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- Communist China
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Re: you can't please everyone
Pumpkins is different in several ways though. They have a huge discography to choose from, even if they wanted to do a GH show each night they couldn't satisfy everyone. I don't think we're asking Axl to drop Jungle or SCOM, just why do Out Ta Get Me and My Michelle warrant nightly showings on the set? What Corgan's been doing is ignoring the hits, which we haven't asked Axl do to.
I think NIN is a better example. Their set is good, but not great because they insist on being current. They're a better 'be careful what you wish for' scenario. They only play 2 PHM songs, 2 Broken songs, 3 TDS songs, and then play almost all of The Slip, Year Zero , which are albums that just aren't as good or well known. The reason I don't complain about it really is that it's respectable and takes balls to do, and I have faith they'll be touring more before they're done for good. They may do a GH tour sometime down the line.
Re: you can't please everyone
For sure they should focus on the new work. It's anyway better fitting to the band. For playing AFD and UYI, we could have kept the old band together, they played those songs very well...
The tours so far after '93 have been mostly nostalgic tours with new artists. This is absolutely no critisism, I've seen them three times and had terriffic evenings! But if there comes another Chinese Democracy world tour (and especially accompanied with a release), they should strongly focus on the new material. Maybe 5 old songs and the rest new songs. CD is what the new band stands for and hopefully where Axl and GNR is proud of after many years of hard work, so they need to play it!
Re: you can't please everyone
They need to play the full Chinese Democracy album and that is it. Throw in the songs everyone expects and then maybe a few off the UYIs but I think this band needs to focus on their own work and not on the work of the previous members weather fans want too hear it or not. Axl needs to give this era of the band their own identity and not rely on AFD.
Re: you can't please everyone
Listen it's pretty fuckin' simple. You do a 24-song set. 4 from AFD, 4 from GN'R-Lies, 4 from UYI1, 4 from UYI2, and 8 from CD. That's 16 songs from the old era, and 8 from the new era, and yet everything is being pretty covered for EVERY fan.
Set:
AFD:
Welcome To The Jungle
Nightrain
Paradise City
Sweet Child O' Mine
Lies:
Move To The City
Patience
Used To Love Her
You're Crazy
UYI1:
Don't Cry
November Rain
Dead Horse
Coma
UYI2:
Civil War
Yesterdays
Estranged
You Could Be Mine
CD:
Chinese Democracy
The Blues
Madagascar
I.R.S.
Better
T.W.A.T.
If The World
Song #2
Granted 24-songs is pretty thick, but that selection right there covers EVERYTHING you could want in 2008. Think if the show was tomorrow? That would cover it all for the casual & hardcore.
Re: you can't please everyone
GN'R needs to pay more attention to the Illusions to fill out their sets and cross pollinate with the CD era stuff. Tonally, it just fits better than the AFD material they've been rehashing. Sure, play the big guns off AFD, that's all the fans really need at this point. I think eight songs off the new album is a bit too thick to bring out the casual fans, but a better mix can be found between mixing up the new with the not-as-old, as opposed to the new with the accepted standard.
Re: you can't please everyone
The AFD-heavy setlist is quite the curate's egg. While Axl considers it the finest whole of music he's actually released to this day, the album itself comes with so much of what can be considered filler, material that could be easily replaced with choice cuts from the UYI's. For the most of it, AFD is and remains a rather solid album, but basing a setlist on it nowadays takes a good deal away from the band's evolution from one place to another.
Axl keeps saying he's unhappy with the UYI's as, while he never uses the particular words, he himself, Slash and Izzy were growing apart as musicians and songwriters, developing a degree of craftsmanship that made the albums into the mixed bag they are. The band was dying, or at least in a certain kind of crisis, as for everyone else, the UYI songs represented them in 1990. Axl made them go the extra mile of production and under those circumstances, they couldn't exactly move on to solo albums and whatnot. Meanwhile, Axl's vision got so overpowering over the rest (partially as his work was done last), you can't shake the feeling they would've been unsure whether the album released was really the album they'd made, whether the songs they'd written for the band any longer explored the areas of their musical interests at that time.
Therefore, I think Axl's approach to the UYI's today is a bit of a melting pot approach, although he'd see as the polar opposite of the CD project. What he did was take all these songs from the other members and forge them into what he felt was the direction he wanted GNR to move towards from AFD and tried to use his personal preferences as production guidelines in order to create cohesive pieces.
Of course, the problem is that while there are several instances of brilliance audible on both the finished album tracks as well as the early demos, in a situation like that, you're heading into a series of compromises to begin with. Axl's not exactly the mediator - had he settled to be the one bringing synergy, he might've been able to create a best of all worlds situation, balancing out and accommodating the different styles therein. But he had the big-time power ballad thing going for him and while he does handle that nicely, it hardly provided him with the moderation and clarity required to bring out the best of all there was.
That's why the others likely felt a bit distanced from the final product when it finally was done, while Axl was still enjoying a rush of accomplishment. After all, he, in his own mind, thought he'd forged the songs into albums which he felt were true to the new GNR direction, and only later did the realization sink in that what he'd done was actually taking everything and forcing it into that said direction. Therefore, when considered as albums as opposed to the AFD, the UYI's are salvage jobs. Very elaborate ones and certainly not without several different merits, but salvage jobs nonetheless.
Re: you can't please everyone
While I don't particularly agree with everything in your post, I think it's a well argued point of view. Still, none of that (for me) detracts from the fact that the Illusions songs are a tonally better fit to the CD era music than AFD is. Period.
Re: you can't please everyone
Well von,
I actually agree with you on that and the thought actually occured to me as I wrote the previous post but somehow never made it into it. You see, I believe one can say GNR's always been 'Axl's vision' as far as the end products are concerned. AFD was his 'vision', but I bet you $1,000 that if you would've asked the other members back then what they wanted to achieve with the album, what was in their field of interest, you would've gotten pretty much the same answers from everyone. That's why AFD is 'Axl's vision', but the band happened to be on the same page with him (and vice versa), which makes it equally the band's vision, and the outcome therefore can never attributed solely to Axl.
The UYI's represent 'Axl's vision' as how it'd developed in the intervening times and build a perfectly reasonable bridge in between AFD and the CD songs. You can hear for yourself where and when he picked up a lot of things after AFD that have since become stables in the overall GNR sound, even if the other original aren't there anymore. That's why choice cuts from the UYI's would definitely fit like a glove into a CD-heavy setlist, as well as the new band's musical sensibilites. There's just so much more for them to dig into, to stretch their muscles in terms of interpreting that stuff, as the foundations of CD lie heavily in the UYI's - as far as Axl's concerned.
Those mish-mash powerhouse rockers and ballads in the albums are just begging to have the benefit of the new band members in a live setting, because they would have the ability to cut through the fat and bring out whatever Axl'd wanted to get on the record in the first place, as I think they correspond with his 'vision' - both back then and now - far better than the old band.
But I guess Axl's a bit wary of 'fixing what ain't broke', and by this I mean the solid structure of AFD. And as long as he's relying on an AFD-heavy setlist, it's a bit tricky to start adding more UYI material, as they stand out pretty lively. I guess the ideal situation would be in making the must-haves (WTTJ, SCOM, PC, Patience, NR) and the major CD songs the backbone of every show and having a pool of secondary AFD/UYI/CD songs from which to throw in a number depending on the night.
And that would not include Out Ta Get Me.
Re: you can't please everyone
I would just like to guess that he still wants to rock n' roll and if he only plays ballads, that's not going to happen. Not to mention so many of them are so damn long. Great, but long. I am actually siding with Axl on this one, and I'm gonna steal the Michael Jordan to the Max analogy of things for this statement. There's gonna be a lot of people in the crowd who are going to be having a one-time Axl Rose/Guns N' Roses experience that night, they will never have the chance to see the guys play again. And for that reason, he needs to stick to the hits and play the rock that made the group famous. He's got a short, but strong back catalogue and I think in his mind it's just a matter of the rock on UYI being interchangeable with the rock on AFD, but AFD's is all the more powerful. Plus, I think the CD stuff is similar to UYI, so he's devoting 1/2 the show to rocking hard and 1/2 to the new epic stuff.
Shit, the last thing I'm going to do is sit here and cry about great songs like Out Ta Get Me and My Michelle. Would I love to hear Estranged or Civil War? Sure, but to me it's not something worth getting my panties in a bunch over and he's gotta fit the CD stuff in there somewhere.
