Last of the Giants

by Mick Wall

  Izzy exiled himself, also distanced by the scale of the recording. ‘I did the basic tracks, then he [Slash] did his tracks, like a month or two by himself. Then came Axl’s vocal parts. I went back to Indiana …’ Axl was fixating on ‘November Rain’ and ‘Don’t Cry’, big songs into which he’d poured some of his deepest feelings. ‘Axl had this vision he was going to create,’ said Matt Sorum. ‘We’d start at noon, the work ethic was cool. There was a lot of alcohol around, but the heroin thing had definitely subsided at that point – Slash had quit, Izzy had quit. We were dabbling in cocaine and partying rituals. It was candlelight in the studio. You’d look and there’s Sean Penn and Bruce Springsteen hanging out, and supermodels like Naomi Campbell and Elle McPherson. It was like a Fellini movie! But it was never really cool to do a lot of drugs in front of Axl. Even though he’d be on some pills, like, “Yeah, man, I just took a bunch of Halcion.” I did some coke with him once and he talked for about fucking ten hours! I never did coke with him again …’ But the sessions became more drawn out as Axl strived to match the music with the versions in his head: ‘It was later nights. We’d start at six or seven. Axl would want to do “November Rain” and “Don’t Cry”, his songs.’

  ‘Axl’s a perfectionist, that’s what makes him great. The end product’s great, but it gets maddening to work with that person,’ Duff McKagan said of those apparently endless studio nights. ‘There’s no hashing out with them. “November Rain”, in particular, the song was torturing him. He was happy he was finally finished with it. It wasn’t really characteristic of the band.’

  In fact, as Axl had suggested in our interview, ‘November Rain’, a long piano ballad with a tender lyric that would go on to be a Number 2 hit single, was set up to be the keynote track of the entire album. While it sounded like the kind of tune that a band with the commercial leeway to indulge their artistic whims would cut, Axl in fact had a fairly final version of it as far back as 1983. Tracii Guns remembered the song well: ‘When we were doing that EP for LA Guns, like ’83 … He was playing “November Rain” – and it was called “November Rain” – way back then. It was the only thing he knew how to play, but it was his. He’d go, “Someday this song is gonna be really cool.” And I’d go, “It’s cool now.” “But it’s not done” … And, like, anytime we’d be at a hotel or anywhere there’d be a piano, he’d just kinda play that music. And I’d go, “When are you gonna finish that already, you know?” And he’d go, “I don’t know what to do with it.”’ While according to Slash, there was a 20-minute version of the song that went back to their pre-Appetite days when Nazareth’s guitarist, Manny Charlton, produced a demo for them. ‘It was on acoustic guitar and piano,’ Slash recollected. ‘It was really epic.’

  It is tempting to look back at the Use Your Illusion material now through the prism of what came next and see Axl Rose taking control via the grandeur of his songs, living out all of the rock star fantasies he had as a boy in Indiana, ambition vividly drawn through every overblown moment. If Appetite was a record made by hungry street hustlers, Use Your Illusion was a dispatch from high in the Hollywood Hills, with all the decadence of the mansions that clung to the canyon edges, way out of reach of the kids on the Strip.

  Alan Niven had some insight into where Axl’s urge to reshape the band was coming from: ‘When he was younger, he played piano and composed on piano. I’d lay a bet that a record like Goodbye Yellow Brick Road [by Elton John] had a huge impact on him. He aspired to that level, and anybody who has a hero and aspires to match a hero also in their heart hopes to exceed their hero and validate their presence. So I think he always had that in his bloodstream. The big construction was something he always wanted to do, but I think it’s ill-advised to do an album that’s over-weighted with material like that unless you’re going to do it utterly seamlessly, as someone like David Gilmour does.’

  ‘November Rain’ and ‘Estranged’ came from that place: big, ambitious pieces with themes that hinted at Axl’s obsessive nature: ‘“November Rain” is a song about having to deal with unrequited love,’ he explained. ‘“Estranged” is acknowledging it and being there. And having to figure out what to fucking do, it’s like being catapulted out into the universe and having no choice about it and having to figure out what the fuck are you gonna do because the things you wanted and worked for just cannot happen.’

  The white-hot anger so apparent on Appetite and onstage was still there too, a rage which he didn’t seem to be able to contain artistically. Alongside ‘November Rain’ and ‘Estranged’ and ‘Don’t Cry’ came ‘Get in the Ring’ (which targeted by name this writer, plus the American music journalists Andy Secher and Bob Guccione Jr), ‘Right Next Door to Hell’ (inspired by Axl’s neighbour Gabriella Kantor) and ‘Back Off Bitch’ (which went all the way back to his days with his former girlfriend Gina Siler), songs that sought to settle explicit scores from a public platform from which their subjects couldn’t possibly respond. It was an area in which he already had form.

  ‘I thought they were tiresome, small-minded and mean,’ says Alan Niven. ‘I’d already been through “One in a Million” with him. I’d backed him on that because I accepted his motivation was a sincere representation of his mind-set at the time he was arriving [in LA]. But with the meanness and the vitriol – if you’re going to apply it, apply it to something big. He’d make his attacks on his next-door neighbour or journalists, and I’m thinking, “Axl, this is the scope of your world?” There was a schizophrenia … And I had a band here of prodigious skill, spirit and intelligence. When Axl played “Civil War” for me, I was absolutely over the moon. The simple cleverness of saying, what’s so civil about war? Clarity of expression. Great song. Then he plays me “Right Next Door to Hell” …’

  Axl spoke about the motivation for writing so directly a year after the album’s release: ‘“Back Off Bitch” is a ten-year-old song. I’ve been doing a lot of work and found out I’ve had a lot of hatred for women. Basically, I’ve been rejected by my mother since I was a baby. She’s picked my stepfather over me ever since he was around and watched me get beaten by him. She stood back most of the time. Unless it got too bad, and then she’d come and hold you afterward. She wasn’t there for me. My grandmother had a problem with men. I’ve gone back and done the work and found out I overheard my grandma going off on men when I was four. And I’ve had problems with my own masculinity because of that. I was pissed off at my grandmother for her problem with men and how it made me feel about being a man. So I wrote about my feelings in the songs.’

  Other titles included Duff’s ‘Why Do You Look at Me When You Hate Me’ – about to be transmogrified at the last minute into the blistering ‘Get in the Ring’ – and ‘So Fine’, Duff’s ‘ode to Johnny Thunders’, which he sang lead on à la Sid Vicious; Axl’s beloved epic, ‘November Rain’; another Elton John-style, autobiographical Axl ballad called ‘Estranged’; the swaggering, Stonesy ‘Shotgun Blues’, allegedly about Vince Neil; and another ten-minute Axl-penned epic co-written with Slash about a real-life overdose, called ‘Coma’, replete with the sound of a defibrillator, hired in for the occasion, and some authentic ECG beeps; Izzy’s self-explanatory ‘You Ain’t the First’ and ‘Pretty Tied Up’, about a real-life dominatrix he knew ‘down on Melrose’, plus ‘Dust and Bones’ and ‘Double Talkin’ Jive’ (both featuring lead vocals from the guitarist); Slash and Izzy’s ‘Perfect Crime’ and a clutch of sneering Izzy and Axl rockers, ‘You Could be Mine’, originally from the Appetite sessions, its bitter little couplet ‘With your bitch-slap rapping and your cocaine tongue / you get nothing done’ appearing in the Appetite inner sleeve artwork (an indication of how close it came to making the cut) and ‘14 Years’ (again, featuring Izzy on vocals). Then there were the more full-on Slash and Axl tracks like ‘Don’t Damn Me’ (also featuring some lyrics by Axl’s old Lafayette pal David Lank), ‘Garden of Eden’ (Axl’s tirade against organised religions that made ‘a mockery of humanity’) and the Zeppelin-esque ‘
Locomotive’; plus a handful of ‘joke songs’ in the ‘One in a Million’ mould: ‘Be Obsession’ (‘I call my mother / She’s just a cunt now …’) and ‘The Garden’ – the latter co-written by Axl, West Arkeen and Del James and featuring the duet between Axl and Alice Cooper. ‘I did my bit maybe three times, but Axl was a perfectionist,’ Cooper relates, ‘almost to the point where you want to say, “At some point, Axl, it’s gotta be good enough.”’

  There were also two new versions of ‘Don’t Cry’, the maudlin Axl and Izzy ballad from the demo tape Tom Zutaut first heard – now featuring on backing vocals another Indiana escapee, named Shannon Hoon, younger brother of Axl’s old high-school friend Anna, and soon to become famous in his own right in Blind Melon. Axl remembered it as the first song he and Izzy wrote together, a song about a girlfriend of Izzy’s: ‘I was really attracted to her. They split and I was sitting outside the Roxy, and, you know, I was, like, really in love with this person, and she was realising this wasn’t going to work, she was telling me goodbye. We wrote it in about five minutes,’ he said. Plus an updating of a West Arkeen tune called ‘Yesterdays’ (with additional lyrics by Del James). Musically, the tracks certainly roamed widely across the borders of the rock and pop spectrum, from Axl’s intricate piano-led balladry to the jaunty banjo with which Slash introduces one track, to the remarkably adept sitar playing Izzy’s utilises in the intro to another, going even further forward with the self-consciously futuristic synthesisers and electronica Axl fiddles with on the track that would provide the esoteric finale to the collection, ‘My World’.

  Steven Adler only appeared on one track – ironically, the track he had such difficulty recording it led indirectly to his sacking: ‘Civil War’. It was an early version of ‘Civil War’ – the most ironic flag-waver since Hendrix’s wilfully misshapen ‘Star Spangled Banner’ 20 years before – to appear on the Nobody’s Angel compilation album, a fundraiser organised under the aegis of George Harrison, with all proceeds going to the Romanian Angel Appeal, a charity set up to aid those children left orphaned by the Romanian Uprising of December 1989. An earlier version of another track reheated for the Use Your Illusion set, their cover of Dylan’s ‘Knockin’ on Heaven’s Door’, had also been included on the soundtrack album to the 1990 movie Days of Thunder – or Top Gun on wheels as its producer, Jerry Bruckheimer, called it. The resultant video – itself an out-take of a performance filmed at The Ritz club in New York in 1988 – quickly shot to Number 1 on the MTV most-requested charts, despite Axl’s repeated swearing throughout the song being bleeped out.

  Of the nearly 40 different tracks that would be recorded – aside from the new originals and various covers there were also some older songs that had been re-recorded but didn’t make the cut, rubies lying in the dust like the anthemic ‘Ain’t Goin’ Down’ and the more throwaway ‘Just Another Sunday’ – 30 would make the finished track-listing. The problem was how to present them. Double album? Triple album? Or cut them right back to the bone and make one ton-up single album?

  As Axl told me: ‘When you’re writing off your life and not fantasy you have to, like, have gone through these different phases. And now I think there’s enough different sides of Guns N’ Roses that, like, no one will know what to think, let alone us. Like, what are they trying to say? I don’t fucking know!’

  Axl said the band was still writing even as recording was taking place. ‘It’s like, I wrote this thing …’ He closed his eyes and began to recite. ‘It goes, ah, “Call us violent / I say we’re a product of our environment / Call us hostile / Babe, we gotta survive / You call us heartless / Before we had the money nobody gave a damn / You call us deadly / All my life you been killing me …”’ He opened his eyes again. ‘So the mean stuff is there at the same time as the ballads are now. And then Izzy’s got his sense of humour in there, too. Like, “There were lots of other lovers / Honey, you weren’t the first”, then something, something, then, “But you were the worst / Yes, you were the worst” …’ He laughed. ‘I’m gonna try to get him to sing that one cos Izzy sings it the best. But, like, there’ll also be West playing on “The Garden”, because West plays that song the best. And Slash wants to do the solo. He’s like, “I’m gonna nail that motherfucker this time!” He’s been trying to nail the solo for “The Garden” for the last three years …’

  Axl’s thing, he said, was ‘to give a broader picture of Guns N’ Roses’. For him, all this new material, however it came out, would essentially form ‘like a trilogy – Appetite, GN’R Lies and this, okay? That those three albums were kind of like, Guns N’ Roses can do whatever the fuck they want. It might not sell, but, like, it will break our boundaries. The only boundary we’re keeping is hard rock. We know that’s a limitation, in a way. But we want to keep that because we don’t want it to die, you know? And we’re watching it die. At least we were before Guns N’ Roses formed. We were watching it just kind of being obliterated. By radio – by, like, all the stations not playing heavy metal any more, and all this crap. And so we decided, okay, we like a lot of guitars, we wanna keep it.’

  *

  With so many songs and different styles, Use Your Illusion was never going to be a completely coherent artistic statement. Bob Clearmountain, who had worked as engineer and producer with everyone from The Who to the Rolling Stones, was brought in to mix the songs and try to make the thing a whole. Alan Niven kept seeing Bob’s name credited ‘on all of these records that are blowing my ass off. I thought, he must be a genius. He’s wonderful!’ But Clearmountain’s efforts were made fraught by the ever-watchful presence of Axl. ‘Poor fucking Bob. Axl moved into the Record Plant. He ate, slept and shat there. He was there all the time, breathing down Bob’s neck. And finally we’re informed that they’re done. God knows how they ever got through all that stuff with Axl with his myopia.’

  Tom Zutaut and Alan Niven received their copies of the mixes at the same time. When Niven listened to the DATs in his music room. ‘My heart just went into my boots.’ He called Zoots and asked him to come to his house, where the two men sat in Niven’s music room and started to play the mixes again. ‘Then we just turned them off,’ says Niven. ‘They had no vitality. No punch. They were overworked. There was no spontaneity. There was nothing vital in them whatsoever.’ At which point, says Niven, ‘Tom and I started to foment a wicked idea. We looked at each other and said, he’s such a fucker to us all, let’s put this record out as it is. And let everybody know that he oversaw the mixes. The idea was so giddy to us we sat there and started laughing until we cried at the prospect of doing it. We were looking each other in the eye going, “Let’s let the fucker swing …” We were so tired of him at that point.’

  Once they’d stopped laughing, they decided they had to take drastic action. In an effort to try to save the day, they turned to the British production wizard Bill Price, whose brilliant work in the past with tendentious English rock acts like the Sex Pistols, Roxy Music and The Pretenders would, they gambled, make him the best man to try to bring the best out of the sprawl of new GN’R material. Bill, says Niven, was great at ‘bright and sparkly. And, thank god, Bill did a huge job and saved what was saveable on there.’ Price delivered a ‘loud, in-your-face, heavily compressed’ mix of ‘Right Next Door to Hell’ to show how he felt the band should sound. ‘It was a very long process,’ Price recalled. ‘The last half a dozen songs were recorded, overdubbed, vocal-ed and guitar-ed, what have you-ed, in random recording studios dotted about America when they had a day off between gigs because the tour had already started. My mixing mode then switched into flying around America with pocketfuls of DATs, playing it to the band backstage.’ Price somehow got the job done, and the Clear-mountain mixes were, Alan Niven said, destroyed out of respect for the producer.

  The amount of songs that the band wanted to release, however, presented a commercial problem for Niven and Geffen Records. With 30 tracks and a combined running time of over two and a half hours, a vinyl version would, in effect, be ak
in to a quadruple album. Even with CD technology allowing for a much-expanded running time per disc, it would take two CDs to launch all 30 songs as one album. At first, though, that’s what they decided to do: 30 tracks spread over two CDs presented as one coherent album. Certainly, such grandiosity sat well with Axl’s idea of the band’s monumental destiny – instantly propelling Use Your Illusion into the exalted realms of a modern-day Tommy or The Wall.

  Tom Zutaut suggested they release a double album, followed a year later – halfway through what already promised to be a two-year world tour – by a more conventional single album, with the added prospect of at least one EP – or mini-album, à la GN’R Lies – of the various cover versions Axl was also now insisting the band record – including ‘Down on the Farm’, ‘New Rose’ by The Damned (with lead vocals from Duff), ‘Don’t Care about You’ by Fear, ‘Attitude’ by the Misfits, ‘Jumpin’ Jack Flash’ by the Stones, ‘Black Leather’ by the Sex Pistols (featuring the Pistols’ guitarist, Steve Jones) and, most surprisingly of all perhaps, a heavyweight version of ‘Live and Let Die’, Paul McCartney’s hit theme tune to the 1974 James Bond movie of the same name. Slash told me there was even talk of a series of EPs – one punk-themed, one funk, one rap, one rock – and the probability of a live album at the end of the tour too.

  But in what would prove to be his last significant commercial decision for Guns N’ Roses, Alan Niven had a better idea. ‘As the material was growing, I was getting more and more apprehensive about it being a double CD, and I was getting more apprehensive about it selling as a double CD, which made it much more expensive for the individual. The last thing I wanted to develop was the reaction from the fans that now they’ve become excessive and there are these long meandering songs, and it’s a thick double record that’s hard to get into. I persuaded Axl that from a fan’s economic point of view to be able to go and buy one album one week and one album the next was less onerous.