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Re: "The Full Story Behind Our ‘Chinese Democracy’ Leak" (Antiquiet.com)
Iovine was also the guy who made them go back and re-record the album when Axl was ready with it in, what, 2002? If I'm not mistaken, he suggested bringing in Roy Thomas Baker also, who by all accounts severly fucked the entire project up and down.
Iovine got involved in the first place in early '99, when Geffen was merged with Interscope and Guns switched labels. This meant Iovine sort of inherited the industrial album begun with Geffen approval. Like everyone else, he was ready to give it the benefit of a doubt. He was said to have been there with Axl, doing the final mix of OMG right before its release. After that track didn't go down so well, Axl was suddenly looking for guitar heroes, from Brian May to Bucket. We can only wonder how much of this was because of Iovine's insistence, but he certainly had his reservations with the industrial sound and the audience reception seemed to validate his concerns.
Bucket came in when Beavan was still there. The plan seemed to be just to put stronger leads on the record, with May and Bucket, to make it more of a traditional guitar-album, something which Guns had been known for. Iovine and Axl could've seen this as a compromise between their differences on the sound and as a way to circumvent the reception of OMG. Then, Iovine brought Bob Ezrin in to feel through the album. Had Ezrin been alright with it, there's a strong case to be made that the album would've been released in late 2000. Ezrin made the infamous "3 good songs" remark, possibly hoping to redeem himself in front of Iovine in case of an OMG reaction/sales, as well as knowing that working with Guns meant a big payday. By downplaying the material, Ezrin would win either way.
This is when Iovine got Roy Thomas Baker in, and Ezrin moved the band to the Village Studios in order for the label (read: Iovine) to have more control over the way things were run. Axl ran into a halt. Dragged out of Rumbo, the AFD studio, where he'd been happily cloistered with Beavan and the crew for a good few years, he made sure Ezrin would take a hike. But Iovine got the project where he wanted it, to be re-done closer to a classic rock sound, which he would've felt to be an easier sell. And that's the one thing Iovine would care about, due to pressure coming from above.
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.
Jimmy [Iovine] and whoever would come down to the studio. Things would be good for [the first] month. Then... someone above Jimmy would start putting pressure regarding us on him, Jimmy would start pressuring others at his label [and they] would begin doing the same with us... [During the second month], the whole thing would get ugly and extensively interfere with getting anything productive done, and near the middle of the third month we'd arrange for Jimmy to come down again. They'd go away happy and the entire process would repeat itself over and over and over...
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.
We feel that, unfortunately, we've never been really anything all that much more other than a throw it at the wall, see if it sticks, no real ground work, something to take advantage of, last quarter, cook the books, write-off, fuck this headache, hoping to get lucky scam.
Of course, this does paint a picture of a clueless labelhead feeling the heat to grab a hit album from a suffering genius. Then you add up the insane studio bill, the chicken coops, the nightmare of a band management (both Doug Goldstein and Team Brazil), and most importantly, the never-present, indecisive frontman/project lead.
The truth may well be that the nightmare was contagious; a shitstorm on all levels. 
Re: "The Full Story Behind Our ‘Chinese Democracy’ Leak" (Antiquiet.com)
Great post Apex!
I think Iovine and Ezrin really did the most damage. Ezrin wants writing credit, always has, and I think he purposely sabotaged it so they would be forced to go back and write a new album. His opinion was wrong, just like his vision of Janes Addiction was. And GN'R didn't need to sound like no fucking Army Of Anyone, either.
Re: "The Full Story Behind Our ‘Chinese Democracy’ Leak" (Antiquiet.com)
Random events and contracts resulted in the release of CD. UYI was a forced release as well
No future release will happen unless events dictate it. Will disquiet among the band members be enough, I do not know, but I heavily doubt it
Unless anyone knows otherwise, there is no noise just now showing Axl is doing anything himself towards a new album. Band members, yes. Axl, no.
It will be another year of touring, that is where the money is
Re: "The Full Story Behind Our ‘Chinese Democracy’ Leak" (Antiquiet.com)
[...]
"You played in a rather bizarre version of Guns n Roses in the mid-90s - Sid Riggs was on drums I believe, who else was involved? Paul Tobias?KB: Well now, keep in mind Sid and I were recording on demos. Paul was involved. If you talk to him, tell him to call me too. He’s a great guy. As for the recordings, across the mixer were such people as Slash, Zakk, Matt, Duff, Dizzy, and a host of others. We were all a part of putting tracks down on the demos. So, it was never a "version" of the band. It was fun though... The only time I really talked to [Axl] was up at that particular Halloween party at his house. He was never there when I was doing any playing. He told me he liked the bass parts and asked if I was getting paid on time, gotta love that. " (Krys Baratto, Sp1at, 04/15/05)
So, there you have the likely source for those 300 DATs. Ideas, loops and sketches, courtesy of Dizzy, Paul Tobias, Krys Baratto and Syd Riggs. That stuff may be the below the line material that keeps getting rumored about. No-one ever raves about how cool that stuff is for some odd reason - every insider seems to have their heart set on the 40 Beavan songs
Would a few of those DAT's also include Izzy and Duffs 10 demos incl. Down By The Ocean from May 1995 too, or are these 300 DATS in addition to those?
You're post was fantastic btw, really enjoyed the read. Still find it all bloody confusing though 
Don't want to derail the thread, but for example, why are Slash, Matt, Duff and Dizzy across the mixer from Krys (bass) and Sid (drums)? I can understand using session musicians if they were all out on the road with Slashs Snakepit at the time, but Krys makes it sound like they were all in the studio together, and I can't find a specific date when Krys/Sid would have been in the studio. Looking at "Snakepit Recalled" in Whispers '95 though we have:
"[Slash] has not been musically involved with Guns N' Roses since [...] a 2 week initial period [...] in the late fall of '95." (Axl, 10/30/96)
So Geffen pulled the plug on Snakepit (see Snakepit Recalled above) because Axl was ready to work on the next Guns N Roses album, but when Slash returned to the studio he finds Paul, Krys and Sid laying down ideas?
Maybe I need to read Whispers, again.
Re: "The Full Story Behind Our ‘Chinese Democracy’ Leak" (Antiquiet.com)
Don't want to derail the thread, but for example, why are Slash, Matt, Duff and Dizzy across the mixer from Krys (bass) and Sid (drums)? I can understand using session musicians if they were all out on the road with Slashs Snakepit at the time, but Krys makes it sound like they were all in the studio together, and I can't find a specific date when Krys/Sid would have been in the studio.
Krys also mentions Zakk Wylde, who was jamming with Guns very briefly in early '95, so go figure. To confuse you some more, I found this Krys interview:
Rumor has it that you may (or may not) appear on Axl's 'Chinese Democracy' album. What was your involvement with that, how long ago did you record anything for that, and do you think it will ever actually see the light of day?
Ya know what? No. I did play on the demos that were being recorded for what I guess, may be that record. This was back in like ’96 to ’97. I would like to hear it come out, I don’t think it will. If it hasn’t by now, do you think it will?
Krys isn't exact with his dates, as he's not reaching out for his payslips to confirm them. I guess he was let go earlier than Sid, as Josh Freese remembers Billy Howerdel being the temporary bass player when he auditioned. Dizzy mentions Sid to have been in the studio with him and Paul during the Shaq incident. This was April, 97. Matt was fired just around this time, which was no surprise; Axl had been looking out to replace Matt before they officially parted ways. It wasn't as clean-cut as Matt says it was, even Igor Cavalera (ex-Sepultura) was approached when Matt was still officially in the band.
So Geffen pulled the plug on Snakepit (see Snakepit Recalled above) because Axl was ready to work on the next Guns N Roses album, but when Slash returned to the studio he finds Paul, Krys and Sid laying down ideas?
More like Geffen pulled the plug on Snakepit because Axl wanted to start haggling the band name for himself. But yeah, those guys appeared to be Axl's "solo project" at the time.
Re: "The Full Story Behind Our ‘Chinese Democracy’ Leak" (Antiquiet.com)
I recalled that 2002 tour interview to illuminate a few points.
We don't know how productive those Bucket & Brain writing sessions were and how many songs it actually produced after Sean left.
There are a lot of new songs, that were just done in the last year, that we feel that, ‘okay, well, that bumps a lot of stuff off the previous list', but it's time to stop that now and wrap up the baby.
40 pieces of music and then some, when you count the Beavan and B&B sessions. I doubt they wrote another 20+ new songs, tho.
Random events and contracts resulted in the release of CD. UYI was a forced release as well
No future release will happen unless events dictate it. Will disquiet among the band members be enough, I do not know, but I heavily doubt it
Indeed. From that same interview;
I gave into a lot of pressure on Illusions both internally in Guns and externally in the press, those albums suffered as a consequence, it's not something I'm too excited to have to live with again.
There were fully-fledged instrumental tracks readied by Slash & co, which were completed months and months before the album release. It was a well-known fact that Axl was personally holding up the album with his tardiness on the vocal tracks and his painstaking attention to detail with the orchestration. Back then, Axl still had peers in the band, but even they couldn't do much to force his hand. If they were unsuccessful, what chance would the new guys have? They're not even sharing organizational responsibility, they're contracted employees.
No big surprise CD was the same. There's the excuse of a booklet and reports on how the mastering was done as late as in October. Nothing was ready with Axl's camp, they said. It was almost as if he and his people were caught off-guard by the immediacy of the release.
Unless anyone knows otherwise, there is no noise just now showing Axl is doing anything himself towards a new album. Band members, yes. Axl, no.
It will be another year of touring, that is where the money is
It's really sad to see Axl apparently having given up on the two album concept. In the Buckethead era, he used to point out every now and then that the plan would be to release the first album, hit the road and after a year or so, release the second one. I maintain the unceremonious release (and mixed reception) of CD cut him deep. The man spent a ridiculous amount of time on the album for a plethora of reasons, it gets out and is quickly forgotten. Had it come out some years earlier, there would've at least been the public interest factor, which would've earned it more casual listeners and kept it in the public eye as something else than a not-coming vanity project.
Re: "The Full Story Behind Our ‘Chinese Democracy’ Leak" (Antiquiet.com)
imsorry wrote:Skwerl: 'While I was still working at Universal in 2005, I met a guy that had been working with Axl, who told me that he had touched over 90 songs, 40 of which were “some of the best songs he’d ever heard.”'
It just makes me hate this band even more if all this is true .
The number of songs worked on has been the stuff of legend for years now. The most coherent numbers come from people who were actually there. Josh Freese and Sean Beavan both confirm that 40 or so songs existed in 2000, the year they both left the project. This jives with what Axl, Robin and others have said about there having been enough material to cover two albums or more since then.
Josh Freese wrote:When I left, there were two lists, the Master list ('Here's the 20 songs we're concentrating on') and the B list ('Here's the other 20 songs, we'll finish them one day and we'll see what happens'). (Podomatic, 04/13)
Sean Beavan wrote:I think we worked on thirty-five songs or something. (Antiquiet, 08/13/08)
Even so, 90 songs in total is probably the most ambitious number I've ever seen on the subject. What's known is that the band did write new material with Bucket and Brain, which would pile upon the 40ish songs from the Beavan era. But the numbers are fleeting, again.
I went to the studio [in mid-February] and heard 41 songs [...] from the 60 or 70 [Axl]'s working on... You're gonna be blown away when you hear them. (Interscope executive, Kerrang, 03/07/02)
Over a decade later, we're still to be blown away. Even so, you'll notice the 41 songs to be consistent with the above quotes.
And here's Axl from '99, telling Kurt Loder they have around 70 songs in the works with Sean Beavan.
Again, those extra 30 were probably quite loose in comparison, even if they could be distinguished as individual pieces of music. Another 20 tinkerings in six years? Maybe, but the bottom line is that there's a shitload of "some of the best songs" in the vaults, which no-one seems interested in releasing.
- dave-gnfnr
- Rep: 16
Re: "The Full Story Behind Our ‘Chinese Democracy’ Leak" (Antiquiet.com)
The Feds came out pretty daft, considering they nearly incriminated Billy Howerdel for leaking discs burned in 2006. He'd been away from the project for around... six years.
Skewrl wrote:We started with a list of people that had a copy of the record, according to the FBI’s information. It was very short. Three names: Andy Wallace, whose relationship with GNR was apparently strained for a time due to money owed to him; Merck Mercuriadis, Axl’s former manager, who had played the songs for Interscope in 2006; and, impossibly, Mister Saint Laurent, who had claimed to have gotten a copy from “some guy in Portugal.” One of these things is not at all like the others, and as I said, MSL’s claims were discredited and removed from this list... At some point in 2008, I’m not sure when, we found an email from Laurie Soriano to Jensen Penalosa, telling him that it had come to her attention that Jimmy Iovine “does in fact have a copy” of the tracks, and that his name should be added to the list of possible sources.
It's nice to get confirmation that them leaks were in fact Wallace's mixes, the ones Rolling Stone bragged about when there were x Tuesdays left in 2006.
The Iovine connection does tickle the funny-bone, when one takes into account how Guns were walking on eggshells when commenting on the leaks as they happened. Axl showed unusual restraint, just having the usual "leaks are devastating to the band", while the official line was something along the lines of "we don't really care about the AntiQuiet guys, our concern is the original source". If Iovine was the guy, those remarks were squarely aimed at him - and given Laurie Soriano is Axl's lawyer, Guns had their sights set on Jimmy as the culprit for a good while. Move on to 2009, Axl gives out interviews voicing his disenchantment with the label, while Tommy ups the ante by telling the world it was Iovine who sunk the album.
Looking back, both Axl and Tommy pretty much shovel the dirt at Iovine's feet by blaming him on everything aside leaking the album, and they do it because, well, Iovine may have leaked the album, but they can't say it outright.
I can see why they didn't care about Skwel and wanted the original source since there are 90 songs that original source could have,and if all of those leaked they would be fucked.
- Smoking Guns
- Rep: 330
Re: "The Full Story Behind Our ‘Chinese Democracy’ Leak" (Antiquiet.com)
From what I recall, that comment about Slash last jamming in 1995 sounds off. I thought they actually regrouped in 1996 with Zakk and Slash just weeks or months before Slash left the band. 1994 was the incident with Huge on Interview with a Vampire Movie (Sympathy for the Devi) cover song. But then I think in 1996 for 2 weeks, Slash, Zakk, Matt, Duff, and Axl jammed out. From those sessions, Zakk took one song and used it on his album, Sonic Brew. I think it was track 3 off that album that came from those sessions.
