock on the Range » 642 weeks ago
They did Rocklahoma last year, I believe.
#904 Re: Guns N' Roses » Robin Finck first substantial interview on how he got GNR gig » 643 weeks ago
Robin also touched upon an upcoming solo album.
He is also in the very early stages of his own solo album (and insists that it's still very early days yet) but once released will absolutely establish him as a major player in the world of electric guitar.
You've been working on your own solo album?
Yeah. I was in the throes of that when Trent called me for this tour and so I'm looking to get into that when this tour lands at some point next year [2014]. I've really been woodshedding on my own and the songs are born on piano or guitar and building them up from there. But I have yet to introduce them to any wall of noise just yet.
This is going to be a vocal record?
Oh yeah and I'm singing them.
You sing with NIN so that's an aspect of the process you dig?
Yeah, I do. I really do. I've been playing and recording all the time through the years and I have yet to fashion my own coming out and it's been inevitable. I've been very blessed with other opportunities that were gonna go with or without me and I've enjoyed saying yes to those opportunities.
Axl had come to simply see the circus (laughs) and he and I had never met and he didn't know I was there. One of the guys Axl was with in the grandstands pointed and said (in hushed excited voice), "Axl, you see that guitar player down there? That's Robin from Nine Inch Nails."
Story goes that someone else was none other than Matt Sorum.
#905 Re: Guns N' Roses » GNR to headline 2014 Rock on the Range » 643 weeks ago
Motorhead should headline every festival they play.
There's also Black Label Society, Jason Bonham's Led Zeppelin Experience and Kvelertak.
Slayer is, I'm afraid, now a greed fest ran by Kerry King. 
#906 Re: Guns N' Roses » "The Full Story Behind Our ‘Chinese Democracy’ Leak" (Antiquiet.com) » 644 weeks ago
Haha, no worries mate, your syntax just fails to give your inebration away 
I think I bumped into that Tommy interview you mentioned just a while ago. A pretty kicking account in all its honesty.
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.
I remember Tommy saying earlier on that most of the songs were written before/during the Beavan era. But, at the time, Josh Freese and Beavan said there were around 40 songs being tinkered on, with Axl saying 70 songs in total... Tommy doesn't contradict that, nor the additional stuff written with Bucket & Brain.
What Tommy does suggest is that Guns stopped writing new songs in around 2000/2001, and merely screwed around re-recording the existing material for 7-8 years. 
#907 Re: Guns N' Roses » "The Full Story Behind Our ‘Chinese Democracy’ Leak" (Antiquiet.com) » 644 weeks ago
Cheers for the vote of confidence guys, but let's keep it real. I doubt there's a need for any new mods given the current level of activity, as well as the fact that the incumbent mods seem to have a good handle on things as is. The whole mod campaigning I've seen happen on other forums, some folks have been put on a pedestal for whatever reason and staffs may have caved in, which have sometimes resulted in unnecessary and disrupting promotions. Most forums are run by volunteers and don't need to be force-fed new recruits; they ask them if they need them, methinks. I get the positive note and of course I appreciate it, but let's not make things awkward for Will & co.
As for why EVO is better on me than any other forum; elsewhere one has to choose to either toe the company line on what can be discussed and whatnot, or, alternatively, get swamped by trolls who generally contribute by clogging up threads with rickrolling, etc. Both atmospheres get old as they make constructive discussion a bit difficult. To me, EVO remains the best place to keep looking back at the Chinese Democracy mystery, which, to a degree, is still ongoing. It has all the makings of an epic, Axl went Salinger for years, made several attempts for a comeback, etc. He's really been a ne'er-do-well for his fanbase by delivering neither (that much of) the new music or a reunion. His vault is said to compete with that of The Grateful Dead, the only difference being that he doesn't have a release schedule. Thus you have a patch-full of carrots dangled in front of you and sometimes I feel one doesn't even need to be interested in the music to be swept away by the story.
Don't worry about being a drunken sod, dude, been there meself. We definitely need folks like you to loosen it up a bit, too many people just lurk around, some maybe on the account of EVO's reputation as a classy joint in comparison to others. I get that slow news weeks and the Internet Drama of yesteryear have been a drag as well, as it only takes one good leak to really light the place up. In the meantime, I know this may get me into trouble, but here goes anyway.
Don't take it so hard now, Axl, and please don't take it so bad.
#908 Re: Guns N' Roses » "The Full Story Behind Our ‘Chinese Democracy’ Leak" (Antiquiet.com) » 644 weeks ago
imsorry wrote:Skwerl: 'While I was still working at Universal in 2005, I met a guy that had been working with Axl, who told me that he had touched over 90 songs, 40 of which were “some of the best songs he’d ever heard.”'
It just makes me hate this band even more if all this is true .
The number of songs worked on has been the stuff of legend for years now. The most coherent numbers come from people who were actually there. Josh Freese and Sean Beavan both confirm that 40 or so songs existed in 2000, the year they both left the project. This jives with what Axl, Robin and others have said about there having been enough material to cover two albums or more since then.
Josh Freese wrote:When I left, there were two lists, the Master list ('Here's the 20 songs we're concentrating on') and the B list ('Here's the other 20 songs, we'll finish them one day and we'll see what happens'). (Podomatic, 04/13)
Sean Beavan wrote:I think we worked on thirty-five songs or something. (Antiquiet, 08/13/08)
Even so, 90 songs in total is probably the most ambitious number I've ever seen on the subject. What's known is that the band did write new material with Bucket and Brain, which would pile upon the 40ish songs from the Beavan era. But the numbers are fleeting, again.
I went to the studio [in mid-February] and heard 41 songs [...] from the 60 or 70 [Axl]'s working on... You're gonna be blown away when you hear them. (Interscope executive, Kerrang, 03/07/02)
Over a decade later, we're still to be blown away. Even so, you'll notice the 41 songs to be consistent with the above quotes.
And here's Axl from '99, telling Kurt Loder they have around 70 songs in the works with Sean Beavan.
Again, those extra 30 were probably quite loose in comparison, even if they could be distinguished as individual pieces of music. Another 20 tinkerings in six years? Maybe, but the bottom line is that there's a shitload of "some of the best songs" in the vaults, which no-one seems interested in releasing.
#909 Re: Guns N' Roses » South American Tour info comes tomorrow. » 644 weeks ago
Here's another interview I've never actually heard before, from an Argentinian radio station, following the RIR3 performance in 2001. There's a transcript available at HTGTH, even if the wording differs somewhat.
On RIR3: Sound and music -wise, everything went wrong for the band. 
#910 Re: Guns N' Roses » "The Full Story Behind Our ‘Chinese Democracy’ Leak" (Antiquiet.com) » 644 weeks ago
I recalled that 2002 tour interview to illuminate a few points.
We don't know how productive those Bucket & Brain writing sessions were and how many songs it actually produced after Sean left.
There are a lot of new songs, that were just done in the last year, that we feel that, ‘okay, well, that bumps a lot of stuff off the previous list', but it's time to stop that now and wrap up the baby.
40 pieces of music and then some, when you count the Beavan and B&B sessions. I doubt they wrote another 20+ new songs, tho.
Random events and contracts resulted in the release of CD. UYI was a forced release as well
No future release will happen unless events dictate it. Will disquiet among the band members be enough, I do not know, but I heavily doubt it
Indeed. From that same interview;
I gave into a lot of pressure on Illusions both internally in Guns and externally in the press, those albums suffered as a consequence, it's not something I'm too excited to have to live with again.
There were fully-fledged instrumental tracks readied by Slash & co, which were completed months and months before the album release. It was a well-known fact that Axl was personally holding up the album with his tardiness on the vocal tracks and his painstaking attention to detail with the orchestration. Back then, Axl still had peers in the band, but even they couldn't do much to force his hand. If they were unsuccessful, what chance would the new guys have? They're not even sharing organizational responsibility, they're contracted employees.
No big surprise CD was the same. There's the excuse of a booklet and reports on how the mastering was done as late as in October. Nothing was ready with Axl's camp, they said. It was almost as if he and his people were caught off-guard by the immediacy of the release.
Unless anyone knows otherwise, there is no noise just now showing Axl is doing anything himself towards a new album. Band members, yes. Axl, no.
It will be another year of touring, that is where the money is
It's really sad to see Axl apparently having given up on the two album concept. In the Buckethead era, he used to point out every now and then that the plan would be to release the first album, hit the road and after a year or so, release the second one. I maintain the unceremonious release (and mixed reception) of CD cut him deep. The man spent a ridiculous amount of time on the album for a plethora of reasons, it gets out and is quickly forgotten. Had it come out some years earlier, there would've at least been the public interest factor, which would've earned it more casual listeners and kept it in the public eye as something else than a not-coming vanity project.
