You are not logged in. Please register or login.
- Topics: Active | Unanswered
Re: The Tommy Stinson Thread
no bullshit from Thomas Eugene...tell it like it is Tommy! 
The A.V. Club: You have a pretty varied résumé: The Replacements, Guns N’ Roses, Soul Asylum. Do you see a common thread in those bands?
Tommy Stinson: Just that they’re all rock bands. And that they all have fairly emotional singers who are a little bit on the dangerous side. And they’re real—they’re all the real deal. I guess I got lucky enough to not have to play with people who aren’t.
AVC: Do you consciously seek out those types of singers?
TS: It’s sort of by default. I think there’s a yin and yang to it. I’m probably more comfortable with Dave [Pirner, of Soul Asylum] and Paul [Westerberg] than I am with Axl [Rose], just because I’ve known them longer and I’ve been friends with them longer. That’s not to bag on Axl in any way—it’s just to say that I think I’ve managed to get along with Dave and Paul better.
AVC: How did you end up with GN’R?
TS: It was kind of a fluke. A friend of mine, Josh Freese, was playing drums with them, and I asked him what he was up to, and he was like, “Oh, fuck, I can’t really talk about it, but I’ll tell you anyway.” And it turned out he was playing drums, and working on the record. He said, “It’s funny that you’re asking me, because Duff [McKagan] just quit, and we need a bass player.” I was just joking with him: “Oh, that would be a fucking hoot,” given my thoughts about Guns N’ Roses at that time. But I did it anyway just as a laugh, and it turned out pretty good. They didn’t really audition anyone else. They liked me, and because Josh was doing it, it was a compelling notion.
At the time, coincidentally, I was about to get kind of screwed by yet another record label with the Perfect record. I felt like, “You know what? This is enough.” It’s been five years of trying to get this thing going, I keep getting screwed, and I just want a break. So I looked at it as something to do until I figured out my next move. And it worked out pretty good, all things considered.
AVC: Chinese Democracy took all of 10 years to make. What was the recording process like? I mean, you couldn’t have been working at it every day for 10 years.
TS: At first we were in there a lot. We were working on the writing aspect of it, but it just kept going on. We had [Interscope Chairman] Jimmy Iovine intervening in a not-so-productive way, and we had other guys coming and going with nutty ideas. My summation of the whole thing is that Interscope, when they took over Geffen, really led Axl to believe that Jimmy Iovine would be involved, and would help get this record done and make it happen. But basically what he did was let it completely fall apart. Then he had this great idea to bring in [producer] Roy Thomas Baker to make it sound better. All he did was re-record everything three or four different times, trying to make it sound like something it didn’t need to sound like, and spend $10 million in the process. My two cents on the whole thing is that I really think Jimmy Iovine fucked the whole thing up.
It was a bummer. Most of the songs that are on the record now were done 10 fucking years ago. But all the talking heads in the mix were saying, “Make ’em sound better! Make ’em sound better!” So we kept redoing this and that. And it ended up coming back down to the same fucking songs that they were 10 years ago, except that now they were a super-dense mishmash of a bunch of instrumentation. That whole era pretty much sums up what happened to the record industry. Those kinds of people, making those kinds of decisions and not really helping the artist.
Re: The Tommy Stinson Thread
good interview.. a little bitchiness creeping in to the bands interviews again..
Re: The Tommy Stinson Thread
Oy..a little tense there Tommy. Where was this five years ago? Finally letting go a little perhaps? A little annoyance here and there. From preferring Axl in one interview a few back, to not preferring him now.
"super-dense mishmash of a bunch of instrumentation"
Yep.
Surprised Jarmo posted it.
Re: The Tommy Stinson Thread
I love it when these guys talk about the making of the album, we've had bits n peices of info in the last couple of years, but its pretty much still shrouded in mystery.
Little tit bits like this are very welcome, I'd feckin devour a book about those years.
Re: The Tommy Stinson Thread
buzzsaw wrote:I have a new found respect for Tommy and it's nice to see someone in the band call the songs the mess that they are.
Ah, but he didn't call them that, did he? You did.
Ali
Really? Read it again. He's not talking about how great they are. He's talking about how cluttered they are. The message is the same. He knows better than I do because he lived it. Validation my friend, validation. You can't ignore it on a technicality.
