Guns N’ Roses, some £10m of Axl grease and Chinese Democracy
The new Guns N’ Roses album is finally due out next month. Mick Wall reports on the 13-year gestation of the world’s most expensive record
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Appetite for resurrection: Axl Rose has announced a release date for the on-again, off-again Guns N' Roses album Chinese Democracy
The most expensive album ever made. The longest album ever made. The most over the top album ever made . . . It hasn’t even been released yet but the stories about the making — and endless remaking — of the new Guns N’ Roses record, Chinese Democracy, have been circulating for years. Indeed, almost £10 million and nearly 15 years later, and, according to a breathless press release on Wednesday, finally to be released on November 24, it has assumed almost mythical status.
But while the stories are endless — delayed by a revolving door of group members, producers, record company chiefs, personal gurus and the wildly unpredictable day-to-day whims of the group’s extraordinary leader, the singer W. Axl Rose — the reasons for the album’s extraordinarily painful creation are harder to pin down.
Begun back in 1995, when the original line-up of the band was still more or less intact, initial problems centred around Rose’s fractured relationship with Slash, the lead guitarist. Slash was aghast first to have his songs unilaterally rejected by the singer, then to find that Rose had hired a replacement guitarist, an old school chum with no previous big-time experience named Paul Huge, without informing the rest of the band.
“I was suicidal,” said Slash. “If I’d had a gun with me at that time, I probably would have done myself in. If I’d had a half-ounce of heroin with me, I probably just would’ve gone. It was heavy.” So heavy that one by one over the next two years he was followed out the door by every other original member.
Left alone to his own devices, Rose embarked on an extraordinary decade-long journey during which more than a dozen musicians were hired, fired, or eventually walked out, exhausted by the endless delays.
Working from a massive soundstage in California, he instructed studio engineers to keep recording any ideas the various musicians he’d invited into the fold came up with. At one point he was being sent up to five CDs a week with various different mixes of proposed songs. Eventually, a stack of more than 1,000 CDs and DAT cassettes had built up, all painstakingly filed and labelled. “It was like the Library of Congress in there,” says one studio worker.
Deeply affected by the death of his mother, Sharon, from cancer, in 1996, and his collaborator West Arkeen, from a drug overdose, Rose also became a recluse, refusing to leave his Malibu mansion. He kept tanks of exotic spiders and reptiles for company, adopting bizarre disguises whenever he went out.
All employees were required to sign confidentiality agreements containing stiff penalties if breached. They also had to submit a photograph of themselves which Rose would then offer to a personal guru, nicknamed Yoda by his road crew, for “psychic inspection” to reveal their true motives, strengths and weaknesses. Even photographs of an employee’s children were requested on occasion.
Meanwhile, the years crept by and his record company, Interscope, began to panic. When one record company honcho couriered to Rose a sampling of CDs featuring various producers, with a note suggesting he might like to consider one of them to work with, Rose’s response was to place the CDs in his drive and run over them in his Ferrari.
When another new recruit, the bizarre guitarist Buckethead — so-named because he wore a Kentucky Fried Chicken bucket on his head and hid behind a Friday the 13th mask — requested a chicken coop be built in the studio, stocked with live chickens, Rose accommodated him — until the singer’s pet wolf cubs got in there one night and feasted on them. Buckethead left soon afterwards.
The record company authorised a further $1 million “incentive” payment to Rose, with the promise of another $1 million if he delivered a finished album by March 1999. The date came and went.
Rose’s working routine now became so ragged that he rarely showed his face at the studio, despite keeping all the musicians and engineers on a monthly retainer said to have totalled $250,000.
In a rare interview, Rose claimed that there were now roughly 70 new songs in various stages of completion, and that they had already recorded “at least two albums” of material, some of which was “too advanced” for their fans to enjoy.
Possibly so, but listening to the grungy “new” single, Chinese Democracy, released this week, it sounds almost identical to the track that’s been available via a leaked internet source since 2005.
As to why he had decided to call the album Chinese Democracy, the one constant fact about the project throughout all the chaos, Rose shrugged: “Well, there’s a lot of Chinese democracy movements, and it’s something that there’s a lot of talk about, and it’s something that will be nice to see. It could also just be like an ironic statement. I don’t know, I just like the sound of it.”
Guns N’ Roses’ manager Andy Gould said recently: “When they asked Michelangelo to paint the Sistine Chapel, they didn’t say, ‘Can you do it in the fourth quarter?’ Great art sometimes takes time.”
Chinese Democracy is released on Nov 24 (apparently) on Polydor
