A new Guns N' Roses song has leaked

Discussion in 'Music Corner' started by jujuhounds, Nov 12, 2017.

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  1. PacificOceanBlue

    PacificOceanBlue Senior Member

    Location:
    The Southwest
    Can't agree there. The Illusions are filled with great material (not just Izzy's penned songs) and Chinese Democracy contains many first-rate songs as far as I am concerned.
     
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  2. Vinyl Socks

    Vinyl Socks The Buzz Driver

    Location:
    DuBois, PA
    It's all good. We're allowed to disagree.
    I remember being extremely let down in 1991 when they were released, having loved Appetite For Destruction so much.
     
  3. PacificOceanBlue

    PacificOceanBlue Senior Member

    Location:
    The Southwest
    You are not the only one. There are a number of GNR enthusiasts who believe nothing comes close to the debut.
     
  4. stodgers

    stodgers Forum Resident

    Location:
    Montana
    In general, or with GnR? Because his playing on the new Sons of Apollo album is breathtaking.

    There were two elements to what made GnR awesome - the kick-ass songs, and the sloppy, loose, downright-dirty feel with which they were played. Once Adler left, the latter was gone. Once Izzy left, the former was gone. It isn't hard to put the UYI songs up against each other and see that the ones Izzy had a hand in writing were the best, and he wrote damn near half of that material. Sure, Axl had a couple good ones, but Izzy carried the load. His first solo album was awesome too, so it isn't a stretch to say he still had something to give.
     
  5. timgs

    timgs New Member

    Location:
    San Diego
    is there a link someone can PM me?
     
  6. The Hermit

    The Hermit Wavin' that magick glowstick since 1976

    Just stumbled onto this thread...

    The record company never had a finished album to reject or otherwise until late 2007 when Axl finally signed off on the version that was released a year later... and even then, only because of the Best Buy deal, and even that release strategy was royally screwed up because of Axl refusing to do almost any publicity and Best Buy completely mishandling the displays of the album in it's stores upon release.

    But most importantly, the relative commercial flop of CD - if you count approximately 3 million copies sold worldwide to date a flop - was because people had simply been burned too many times, too many statements from Axl and assorted bandmembers of an imminent completion and release soon after, too many missed deadlines and release dates that never materialized, and too many song leaks that greatly diminished the anticipation for when it finally hit shelves (and likely influencing the final tracklisting)... you can only keep people waiting on tenterhooks for so long before they eventually just tire of an upcoming release, leading to inevitable general apathy and indifference... and that's largely what happened with CD... had it been another The Wall or Physical Graffiti in terms of quality, then maybe it would have done boffo business on the back of stellar reviews, but it was neither of those works, it was a solid-sometimes-astonishing rock album overall... and that simply wasn't going to justify the protracted hype and hullabaloo that preceded it's release... short of another Appetite, nothing would have...

    As others have mentioned here and elsewhere, it absolutely should have been released by 2003 at the very latest, probably as a single double-album of about 16-18 tracks in total (which even the eventual 2008 released version should have been), getting the very best material from those sessions into that one album as much as they could instead of presuming and assuming they'd get another album or two to release thereafter (which has never materialized, alas)... and they very nearly had a finished album by late 2001... until Axl fired Tom Zutaut, then producer Roy Thomas Baker quit a few months later, followed by an exasperated Buckethead in early 2004, and finally Geffen stopping any further funding of the album in February '04 thanks to Axl's increasingly obsessive-compulsive failure to deliver the finished album (in fact, Axl allegedly had most of the tracks re-recorded for a third time in mid-2003, likely the last straw for both the record company and Buckethead!), leaving the singer to tour and raise the money himself for it's completion, which put it back several more years.

    Had Chinese Democracy been recorded to analog tape (then digitized for editing purposes), been released as a single double-opus (whether it be in '03 or '08), and had a more balanced final tracklisting that was less ballad-heavy, it could have been a masterpiece... but I still like it a great deal and hope that the unreleased material like 'The General', 'Atlas Shrugged', 'Soul Monster', etc, gets a release some day... maybe a future Chinese Democracy deluxe edition or something with those unreleased tracks on a bonus disc... I'd go with that in a heartbeat, it's probably the only way we'll ever hear them...
     
    Last edited: Jul 13, 2018
  7. PacificOceanBlue

    PacificOceanBlue Senior Member

    Location:
    The Southwest
    Fantastic post.
     
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  8. walrus

    walrus Staring into nothing

    Location:
    Nashville
    I was kind of surprised so many leaked songs made the final cut. There couldn't have been more than 4 or 5 unheard songs on it. I think anyone still interested in nu-Guns material by 2008 probably had already heard at least half of them, but I think this even affected casual fans, since the diehards and music press, the people who inadvertently because solely responsible for promoting the record, couldn't get that excited about finally having a record that they'd had 60-70% of already for years by that point.

    Would the album have been massive if it had been 12-14 totally unheard new songs in 2008? Probably not, but I wonder if it would've been at least moderately more successful that way.

    FWIW, I'd be way more interested in a Chinese Democracy superdeluxecashinwhatever box than the Appetite set. Just hearing how the album came to be and all the unused tracks would fascinating for those of us that did really like it, although given the number of people involved, it'd probably be a legal nightmare to actually clear for release. Hopefully the bootleggers will do their job one day.
     
  9. Ristifer

    Ristifer Forum Resident

    This. A Chinese Democracy boxset would be an absolute goldmine. I never buy deluxe editions of anything, but Chinese Democracy would be an instant purchase. I mean, I'm greedy, and I would want every single piece of info, every song, every last drop from that era to be available on the set. And I don't think that would ever happen. But if it ever did, I'd be first in line. Appetite might be the album for GNR, but CD's mystique is unparalleled for me.
     
  10. walrus

    walrus Staring into nothing

    Location:
    Nashville
    Chuck Klosterman once talked about this: "If you like a band, you appreciate all the things they do well. But if you LOVE a band, the parts of their career that truly fascinate you are the aspects that go wrong. Artists are best understood through their reaction to failure. So if you love BLACK SABBATH, the record you want to think about is Technical Ecstasy. If you love OASIS, you want to think about Be Here Now. And if you love KISS, the record that’s most compelling is The Elder. It’s not even close."

    I think the same applies to Chinese Democracy, tenfold. (And I love The Elder and Be Here Now, so I was clearly the target audience for Axl's indulgences)
     
  11. PacificOceanBlue

    PacificOceanBlue Senior Member

    Location:
    The Southwest
    That is a possibility, but the finished album finally was released, and 60% of the songs that some hardcore fans were familiar with were now now available in a final mix and in superior sound compared to the leaked versions. I doubt many hardcore fans bypassed making a purchase simply because they were familiar with leaked versions. I think the album simply was released 5-to-6 years too late in an unfriendly retail climate. Not that it would have been a smash hit in 2001, but I suspect "Chinese Democracy" would have make a far greater commercial impact in 2001 than in 2008 as part of a different retail climate, and with actual promotion beyond a Best Buy "exclusive" distribution.

    I will be surprised if Axl does not one day release a "Chinese Democracy" box set. He spent a decade of his creative life working on the project and he will probably want present a more expansive version at some point. There is too much fascinating music in the archives not to see it released in some form in the future.
     
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  12. walrus

    walrus Staring into nothing

    Location:
    Nashville
    No, but the leaked versions weren't really all that different than the released versions. I mean, other than a couple of guitar parts and minor arrangement differences, the versions of "Madagascar" and "Street Of Dreams/The Blues" and whatever else he was playing back in 2002 didn't change much. I don't think it affected sales as much as tempered excitement in a general sense, and that's certainly a factor in the album not reaching as many ears as it possibly could have. I mean, I'd had those songs in live soundboard or studio quality for 5-6 years by 2008, and had played them for a bunch of people because I thought they were good songs and I was fascinated by what Axl was up to. By the time the record finally came out, and it was mostly those same songs, there wasn't much to tell anyone about. I still think music can be made or broken on word of mouth and levels of fan excitement, to some extent.
     
  13. The Hermit

    The Hermit Wavin' that magick glowstick since 1976

    Correct; by the time of it's eventual release, only 3 of the 14 tracks included hadn't been leaked in advance in some form... I can't remember any other major release that had drip-feed leaks so long in advance and to such an extent that CD did... but that was partly Axl's doing, albeit indirectly and unintentionally; he wouldn't turn up at the studio for days or sometimes even weeks at a time, meanwhile the engineers are all sitting in the studio getting paid tens of thousands of dollars a week but bored out of their minds... leaking like a sieve was an inevitability under those conditions!!!

    Everyone involved except Axl were salaried employees, they got paid for recording and/or touring, but they had no involvement in the inner legal workings of GN'R Inc. Those who contributed to the songwriting probably receive a cut of the publishing royalties, but I doubt it's anything more than that... so releasing the unreleased material wouldn't be too difficult if judged solely by that barometer.

    With regards to the delay in releasing the follow-up album... I suspect that album is done, in the can, ready to go, and has been for a few years now (if not more), but after the painfully protracted, not to mention exorbitantly expensive, process of Geffen trying to get just one finished album out of Axl, coupled with both the underwhelming sales of the released album and likely even lesser sales for any follow-up, in addition to the probable difficulty in finding a new buyer for the album vis-a-vis another 'retail exclusive' deal (Best Buy were all but giving them away for free by the end just to clear the voluminous overstock out of their stores and warehouses)... all combined means from Geffen's perspective, it simply isn't worth it, there's nothing in it for them commercially to put themselves through that again, no advantage to be had, and no real tangible benefits that can be seen... Axl wore out whatever cache and goodwill credit he had with that label long before CD was released.

    Now, if Axl was truly desperate enough to get that material onto shelves, he could theoretically convince Geffen (if he legally needs to, I'm not sure what the situation there is) to license it to a smaller label, and the album could be out within two months... but I think a deluxe edition of CD will be the likeliest outlet for that unreleased material sometime in the future.

    I agree... the finished version was just more overproduced with the then-current bandmembers having added their parts in addition to remaining parts from Buckethead, etc... I believe it was either Tommy Stinson or someone else who once said they had recorded their own individual parts for that album something like 5-6 times overall by the time it was all said and done... that's not perfectionism on Axl's part, it's obsessive-compulsive insanity on a grand scale... every time a new member joined the band, that new member had to re-record everything all over again, all of the tracks being worked on... utter insanity; no wonder it took ten years to release a finished album, and that was only some of the overall material recorded!!!

    I truly believe that the album would have been better and more commercially successful had it been released in 2003 at latest (as a double-album of at least 16 tracks)... Axl was more focused and decisive when Tom Zutaut was overseeing that project, they had a first-rate, world-class producer in Roy Thomas Baker, Buckethead was still a member, and public anticipation for the album was still at it's peak alas...
     
  14. walrus

    walrus Staring into nothing

    Location:
    Nashville
    Not to get all morbid, but Axl will have to leave this earth for any CD-era material to come out. It's all sitting there, but you know he'll never sign off on it until he's re-recorded it 4 or 5 more times.

    The leaks were inevitable. You can't involve that many people and take that long, and not have stuff come out. It sucks that I think it killed a lot of the excitement for the end product, but that's 100% on Axl. The hypothetical record that would've come out in 2000-2002 sometime wouldn't have been much different sounding than the one in 2008.
     
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  15. The Hermit

    The Hermit Wavin' that magick glowstick since 1976

    I think if it had been entirely up to Axl, the follow-up album would have been released by now, probably around late 2015 at most is what I heard on the grapevine, after their Vegas residency ended in June 2014 but before the reunion (which had been in the works for a long time before it was announced) kicked in the spring of 2016; all recording had long been concluded, and I believe Axl sincerely wanted to clear the decks and finish what he started before moving onto the new - and considerably more lucrative - era of the band... his interviews around 2014 seemed to indicate that album was more or less done... then again, he said exactly the same thing about CD from the summer of 2002 onward, but it took another six years until he finally finished the damn thing and it hit shelves, so who the hell knows anymore?

    As I've said before, the likely reason for the follow-up album's non-appearance to date is that Geffen simply weren't interested anymore... in the eyes of the suits, that ship had sailed and the ticket was worthless, alas... and after ten years since CD's release, the death of the traditional physical product retail landscape, plus an extraordinarily lucrative (if creatively bankrupt) recent reunion tour with Slash and Duff, any and all momentum for such a release has long since dissipated, and it's unlikely to ever see the light of day in the relatively near future short of some kind of future multi-disc CD deluxe edition...
     
    Last edited: Jul 16, 2018
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  16. walrus

    walrus Staring into nothing

    Location:
    Nashville
    I'm sure there would've been interest by some label to release it, just not Geffen. The industry still doesn't really make any sense to me. I mean, the moment for massive success has passed, but he's still got a sizable audience of people who'd want to hear it, so there's some money to be made there (especially if the stuff is already in the can and just sitting in a vault somewhere). I mean, if there wasn't any interest, we wouldn't be talking about it today.

    A more likely scenario (IMO) is that, like with CD, Axl just couldn't let go and sign off on anything to be released early enough before the reunion stuff started coming together. I can see why they wouldn't want that stuff coming out in the middle of a reunion jaunt, since audiences are easily confused.
     
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  17. The Hermit

    The Hermit Wavin' that magick glowstick since 1976

    Another possible reason is that once Axl started seriously discussing the reunion tour with Slash and Duff sometime after the Vegas stint, his psychological perspective on what was GN'R may have shifted again from the 'nu-GN'R' he personally led between 1997 and 2014, and the emerging reunion line-up that was being negotiated behind the scenes at the time... it sounds overly analytical on my part, but there is absolutely previous form for this on Axl's part.

    It wasn't the mixing that caused CD to take so damn long to get released, it was the endless, endless recording; once that was done for the tracks selected for inclusion, the album was mixed within a year by all accounts (last recording on CD was Axl's vocals for 'Sorry' in February 2007, with Sebastian Bach contributing some backing vocals to that track the same time, the album was mixed by Christmas that year).

    Again, who the hell knows anymore... but it's just a pity that there's a lot of great material still on the table that is/was absolutely intended for release, but may never be now...
     
    Last edited: Jul 16, 2018
  18. walrus

    walrus Staring into nothing

    Location:
    Nashville
    The closest parallel I can think of was when Kiss shelved Carnival Of Souls until after the reunion tour finished, so as not to confuse audiences. Granted, I'm not sure it would've been released at all if it hadn't gotten out to bootleggers.

    It'll be interested to see what Axl does after this tour ends. I mean, this tour has legitimately hit almost every single worldwide market imaginable, sometimes more than once. Now that the "Not In This Lifetime" tour has, in fact, actually happened in this lifetime, would they be able to launch the same tour again in, say, 2020, and still sell out venues? I enjoyed the show last winter, but it had a sense of finality to it, they played for 3 1/2 hours playing basically every song you'd ever want to see them do, in a way that I left going "that was great, and I think i'm set for life with Gn'R now." I mean, it'd be cool to see Adler and Izzy, but outside of some diehards, that wouldn't be enough to get people to drop $200 again, IMO.

    Slash already has a solo album announced, so I wonder if this is it, at least for a few years...maybe we'll see Axl's second solo album one day after all?
     
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  19. Orthogonian Blues

    Orthogonian Blues A man with a fork in a world full of soup.

    Location:
    London, UK

    Supposedly, one round of re-recording was instigated by Roy Thomas Baker, when he took the producers chair in 2000. Drummer 'Brain' has already said that RTB made him rerecord Josh Freese's drum parts - note for note, but with a different feel, and with different sounds.

    Tommy Stinson also once complained, that RTB wanted to try re-recording every single guitar part with 'every different amp in a five state area'.

    Well, that's how RTB works. He made his name by bringing Bohemian Rhapsody to life. It's a shame he has never spoken about his time working with GnR. If you want some idea about his working methods - read this interview about his work in the mid 2000s, on the Darkness's 'One Way Ticket To Hell' album (the most elaborate, expensive novelty record of all time):

    Producing The Darkness's One Way Ticket To Hell... And Back |

    It's a good read - and some of the sound experiments are jaw dropping.

    Still, for all the time he spent blending thousands of different guitar parts, and recording vocals with a mic in a champagne bucket - he got the Darkness project done in a respectable time. And that was a seriously dysfunctional band at the time.

    I bet Axl did nothing to discourage RTB's re-re-re-re-recording odyssey. And surely he would have said 'enough' if RTB got sounds he was happy with. So, yes I still think the delays are on Axl's head.
     
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  20. walrus

    walrus Staring into nothing

    Location:
    Nashville
    RTB has produced a ton of records I really like, almost all of which got done in a reasonable amount of time. Whatever happened/happens with Gn'R is still on Axl, at the end of the day.
     
  21. Orthogonian Blues

    Orthogonian Blues A man with a fork in a world full of soup.

    Location:
    London, UK
    Yeah. I would give my last money for a Chinese Democracy deluxe edition with all of the unreleased songs.

    Man, I spent eight and a half years waiting for that album. And I've spent quite a bit of the last ten years listening to it.

    I have spent more time thinking about Chinese Democracy then I have spent thinking about China or the concept of democracy as applied to that country. And it's my job to think about China and democracy (I'm serious!)

    As others have said here, Universal/Geffen/Interscope/superevilmegamergedrecordcompany right release an expanded version when they think it most commercially advantageous.

    I maintain that, business wise - releasing the unreleased tracks has to be better then not releasing them - they are already done and paid for, and if they are commercially released, the master recordings can actually make some money, which won't happen if they are left to rot on a hard drive somewhere.

    But it's all about timing. The right time might be after 'Not In This Lifetime' has been put to bed. It may be on the 25th anniversary. Or it may be the 50th anniversary. When albums will be streamed directly into our frontal cortexes. Perhaps as bonus material they could include a holographic recreation of all of the recording sessions.

    You can follow Axl, as he disappears for hours to get his cornrows re-done. And you can climb inside Buckethead's custom built studio chicken coop, and sit with the great man as he watches extreme porn to psyche himself up for his guitar solos. (Allegedly, he really did this during the recording).

    Well, whatever. I hope we hear more Chinese Democracy in my lifetime.
     
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  22. aroney

    aroney Who really gives a...?

    As far as most people are concerned it IS G 'n' R as long as Axl and Slash are in the band. Anyone else is just gravy...:p
     
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