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#311 Re: Guns N' Roses » SOG single coming? » 213 weeks ago
Are we getting an album soon? So far 4 known songs are showing in Spotify in a range of locations. State of Grace, Atlas Shrugged, The General and now Soul Monster. One can dare to dream I guess. I'm not sure 100 or so forum nerds are capable of influencing Spotify algorithms. Starting to think there is something brewing...I have the 2 New Zealand shows I'm attending in December - would take my excitement level to another level if there were a new album to digest or even on the launch pad...
That sounds more like an EP to me.
#312 Re: GN'R Downloads » Slash/Chester - Crazy » 214 weeks ago
elevendayempire wrote:Vale wrote:They should have gone with Franky Perez and stopped playing GN'R songs. Sure losing Scott was a major setback, but with Perez they could have released new stuff without drama and started building up their audience again. Didn't they tease the third record being way heavier? That would have been a good place to start..
The songs Kushner eventually released with Perez that I assume were intended for VR sounded promising...Nah, Perez is – with the best will in the world – a middle-tier talent. Scott had incredible stage presence, charisma to burn and a lyrical songwriting touch. It takes something special to follow that up, and I think the VR guys realised that the people they were auditioning didn't measure up. Or if they did (Chester, etc) they were already in major bands and weren't available.
Oh don't get me wrong - none of these candidates were on par with Scott. But I would have preferred a world with VR and a "good enough" singer to the endless Slash w/ Myles Kenndy boredom.
Nah. For me, 90% of what made VR special was that electric combination of charismatic, lyrical frontman and the GN'R instrumental section. As you can hear from the Project demo tracks and the various leaked post-Scott audition tracks, that band with a generic frontman would've been vastly less interesting.
Apparently Jeff Angell from Walking Papers auditioned at one point. He would've been interesting, since he's a close analogue to Weiland in terms of vocal stylings and the poetic quality of his lyrics - though it would've meant being stuck within the same baritone vocal range as Weiland. And he's considerably less well-known that Scott was.
#313 Re: Guns N' Roses » SOG single coming? » 214 weeks ago
I'd cheerfully gnaw my left arm off for a full release of SOG, though it's so synth/industrial that I'm very curious to hear how it'd work with the NITL line-up.
#314 Re: GN'R Downloads » Slash/Chester - Crazy » 215 weeks ago
They should have gone with Franky Perez and stopped playing GN'R songs. Sure losing Scott was a major setback, but with Perez they could have released new stuff without drama and started building up their audience again. Didn't they tease the third record being way heavier? That would have been a good place to start..
The songs Kushner eventually released with Perez that I assume were intended for VR sounded promising...
Nah, Perez is – with the best will in the world – a middle-tier talent. Scott had incredible stage presence, charisma to burn and a lyrical songwriting touch. It takes something special to follow that up, and I think the VR guys realised that the people they were auditioning didn't measure up. Or if they did (Chester, etc) they were already in major bands and weren't available.
#315 Re: Guns N' Roses » Predictions for the next decade? » 215 weeks ago
Would be a hell of a shame to not get it together enough to put together one more album to bookend their career. Axl really does seem to operate on a completely different schedule - a glacial pace to release anything and then when it arrives, it's full of amateurish mixing decisions, liner notes strewn with errors and artwork that looks like a 16 year old on photoshop could have whipped it up in half an hour. Why do they not hire the absolute best in class for these types of things?
It's so weird when you compare them to probably their closest peers in terms of stature and clout, Metallica. Just look at their YouTube channel; every week there's a new live performance of a song. They're tapping into the zeitgeist in a savvy way, inviting the guy from Stranger Things to jam with the band (why didn't GN'R make more of the Thor movie's massive endorsement of them?). There are lengthy interviews with former band members. There are videos pulled from vintage gigs to tie in with special box set releases. There are live-streamed gigs.
And that's just one promotional channel. 'Tallica's also doing regular album releases, reissues, the promo circuit, etc etc. GN'R has this baffling inability to monetise one of the strongest back catalogues in rock.
#316 Re: Guns N' Roses » Why is GNR so ashamed of (most) of their past? » 217 weeks ago
Maybe because they don't want to dilute their discography with demos that anyone but diehard fans would have any interest in. No one is asking Stephen King to share his first draft of Carrie with the world. A shitty, muffled recording from 1984 may make us giddy, but outside of that, probably very little interest. The $1000 AFD boxset that is now going for $250 is a perfect example of this phenomenon. How many forum members bought the set versus downloaded mp3s of the material they wanted? I'm going to be its substantial, and enough justification why the business would be less inclined to release even more esoteric material.
But… we're not talking about the demos here. We're talking about the hundreds of hours of footage they shot on tours dating back to the 80s. Why the hell isn't it being released as DVDs or on YouTube instead of mouldering away in a vault?
#317 Re: Guns N' Roses » Think About You - opinions? » 217 weeks ago
The 2002 version was probably my favorite version.
Yeah, always had a soft spot for Fortus' rendition of the solo.
#318 Re: Guns N' Roses » Hard Skool: Does it date from ‘96? » 218 weeks ago
Blackstar wrote:The "Slash is a cancer" comment was in 2009.
According to Marc Canter, Axl was still open to include Slash on CD until 2006/2007 provided that Slash would apologize for certain things he had said the press. But Slash wasn't going to do that (although he did apologize in private - through Beta - for some of his Velvet Revolver era interviews when he went to Axl's house in October 2005) nor would he accept to be featured on CD only as a "guest" on some songs. Things completely soured on Axl's part after Slash's book was released.
Marc said recently that one of the three songs Slash had written on that Axl wanted to include on CD was Fall To Pieces (I suppose that was, of course, before it was released as a VR song). So this confirms what Axl said in the forum chats about the origins of Fall To Pieces, even though Slash has claimed that he first came up with the idea for it in late 2001/early 2002.
This late in the game, most interesting time period IMO is 2005- early 2006 where a reunion of some sort was clearly taking shape until it imploded for reasons we'll never know.
I'd like the full true story on what really went down during the Beta incident...it all went to shit after that.
The big question for me is, what would've happened if that 2006 reunion went ahead? Chinese Democracy was basically in a finished state at that point, and Axl has historically shown himself to be keen to honour the work that musicians have put in (hence Buckethead being all over Chinese Democracy).
Which means that the 2006 tour wouldn't have been in support of an album, 'cos there's no way that the record company would permit it to be released without wholesale re-recording from Slash and Duff. And knowing Axl that would've taken at least a couple of years.
Still, though. The likely configuration of that band would've been 2006 Axl on top form, with Slash, Duff, Fortus, Brain, Dizzy and Pitman. Which would've been a hell of a show.
#319 Re: GN'R Downloads » Slash/Chester - Crazy » 220 weeks ago
I would have been interested in hearing a VR album with Chester.
That, to me, is one of the greatest missed opportunities in rock music. We know Chester had the skinny-cool Weiland vibe; the fact that he was hired for STP shows that, and the songs he wrote with them made a decent fist of replicating Weiland's lyrical flair. We know that he had a wider vocal range than Weiland, which opened up the possibility of covering more GN'R tracks beyond the low-register stuff that Weiland could do, and would've widened the scope of the original stuff they could write. He did a pretty decent job covering Slither:
And we know he could belt out Paradise City:
I suspect the thing that stopped it from happening was bloody record company politics, the same thing that stopped his Slash collab going on the album. Linkin Park's management didn't want him doing any side projects, or whatever.
#320 Re: Dust N' Bones & Cyborg Slunks » 2003 killer footage of "The Project" pre Weiland » 220 weeks ago
I miss Velvet Revolver. And it bums me out a bit that the GN'R reunion means that none of the VR milestones are being acknowledged. Like, where's our deluxe edition of Contraband? We know for a fact that there are unreleased VR songs, too; The House is Alive and a cover of Tie Your Mother Down, at least. Plus all the demo stuff.
