Adolfo, en este artículo publicado hoy, salen algunas explicaciones:
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
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."
Jue 04 Jul 2024, 14:59 por JJ
» nuevo video oficial en directo de WHISPER
Jue 04 Jul 2024, 14:55 por JJ
» MEJORES GUITARRISTAS
Jue 22 Jun 2023, 17:53 por Robert
» Cds AOR LITE AOR HI TECH AOR WESTCOADT POP
Lun 21 Jun 2021, 03:32 por Martín
» BIENVENID@S A #HARDROCK_&_AOR
Sáb 10 Abr 2021, 07:57 por A.K.U.
» GUN acoustic live
Sáb 20 Jul 2019, 19:44 por spanishvertigo
» H.E.A.T. - 2017 - “Into the Great Unknown”
Lun 27 Ago 2018, 09:09 por A.K.U.
» JOE LYNN TURNER - Endlessly (Rescue you - 1985)
Dom 13 Mayo 2018, 20:06 por Starfall111
» Cds para venta
Miér 02 Mayo 2018, 15:05 por c4d4v3r