Guns N Roses... LIVE

What a fucking joke. Let it go Axl.

Download Festival 11th June

anyone who think this is guns n roses is seriously disillusioned. But all i can say is, thank fuck i'm at IOW festival.

In that case, why doesn't Mark E. Smith let go? He's the only original member of The Fall.

But brilliant news. Now my trip to Download will be even better.

I actually saw GnR a few years back.. was amazed by Buckethead.. I'm not and never was a GnR fan but the show was pretty good..

Christ.

I was just going to say has Download turned into the Monsters of Rock Festival.

Then I realised it is.

oops

It was probably a bad night. I have a few bootlegs of the 2002 tour and he hits the notes perfectly.

Al Jarvis wrote:

Christopher Owens wrote: In that case, why doesn't Mark E. Smith let go? He's the only original member of The Fall.

No quite true. The Fall IS and always has been just Mark E Smith.

That's like saying Madonna is the only original member of, um, Madonna.

Not quite true. If it wasn't for Axl's business sense, picking out the riffs, arranging the numbers, writing the lyrics AND writing November Rain in it's entirity, Guns would still be playing bars in L.A.

So writing a poncy ballad had more to do with GNR making it big than anything from Appetite for Destruction? And what about Slash, actually writing those riffs. Wake Up Chris.

Uncle Liam wrote: So writing a poncy ballad had more to do with GNR making it big than anything from Appetite for Destruction? And what about Slash, actually writing those riffs. Wake Up Chris.

November Rain was meant to be on Appetite For Destruction. It was taken off at the last minute, due to production.

What about Patience, a song he forced them to do, and was rewarded by getting to Number 4 in the Billboard charts?

And where did I say Axl WROTE the riffs, I said he ARRANGED them i.e. Play that there, you come in with that drum roll etc.

Wake up Liam.

Al Jarvis wrote:

Eh?! We were talking about the Fall, surely?! Which is pretty much a hegemony.

I don't know the first fcuking thing about G'n'R so can't comment on them.

I only have a brief knowledge of the history of The Fall, so there are gaps, but here's what Liam said:

anyone who think this is guns n roses is seriously disillusioned.

Because Axl is the only original member. How come he gets stick for carrying on, when Mark E. Smith doesn't? If I'm correct, Smith is basically the Fall's manager, same way Axl is basically GNR's manager. They basically do the same things, one gets grief for carrying on under an established band name, while the other doesn't.

Christopher Owens wrote:

Uncle Liam wrote: So writing a poncy ballad had more to do with GNR making it big than anything from Appetite for Destruction? And what about Slash, actually writing those riffs. Wake Up Chris.

November Rain was meant to be on Appetite For Destruction.

And where did I say Axl WROTE the riffs, I said he ARRANGED them i.e. Play that there, you come in with that drum roll etc.

Wake up Liam.

But what you infer is that Axl rose is solely responsible for GNR success, which is nothing but plain bullshit. You give no credit to any of the other bandmates for the success, which is amazing considering the success of Velvet Revolver.

Uncle Liam wrote:

But what you infer is that Axl rose is solely responsible for GNR success, which is nothing but plain bullshit. You give no credit to any of the other bandmates for the success, which is amazing considering the success of Velvet Revolver.

Wrong. I DON'T infer that Axl is solely responsible, but he DID carry them single handedly in a business sense. If he had left it to others, they'd have been screwed left, right and centre. It was Axl who wanted to play stadiums, NOT Slash, Duff, Izzy and Matt.

On what grounds do you base that? "If he had left it to the others, they'd have been screwed left right and centre." Heres a far out theory for you, if he'd left it to the others, or even hired a manager, maybe the majority of the band wouldnt be playing as Velvet Revolver and Axl Rose wouldnt be doing comedy spots on GTA San Andreas.

Uncle Liam wrote: On what grounds do you base that? "If he had left it to the others, they'd have been screwed left right and centre." Heres a far out theory for you, if he'd left it to the others, or even hired a manager, maybe the majority of the band wouldnt be playing as Velvet Revolver and Axl Rose wouldnt be doing comedy spots on GTA San Andreas.

Q Magazine 2003

Duff McKagan came from Seattle looking for a new start: both his girlfriend and his roommate back home ere addicted to heroin. “Of course,” he notes drily, “I ended up in a band with three heroin addicts in it.”

The following month Guns N’ Roses toured with Motley Crue, whose own excesses had already grown to mythic proportions. Amazingly, there were fine until they got home. After shooting up in Slash’s motel room, Motley Crue bassist Nikki Sixx left in search of Steven Adler. Minutes later he was found prone in the corridor, turning blue. He was revived and rushed to hospital.

Mojo 2005

LOS ANGELES March, 1989 Driving down the 101 Freeway with "a head full of coke and a gun in the glove compartment", Izzy Stradlin was startled to see it snowing outside. "I thought, gee, I never knew it snowed in LA." The fact that the 27-year-old Guns N' Roses guitarist had been up "for five days straight" had nothing to do with it, of course.

Besides, Izzy's scatter-gun mind was on other, more important things than the weather. With the success of the band's debut album, Appetite For Destruction, released two years before, still escalating beyond anybody's wildest dreams, Izzy's main obsession - apart from getting loaded - now centred on the not unreasonable question of "where all the fuckin' money had gone, man."

With combined US sales alone for Appetite and its 1988 minialbum follow-up, GN'R Lies, then tipping 10 million - making them the first band for 15 years to have two albums in the American Top 5 - it didn't take a genius to work out that Guns were now generating squillions of dollars worldwide. Paradise City, the fourth single from Appetite, had just become their first Top 10 hit in Britain, where combined album/mini-album sales were also now into seven figures. Yet none of the band were millionaires and Izzy damn well wanted to know why. "I'm out of my fuckin' gourd, right? I'm at the fax machine and I've got, like, a hundred faxes strung across this room. I've got a loaded pistol on the desk, 'cos I keep hearing people walking on my roof, and I'm snorting coke, reading through this stuff, just trying to grasp what had happened to us. All I knew was we left [to go on tour] broke and we came back [18 months later] and suddenly there's loads of money but we can't get to it. I'm yelling on the phone going, I know it's there somewhere! Where the fuck is it?"

Actually, the money had already started to filter through but Izzy was so thoroughly out of it that when he did pick up his first six figure royalty cheque (for a cool $900,000), he walked around with it crumpled in his jacket pocket for weeks.

The rest of the gang weren't faring much better. Fellow guitarist Slash had gone back to his bad old ways almost as soon as they'd returned from the final shows of the Appetite world tour in Australia in December. When, after a two-month break, rehearsals reconvened in LA, he had been discovered injecting himself in the stomach with heroin - skin-popping- and was confronted by singer Axl Rose. On the surface, a very bad scene. In reality, just the latest in a series of ultimatums the 24-year-old (real name: Saul Hudson) had been issued with over the years - from being told in the early days to choose between smack and the band, to manager Alan Niven's astonishing decision once to have him kidnapped and put on a plane to Hawaii for a couple of weeks' enforced, drug-free r&r.

"Word had gotten out that I was doing junk [again]," Slash says today, "and at the time, I guess I was." The next thing he knew, "they were putting me in a car, I was off to the airport and I'm in Hawaii! It gave [tour manager] Doug Goldstein a great excuse to play golf. But I caused a lot of trouble in Hawaii. I've ruined many a fuckin' golf game for Doug..."

While Slash resented these "intrusions into my personal shit", he grudgingly agreed to clean up. Over the next few months, however, holed-up in his newly bought house in the Hollywood hills, playing with his snakes and "sinking deeper into my hole", his habit would grow steadily worse.

Smack wasn't bassist Michael 'Duff' McKagan's game. Despite his over-eagerness to buy into the Sid Vicious myth (hence the padlock neck-chain and lopsided sneer in pictures), Duff couldn't help but be affable. Nevertheless, even his puppy-dog enthusiasm would become subsumed as his year-old marriage began to break down. Duff may have been smart enough to avoid smack, but over the next five years the combined effects of cocaine, weed and, most hazardously, alcohol would take its own heavy toll. At one point he was said to be putting away 20 bottles of wine a day. ("Somebody must have been counting, 'cos I certainly wasn't!" he says now, only half-joking.) This increasingly desperate situation only came to an end when his booze sodden pancreas burst one terrifying morning, a few weeks after his 30th birthday in 1994.

"I couldn't reach the phone and it was right by my bed." A visiting friend found him. "He picked me up and drove me to hospital. I got, like, third degree burns all through my intestines and all the way down the muscles in my thighs. They put me on morphine and Librium for coming down from the DTs."

Are you telling me these people are sensible business people?

Another reason for the split, which Slash, Duff and Matt freely admit, is that Axl wanted to start incorporating other styles of music into the GNR sound, while the others wished to stick to the hard rock formula of GNR.

Al Jarvis wrote:

Christopher Owens wrote: Because Axl is the only original member. How come he gets stick for carrying on, when Mark E. Smith doesn't? If I'm correct, Smith is basically the Fall's manager, same way Axl is basically GNR's manager. They basically do the same things, one gets grief for carrying on under an established band name, while the other doesn't.

This might be true if the Fall existed from, say, 1976-1990, and then all the original members left an already established name and Mark E Smith ploughed a lone furrow from then on.

But that isn't the case.

The Fall IS, and basically always has been, Mark E Smith plus a bunch of other blokes, and maybe a couple of birds, or a wife. I don't think there's ever really been a point in The Fall's career when people identified with anyone in the band other than Mark E Smith. Perhaps maybe when Brix was briefly a member, but that's just a small slice of their history.

Fair enough, but members leaving has happened to GNR before Slash and Duff quit (oddly enough, they had no problems with them quitting):

Steven Adler 1986 - 1990 Izzy Stradlin 1986 - 1991 Gilby Clarke 1991 - 1995

All of these were fan favourites, but it wasn't until Slash quit in 1996 that people started accusing Axl of cashing in on the GNR name.

Al Jarvis wrote:

Christopher Owens wrote: Fair enough, but members leaving has happened to GNR before Slash and Duff quit (oddly enough, they had no problems with them quitting):

All of these were fan favourites, but it wasn't until Slash quit in 1996 that people started accusing Axl of cashing in on the GNR name.

Can't comment on GNR but the Fall comparison does seem rather flimsy. You're quoting three established names? Mark E Smith's probably hired and fired that many this week alone.

Don't unemployed Mancunian musos have to do like 3 weeks or 15 gigs (whichever is less) national service with The Fall or something.

GnR are metal.....I grew out of metal....they leave me cold.

PS GnR axelgreasehair never sacked the hole band in the Empire in Belfast either!

I'm not sure what that says about which band...but there you have nonetheless ;)

Geez, this idea of re-living the good ole days is getting old, Axl.

Go and play with your Ferraris.

i can't believe people are arguing about the merits of guns n roses. they were 'the' band when i was in high school (when appetite for destruction was released) and i have fond memories of doing the 'axl dance' and watching people imitate their songs during air guitar contests, but i question whether or not the band is worthy of such scrutiny regarding their business management skills. if i remember correctly, they were all pretty f*cked up back then and none of them was exactly bill gates.

you cant believe that I am arguing?

GnR = a bunch of lightweights who couldn't take their drugs.

Bell-end ruined Knocking on Heaven's Door as well, a lovely song which nobody can hear any more without thinking of Rose's shit vocal c/w moronic 'Aye Aye'ing. That one-eyed prick who sampled the Dylan version didn't help, but the junkies started it and they are not welcome in my house as a result.

Rose is a girls name anyway.

Uncle Liam wrote: you cant believe that I am arguing?

you're a gentle soul, liam. i never knew you had it in you.

Still can't believe Tommy Stinson hasn't wised up, course the money may have something to do with it, the 'Mats probably didn't even know what that was.

What was that quote by MES "If it's me and your granny on bongos, it's a gig by The Fall" ?