Axl Speaks
It is two a.m. in a dimly lit recording studio deep in Los Angeles’ San Fernando Valley. Sitting back on a couch in the control room is a once omnipresent rock figure who has been out of public view for most of the last decade. The music he’s been playing on this long night has been the focus of his obsessive perfectionism since 1991, when Guns n’ Roses last released an album of new material. But in late November, Axl Rose played nearly a dozen tracks from the long-in-the-works Guns n’ Roses album for Rolling Stone and gave his first substantial interview in more than six years. He was only an hour late to do so.
Occasionally getting up to whisper details about what still must be done to complete the tracks – “I gotta put some guitar here!” – Rose comes across as intense but hardly humorless as he speaks at length about his music and the fate of his former band mates. At 36, Rose looks a bit older and more solidly built than the lean rock god of his “Sweet Child o’ Mine” days, the result perhaps not just of the passage of time but of his kickboxing regimen and a lifestyle that’s said to still be largely nocturnal but zealously healthy. He’s dressed tonight in Abercrombie & Fitch, with his reddish hair intact and cut to a Prince Valiant-ish midlength. Having failed to deliver a new album by the end of the 20th century, is Rose ready to commit to releasing a record sometime during the 21st? “Yes, I think that would definitely be the right time,” he answers, a slight grin coming to his face.
The new Guns n’ Roses album is tentatively titled Chinese Democracy and loosely scheduled for summer 2000. “As far as I can tell,” says Guns n’ Roses’ manager, Doug Goldstein, “we are now 99 percent musically done and 80 percent vocals done. I see the record being done February or March for a summer release.” But time is of little consequence in the world of Axl Rose. In passing, Rose mentions that he recently “canceled Thanksgiving,” delaying his celebration a few days until it better suited his timetable. “I’m trying not to do that with Christmas,” he adds, “since New Year’s comes up right away.”
From time to time, Rose gets up to pace the studio where he has spent the last year recording and rerecording material (his workday tends to start around midnight and run through the early daylight hours). “What we’re trying to do is build Guns n’ Roses back into something,” Rose explains quietly as he stands in front of a sunken isolation booth. “This wasn’t Guns n’ Roses but I feel it is Guns n’ Roses now.”
Asked whether he ever considered going under his own name instead of keeping the Guns n’ Roses tag, Rose says, “It is something I lived by before these guys were in it. And there were other people in Guns n’ Roses before them, you know. I contemplated letting go of that, but it doesn’t feel right in any way. I am not the person who chose to try to kill it and walked away.” Furthermore, because the new material has been composed collaboratively with the new players, he insists, “It’s not an Axl Rose album, even if it’s what I wanted it to be. Everybody is putting everything they’ve got into singing and building. Maybe I’m helping steer it to what it should be built like.”
Throughout the night, Rose seems anxious to finally have his say but wishes he could wait until the new album is released and can “speak for itself.” Addressing the absence of his old band members, Rose suggests he simply needed to take control to survive. “It is the old story that you are told when you’re a kid: ‘Don’t buy a car with your friends,'” he says with his eyes straight ahead. “Nobody could get the wheel. Everybody had the wheel. And when you have a bunch of guys, I’m telling you, you are driving the car off the cliff. The reality is, go buy those guys’ solo records. There are neat ideas and parts there, but they wouldn’t have worked for a Guns n’ Roses record.”
According to Rose, part of the delay in building the new model of Guns n’ Roses has been “educating myself” about the technology that’s come to define rock in the Nineties: “It’s like from scratch, learning how to work with something, and not wanting it just to be something you did on a computer.” At least one of his former band mates didn’t really want any part of that process – “Slash told me, ‘I don’t want to work that hard,’ ” Rose recalls.
Slash’s name pops up repeatedly, invoked in a way that suggests a shellshocked husband speaking of an ex-wife after a particularly horrific divorce. “It is a divorce,” Rose says with a sad stare. In retrospect, Rose sees the band’s massive success as part of its undoing. “The poverty is what kept us together,” he says. “That was how we became Guns n’ Roses. Once that changed …” He turns momentarily quiet. “Guns n’ Roses was like the old Stones or whatever,” he says. “Not necessarily the friendliest bunch of guys.”
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