Use Your Illusion I & II

Summer 1989, Top Note Theatre
Practice, practice, practice

According to an April 12, 1991, Tribune article, the fourth-floor space was used for rehearsals and as a theater over the years. Smart Bar was located on this level in the mid-1980s, before it was moved to the basement of this building. It opened as the Top Note Theatre in 1991 with a performance by Minneapolis band Soul Asylum's Dave Pirner and Dan Murphy.

McKagan talks about the band's Chicago rehearsal space in his memoir "It's so easy and other lies,": "For our rehearsal spot, we rented an empty old theater -- Top Note Theater -- above the rock club Metro. Unbeknownst to me then, some regulars at the Metro were also tightly linked into the city’s drug chain."

Location: Fourth floor of 3730 N. Clark St.

Summer 1989, apartments
They had to live somewhere

A Tribune reader reached out to say the band stayed in an apartment near DePaul University, "Some or all of Guns N' Roses 'flopped' in a flat across the street from St. Vincent's (St. Vincent de Paul Parish)," Kevin Garvey wrote in an email. "We lived a block west with our little kids and definitely noticed the GNR fans who seemed to be sitting on the church steps/fence/grass across the street around the clock hoping to see any GNR's. GNR being there seemed odd, but I figured they followed their own rules."

McKagan talks about the band's accomodations in his memoir "It's so easy and other lies,": "The first thing we had to do was find a place for the whole band and a couple of our techs to live. We also had a security guy -- in our management's eyes, it was probably to protect the public from our antics and not the other way around. Then we had to find a place where we could rehearse and write. We found two apartments above an Italian restaurant across the street from a church off Clark Street."

Location: Webster and Sheffield avenues

Summer 1989, (Cabaret) Metro/Smart Bar
Band hangout

According to a June 26, 1989, Tribune article, the band arrived in Chicago that summer in attempt to plan their follow-up album to "Appetite for Destruction" and "GN'R Lies."

As part of that story, Joe Shanahan, co-owner of Metro, confirmed that the band had been seen at the Smart Bar:

"But they're not recording here or practicing," Shanahan said, dispelling reports to the contrary.

But several Metro employees said practice sessions took place in the empty rooms above Metro, the former home of the Smart Bar.

"All I know is that they've been downstairs, having a good time in the bar," Shanahan said. "They seem to like the atmosphere."

Location: Metro and Smart Bar, 3730 N. Clark St.

Summer 1989, Leona's
Pizza party

According to a June 26, 1989, Tribune article, the band arrived in Chicago that summer to plan their follow-up album to "Appetite for Destruction" and "GN'R Lies."

As part of that story, a man named Chuck Kouri claims to have seen the band chowing down on pizza and pasta at the Lakeview restaurant Leona's on June 15, 1989:

"When they walked in, one of the waitresses looked at them and said, 'Righteous metal dudes -- you could be in Guns N` Roses,'" Kouri said.

"When she came back and someone told her that they actually were, the guys in the band laughed, introduced themselves and gave her a pretty hard time about it.

"They sat at a table in the front window and even joined in when another table started singing happy birthday. The were singing off-key on purpose, hamming it up.

"Actually, it was kind of disappointing. They were pretty quiet, not at all what you`d expect from their reputation. No one bothered them and they just ate, paid their bill and left."

Limousines? "They all got into a Ford Aerostar and took off. Like I said, pretty disappointing."

After changing hands, the restaurant now has a different owner and name.

Location: Now a Home Run Inn Pizza, 3215 N. Sheffield Ave.

Summer 1989, Kingston Mines
Slash drops in, slays

Metro/Smart Bar owner Shanahan says he and Slash would get together late at night and visit music clubs. One night at the blues bar Shanahan recalls Slash sitting in with a band for a "blistering solo" of the classic blues track, "Stormy Monday." About the experience Shanahan says, "There was a lot of Jack Daniels involved that night, but (his solo) was wicked."

Location: 2548 N. Halsted St.

The time Guns N' Roses squatted in Chicago

When Guns N' Roses takes the stage this weekend at Soldier Field, it will have been almost 30 years since the band's first Chicago appearance, opening for Alice Cooper at the UIC Pavilion.

The band appeared in Chicago on and off since that 1987 gig, canceling almost as many performances as it played. GNR was unpredictable, controversial — and heading for worldwide fame.

In 1989 the L.A.-based group's management wanted it to record a new album (which would eventually become "Use Your Illusion I" and "Use Your Illusion II") but didn't think that would happen with the distractions Los Angeles offered. Where could they go to concentrate on work? Chicago.

"They were on the fast track there (Los Angeles) and everyone there was aware how debilitating it was," Metro/Smart Bar owner Joe Shanahan said. "There was quite a lot riding on it, I think."

It was Shanahan who fielded a call from the band's manager, Doug Goldstein, looking for rehearsal space. The fourth floor of the building that houses Metro and Smart Bar included a space now known as Top Note Theatre, and that's what the band used.

"We didn't have a name for it back then. It was just a little theater. It was a space we would use for rehearsal," Shanahan says of the room. "Smashing Pumpkins, Liz Phair and Material Issue have used it since. It would be like, 'Oh, you're gonna woodshed.' It was a small stage with decent acoustics and you could work some things out."

Shanahan says the band used the space for about a month during the summer of 1989.

"I'd leave them alone unless Axl asked me to come in, which sometimes he did," he said. Did the band's presence here go unnoticed? Definitely not, yet its management tried to keep it quiet. A June 26, 1989, Tribune article tracked sightings of the band. No one in the music industry publicly admitted to seeing the band — except for Shanahan. In the article, he confirms the band members' visits to then-named Cabaret Metro and Smart Bar.

"All I know is that they've been downstairs, having a good time in the bar," Shanahan said in the Tribune story. "They seem to like the atmosphere."

Asked about the 1989 article now, and whether Shanahan feared repercussions from the band's management, he said, "Well, you know, we were kind of under a 'publicity gag order' not to say they were in the building working."

"I asked Slash and Duff, 'People are hitting me up like crazy. I don't like to lie so I'm going to say you are hanging out at shows at Metro.' At this point, everyone had seen them around town. They dressed the way they dressed — it was no question who they were. In L.A. they might have been able to blend in a little bit, not in Chicago."

Of their time in his establishments Shanahan says, "I think Guns N' Roses holds the bar tab crown — biggest and longest running bar tab."

He became friends with Slash. "He's good people. A whole lot of fun. Very gracious," Shanahan said. They hung out frequently that summer — and since then the guitarist has returned to town over the years to perform with Slash's Snakepit, Velvet Revolver and his other projects — often late at night.

"(Slash) liked the late-night jams," he said. "I would sometimes get a call at midnight. I'd turn to my new wife, Jennifer, and say I have to go out with Slash. 'What's that going to mean?' she'd ask. 'It might mean bail money,' I'd say."

Shanahan also has kind words for the band's bassist, Duff McKagan. "He was also really great to be around. Very affable, very approachable," Shanahan said.

Though he can't remember the exact location where the band was housed while in Chicago, Shanahan thinks it was in Lincoln Park. Yet, it could have been above Home Run Inn Pizza on Sheffield Avenue, which was a Leona's at the time. Regardless, Shanahan remembers this about GNR's living quarters: "They definitely flopped there. They needed a housekeeper twice a day."

(Update: A Tribune reader reached out to say the band stayed in apartments near DePaul University, "Some or all of Gun N' Roses 'flopped' in a flat across the street from St. Vincent's (St. Vincent de Paul Parish)," Kevin Garvey wrote in an email. "We lived a block west with our little kids and definitely noticed the GNR fans who seemed to be sitting on the church steps/fence/grass across the street around the clock hoping to see any GNR's. GNR being there seemed odd but I figured they followed their own rules.")

Shanahan has remained friendly with the band members, introducing their music to the next generation of Shanahans. He took his 18-year-old son, Michael, to Coachella this spring.

"He's been hearing me talk about Guns N' Roses for years. He's there to see Ice Cube and LCD Soundsystem, but I told him he's got to see them." As for this weekend, Shanahan says, "I think people are going to like the show."

Ultimate Rock wrote:Choose Your Illusion: Our Writers Cut Guns N’ Roses’ ‘Use Your Illusion’ Albums In Half

To celebrate the 25th anniversary of Guns N’ Roses‘ monumental twin Use Your Illusion albums, we asked six of our writers to weigh in on the debate that’s raged ever since the records were released in September 1991: How would you cut these 30 songs and two-and-a-half-hours of music down to just one record?

To make things easy, we had just one rule: a 15-song maximum limit, with no restrictions on the running time. As you can see below, the resulting “Choose Your Illusion” track lists and explanations varied wildly:

Michael Gallucci – Albums shouldn’t last longer than 45 minutes. After that, you’re going to start to bore your audience with each passing song. That’s the main problem with Guns N’ Roses’ two Use Your Illusion albums: They go on way too long. My single-disc edition of the album still runs a little more than an hour, but it’s more manageable than the overstuffed two-and-a-half-hour version Guns N’ Roses gave us. I like the bookends the band originally gave us for both records, so I left them in, with “Right Next Door to Hell” (Use Your Illusion I‘s opening track) starting my album and “My World” (II‘s closer) ending it. I also included the albums’ big ballads, covers and more ambitious tracks. Guns N’ Roses already gave us a great rock ‘n’ roll album with Appetite for Destruction. Use Your Illusion was all about their growth and diversity. My single-disc edit emphasizes that.

1. “Right Next Door to Hell”
2. “Live and Let Die”
3. “Don’t Cry”
4. “November Rain”
5. “Coma”
6. “Civil War”
7. “Yesterdays”
8. “Knockin’ on Heaven’s Door”
9. “Estranged”
10. “You Could Be Mine”
11. “My World”

Nick DeRiso – There’s a lot at play in trying to re-sequence Use Your Illusion, as even an edited version still needs to take in the breadth of Guns N’ Roses’ ambition as well as the looming changes ahead. As such, lengthier tracks like “November Rain,” “Civil War,” “Locomotive” and “Coma” have to remain, even at the expense of some shorter, punchier tracks. Then there’s the issue of some very familiar songs. I left off both cover songs because the Wings song is superfluous and the Bob Dylan tune had already appeared on the soundtrack to 1990’s Days of Thunder. As fun as it is, Alice Cooper’s rather pointless guest turn got the axe too. The hit single “Don’t Cry,” in this scenario, would have had to arrive back then as a stand-alone release, since I think the alternate version is far superior. I also liked the one-two punch of that song (including the lyric, “If you could see tomorrow, what of your plans? No one can live in sorrow; ask all your friends”) with a final farewell moment for the soon-to-depart Izzy Stradlin. “Pretty Tied Up” makes it clear that his time with the band has drawn to a close, as Izzy sings: “Once there was this rock ’n’ roll band rolling on the streets; time went by and it became a joke.” In between, Guns N’ Roses still get a chance to touch on influences, including punk rock and the Rolling Stones, even as they reanimate a leftover from their career-defining debut with “You Could Be Mine”

1. “Right Next Door to Hell”
2. “Perfect Crime”
3. “Double Talkin’ Jive”
4. “Locomotive”
5. “November Rain”
6. “Don’t Damn Me”
7. “Garden of Eden”
8. “Dead Horse”
9. “Civil War”
10. “Yesterdays”
11. “You Could Be Mine”
12. “Coma”
13. “Don’t Cry” [Alt. Version]
14. “Pretty Tied Up”

Matthew WIlkening – This exercise made me realize I love almost exactly half of these two albums. The “Live and Let Die” and “Knockin’ on Heaven’s Door” covers would be the next things to add if there was room, but it’s better to focus on original material. A lot of the stuff that got left off seems a bit gimmicky and overly concerned with putting across a rebellious attitude all these years later: “Get in the Ring,” “Bad Apples,” “Don’t Damn Me,” etc.

1. “Right Next Door to Hell”
2. “Perfect Crime”
3. ‘Dust N’ Bones”
4. ‘Don’t Cry”
5. “Double Talkin’ Jive”
6. “You Ain’t the First”
7. “November Rain”
8. “Garden of Eden”
9. “Coma”
10. “Bad Obsession”
11. “Civil War”
12. “14 Years”
13. “Locomotive”
14. “You Could Be Mine”
15. “Estranged”

Michael Christopher – “Coma,” fan and Slash favorite, kicks mine off. Something about the sound of a heartbeat introducing an album by a band that many thought would die before it released its debut feels poetic. It continues in more concise, rocking doses with the hardest hitting tracks coming one after another, and finally coming up for air with the whimsical and airy “Yesterdays.” The tempo dips but the music is no less intense before ramping back up again with “Locomotive” and closing out with the original Use Your Illusion II opener, “Civil War.” The problem with the big ballad “November Rain” is that it sounds dated and overblown; even when it came out, it had a grandiosity that felt more at place in the coke-fueled 80s. That’s what some people love about it; others think it’s too pompous for its own good. “Estranged,” on the other hand, is much more layered. It feels less over the top and more like a story because of all the shifts it goes through. The lyrics are absolutely devastating, and the guitar work by Slash fits the mood so perfectly that Axl Rose thanked him in the liner notes. It’s the proverbial crown jewel in the Guns’ canon, which is why it’s slotted center in the track listing.

1. “Coma”
2. “You Could Be Mine”
3. “Don’t Damn Me”
4. “Pretty Tied Up”
5. “The Garden”
6. “Double Talkin’ Jive”
7. “Yesterdays”
8. “Estranged”
9. “Don’t Cry” [Alt. Version]
10. “14 Years”
11. “Locomotive”
12. “Bad Obsession”
13. “Breakdown”
14. “Dead Horse”
15. “Civil War”

Matt Wardlaw – I like and respect the vision that Axl Rose and the band had for these two albums. It was an epic statement. With the idea of a condensed version of Illusion, I wanted to keep the spirit of what was originally captured and present an album that still would collectively have a schizophrenic mood and feel a bit excessive — and yet one that would ultimately feel more concise. I set out to make Use Your Illusion a traditional 10-track album, and it’s one that still clocks in at an hour, even after you strip out 20 songs. I’ve always really enjoyed an album that begins with a knockout. Sometimes, it’s a killer rock tune that sets the tone for what you’re going to hear on the rest of the record. And in other cases, it’s an epic, which is obviously the path I went with, opening the album with “November Rain,” which functions as an incredible nine-minute overture to open the album, one that makes quite an impression and leaves the listener wondering exactly what kind of journey they’re going to take. From there, we move through three straight solid rockers before slowing things down for the first time with “Don’t Cry.” “Estranged” is the next epic that makes an appearance, clocking in at nearly 10 minutes. “Get in the Ring” and “Back Off Bitch” (along with “Double Talkin’ Jive” earlier in the running order) ensures that this still would have been an album that the average kid wouldn’t share with their parents. “Knockin’ on Heaven’s Door” is the lone cover song on the album — it was hard leaving “Live and Let Die” on the sidelines, but I felt like “Knockin’” fit better with this running order, and sticking with 10 tracks, I didn’t want to dilute that by having two covers in the track listing. The revised album wraps up in a grand fashion similar to how it began with “November Rain,” by closing with “Civil War.” 10 songs — and even in this condensed form, there’s still a lot to listen to and process and perhaps in this layout, it would have been easier to understand, grasp and ultimately hold as a classic album.

1. “November Rain”
2. “You Could Be Mine”
3. “Right Next Door to Hell”
4. “Double Talkin’ Jive:
5. “Don’t Cry” (Original)
6. “Estranged”
7. “Get in the Ring”
8. “Back Off Bitch”
9. “Knockin’ on Heaven’s Door”
10. “Civil War”

Eduardo Rivadavia – Like most people, I’ve always felt that Use Your Illusion II was the superior set, and so its songs took nine of the 15 available slots. Many of my exclusions from Use Your Illusion I represent what I like to think of as Izzy Stradlin’s “I wanna go solo” songs — better suited for just that instead of a Guns n’ Roses album. I stuck to hard-rocking, in-your-face material that carried the torch lit on Appetite for Destruction, opening with a vicious tandem of “Right Next Door to Hell” and “Back Off Bitch.” Next comes one of my all-time favorites, the downright nasty “Double Talkin’ Jive,” the power ballad “November Rain” and then the underrated “Dead Horse,” after which we enter epic territory with “Coma.” When all is said and done, “Civil War” may be the most weighty, relevant, powerful Illusion song of them all, and Guns’ cover of Bob Dylan’s “Knockin’ on Heaven’s Door” ain’t far behind, so I think inserting the comparatively brief and breezy nostalgia of “Yesterdays” between them is necessary, especially with the venomous “Get in the Ring” waiting on deck. Heading down the final stretch, I’ve always been a sucker for the piano-rolling-thunder of “Breakdown,” the Arabian-infused perfection of “Pretty Tied Up,” the tireless clickety-clack of “Locomotive” and the maudlin sweetness of “So Fine.” But none of these can scale the grandeur of the majestic piece de resistance “Estranged.” The late ’90s caused many Guns N’ Roses fans to forget just how magical the band had been during its heyday, so this condensed reworking of Use Your Illusion is one heck of a reminder.

1. “Right Next Door To Hell”
2. “Back Off Bitch”
3. “Double Talkin’ Jive”
4. “November Rain”
5. “Dead Horse”
6. “Coma”
7. “Civil War”
8. “Yesterdays”
9. “Knockin’ On Heaven’s Door”
10. “Get In The Ring”
11. “Breakdown”
12. “Pretty Tied Up”
13. “Locomotive”
14. “So Fine”
15. “Estranged”

Kory Grow wrote:Inside Guns N' Roses' History-Making 'Use Your Illusion' Albums

In April 1990, the classic lineup of Guns N' Roses played its final show. The occasion was the nationally televised Farm Aid concert, a disastrous set that included, among several bizarre highlights, Steven Adler drunkenly belly-flopping in the general direction of his drum set only to miss by four feet, and Axl Rose ending the live broadcast with a climactic "Good fuckin' night." It was the mark of a band breaking apart.

Amazingly, though, the imploding GN'R were in the midst of an artistic surge. One of the songs played at Farm Aid (in a version hampered by Adler's inability to learn it) was "Civil War," a sweeping epic that would eventually open the second disc of the massive 30-song, two-and-a-half-hour opus they were hard at work on throughout 1990 and '91. Slash would later liken Use Your Illusion I and II to the Beatles' White Album (though "maybe not as good"), a titanic mix of gritty ragers, passionate rock-opera ballads and decadent screeds – from the failed-relationship triptych of "Don't Cry," "November Rain" and "Estranged" to the rock-critic indictment "Get in the Ring" to the misogynistic double-header of "Bad Obsession" and "Back Off Bitch." "Thirty-five of the most self-indulgent Guns N' Roses songs," Slash said. "For most bands, it would take four to six years to come up with this much stuff." Like the White Album, it was brilliance created amid collapse.

The band began seriously considering a follow-up to Appetite for Destruction in the summer of 1989, during a fruitful writing session that took place in Chicago. Izzy Stradlin, who had recently sobered up and often traveled separately from his bandmates, was especially productive. "Izzy has brought in eight songs – at least," Rose said in 1990. "Slash has brought in a whole album. I've brought in an album. Duff [McKagan] knows everybody's material backwards. So we've got, like, 35 songs we like, and we want to put them all out, and we're determined to do that." Discussing his newfound sobriety, Stradlin reflected, "I just reached a point where I said, 'I'm gonna kill myself. Why die for this shit?' "

The Chicago meeting spawned, among other songs, "Estranged" (about Rose's divorce from Erin Everly, daughter of rock & roller Don Everly), the rocker "Bad Apples" and the bondage jaunt "Pretty Tied Up." While there, they also fleshed out "Get in the Ring," the frustration anthem "Dead Horse," McKagan's tribute to deceased New York Doll Johnny Thunders "So Fine" and the doomy, 10-minute headbanger "Coma," notable for Rose's most dramatic and literal lyric in the GN'R catalogue: "Pleeease understaaand me."

GN'R began recording in earnest in January 1990, a little over a year after the release of Lies, with an attempt at capturing "Civil War," a tune they'd sketched out in 1988 and later donated to a compilation benefiting Romanian orphans. Immediately, Adler's drug problem became an insurmountable obstacle. Addicted to heroin, he began nodding off at his kit. "I said to Slash, 'Dude, I'm so sick that I can't do it right now,'" the drummer once recalled. "And he said, 'We can't waste the money. We got to do it now.' "

After consulting with lawyers, the bandmates put Adler on probation, and within a matter of months, they'd kicked him out altogether. "He was so messed up he couldn't pull off the drum tracks," Slash said. "And he would lie to us [about getting clean]. We'd go over to his place and find drugs behind the toilet, under the sink."

Nevertheless, the band pushed forward. It solved the drummer problem by recruiting Matt Sorum, of hard rockers the Cult – a band whose affinity for Stones-y riffing and trippy lyrics put them in the same league as GN'R at the time. "He was fucking amazing," Slash wrote in his autobiography, recalling a Cult show he attended in April 1990.

Around the same time, Rose brought in keyboardist Dizzy Reed. Reed had known the group since its earliest days, when a band he was in practiced in a space next to GN'R's studio. In early 1990, he called Rose in a panic. Reed, who'd previously auditioned for GN'R, told the singer he'd soon be homeless; Rose offered him a job. "They fucking saved my life," Reed said. Reed would become the only musician other than Rose to stay in the band in the years leading up to its current reunion.

With the new lineup in place, work continued more smoothly. The first tune they recorded with Sorum was a cover of Bob Dylan's "Knockin' on Heaven's Door," for the soundtrack to the 1990 Tom Cruise racing movie, Days of Thunder. "We would get to the studio at noon," Sorum recalls. "We were serious about the work ethic. We'd cut a song and then take a break at one of our favorite bars for a drink or two and then cut another track or two. We never did a lot of takes of a song. We'd get it in two to three takes." They also recorded a number of covers during the sessions, some of which showed up on "The Spaghetti Incident?"; among them was a version of Wings' James Bond anthem "Live and Let Die," which Rose once called "Welcome to the Jungle 2."

Digging deep into their history, Guns revived several holdovers from the Appetite for Destruction days, and earlier. Even though Slash would later say the bass-thwacking rocker "You Could Be Mine" was too reminiscent of Appetite to fit the mood of the Illusion albums, it would eventually appear in the 1991 movie Terminator 2 and be released as a single. There was also the punky, two-and-a-half-minute "Perfect Crime," which Stradlin had brought to their first-ever preproduction session.

Then there were Rose's ballads, ostensibly kept off Appetite so as not to soften Guns N' Roses' image. Rose once claimed that "Don't Cry" was the first song he'd written for the band. "It was [about] a girl that Izzy had gone out with," Rose said, "and I was really attracted to her, and they split up. I was sitting outside the Roxy, and I was really in love with this person and she was realizing this wasn't gonna work – she wanted to do other things, and she was telling me goodbye and I sat down and just started crying, and she was telling me, 'Don't cry.' The next night, we got together and wrote the song in five minutes."

The band ultimately put different versions of "Don't Cry" on each of the Use Your Illusion discs, an "original lyrics" version on the first volume, retelling Rose's story, and an "alternate lyrics" take done impromptu in the studio, in which the breakup is dealt with more forcefully. "I prefer the new version because the original is kind of like a nostalgia piece for me," Rose later recalled.

Another song Rose had been holding onto since at least 1986 was "November Rain." In 1988, he effusively told Rolling Stone about how proud he was of the track, threatening, "If it's not recorded right, I'll quit the business." The singer would later explain that "November Rain" was "about not wanting to be in a state of having to deal with unrequited love." In the years leading up to the Illusion sessions, they'd demo'ed it with guitar and solo piano – one version was 18 minutes long – but the song didn't come into its own until Rose workshopped it in the studio, carefully creating tones to replicate a full symphony on his keyboards.

"We listened to Elton John for inspiration for the drum fills and overall tone," Sorum says. "I vividly remember sitting with Axl listening to [John's] 'Don't Let the Sun Go Down on Me' and Axl pointing out the style of the tom fills."

For the spoken-word sections of the uptempo rocker "The Garden," Guns N' Roses turned to an old friend. Shock rocker Alice Cooper had taken the band out on his Nightmare Returns Tour in 1986, and Rose, Slash and Stradlin accompanied him on a 1988 re-recording of his hit "Under My Wheels." A couple of years later, Cooper got a call from Rose at two in the morning.

"I'm used to doing things in an hour," Cooper says. "I know Axl likes to take his time, but if you can't get a vocal like that in an hour, there's something wrong. So I told him upfront, 'I have a tee-off time tomorrow at seven. We're doing this in about an hour.' I did it in two takes. I don't know how long it took him to do all of his takes, but it ended up sounding really, really good."

In an omen of the darkness surrounding the band, police discovered a dismembered arm and head in the dumpster behind the studio where GN'R were recording. Stradlin would reference the incident in the sinewy "Double Talkin' Jive." "Izzy had gone back to Indiana, and when the police found the body parts, he flew back out and sang the opening line and the final vocal," Sorum recalls.

Violence seemed to follow Guns N' Roses out of the studio, too, as they toured while still working on the records. Rose's wife Erin divorced him in the middle of recording Use Your Illusion, accusing him of assault, and the band toured frequently between sessions, occasionally inciting riots by walking offstage as Rose had done in St. Louis after a fight with a fan. "We all gathered in the dressing room ... we'd open a door and there was yelling, we'd open another and see people on stretchers, cops with blood all over them, gurneys everywhere and pandemonium," Slash recalled.

"After we left the stage, the crowd turned into an angry mob," Sorum recalls. "Our crew was defending our gear through flying chairs and debris as riot squads arrived with tear gas. We tried to go back onstage but ended up in a van and drove to Chicago, still in our stage clothes, not really sure of the outcome of what had transpired. It was a ride I'll never forget. Only when I turned on the news the following day to see the damage and destruction did I realize what had happened and the frenzy that had injured many of our fans."

When they were released in September 1991 – a week before Nirvana's game-changing LP Nevermind – the Use Your Illusion albums were immediate hits, selling more than 14 million copies combined. "There's a ton of material we want to get out, and the problem is, how does one release all of it?" Slash said of the unusual twin-disc offering. "You don't make some kid go out and buy a record for $70 if it's your second record."

The gambit made history: No other artist had put out two records on the same day and claimed the top two spots on the Billboard album chart before. "We poured everything into those albums," Sorum says of their creation. "The music was all that mattered."

Brian Ives wrote:Guns N Roses’ ‘Use Your Illusion’: A Look Back at Izzy Stradlin’s Contributions

Izzy Stradlin', who left the band right after the albums, wrote, co-wrote and sang some of the best GNR songs, and it wasn't the same without him.

On Saturday (September 17), Guns N Roses’ dual 1991 albums Use Your Illusion I and Use Your Illusion II turn 25. The anniversary comes just as GNR has wrapped up a hugely successful reunion tour that saw founding members Slash and Duff McKagan back in the fold. It marked the first time that Axl Rose, Slash and Duff performed together since 1993. Absent from the reunion, however, was founding guitarist Izzy Stradlin’, who quit the band in 1991.

This summer’s Guns N Roses reunion could have included the entire original lineup: singer Axl Rose, bassist Duff McKagan, drummer Steven Adler and guitarists Slash and Izzy Stradlin’. Adler joined the band for a few songs at a couple of shows, but Stradlin’, who has filled in with various versions of the band over the years, was a no-show. In a recent interview, Rose said Adler couldn’t do the tour due to a recent back surgery. Stradlin’, however, flaked out, according to the frontman. “I don’t even know what to say,” Rose said. “We make arrangements, and then he goes and does other things. With Izzy, you never know what to expect.” Which seemed like a plausible explanation, as the guitarist has a history of not wanting to tour. But Stradlin’ weighed in on the interview pretty quickly. “Bulls—,” he tweeted. “They didn’t want to split the loot equally. Simple as that.”

After listening to the Use Your Illusion albums and reading the liner notes, one could make a good argument that Stradlin’ is worth his equal share. Prior to those albums, the band split songwriting credits evenly. On the band’s debut, 1987’s classic Appetite for Destruction, Rose, Slash, Stradlin’, McKagan and Alder were all co-writers. This started to change with ’88’s G N’R Lies. Of the older tracks, we learned that the nasty, dirty “Move to the City” was co-written by Izzy with Chris Weber (from pre-GNR band Hollywood Rose). Of the new songs, three were co-written by the entire band. The massive hit “Patience,” however, was a Rose/Stradlin’ co-write.

If you made a playlist of songs from the Illusion albums and included only songs that Stradlin’ wrote, co-wrote or sang on, you’d have a pretty classic album. Let’s go through the songs.

“Right Next Door to Hell” led off I (which boasted more of Stradlin’s influence than II). A co-written track with Rose and Hanoi Rocks associate Timo Kaltio, the song had all the punk rock spit and bile of Appetite and showed none of the Queen-like aspirations that would surface later on the Illusions. It did, however, give a hint of Rose’s paranoia: the lyrics were allegedly inspired by a conflict Rose had with a former neighbor.

From there, we move to track two, one of the band’s Stonesy-est moments, “Dust N’ Bones,” which sees Stradlin’s debut as lead vocalist; he co-wrote the song with Slash and McKagan; Rose simply plays piano and sings backing vocals. It’s a look into what Velvet Revolver may have sounded like if Stradlin’ stuck around and they never approached Scott Weiland. A Stradlin’-led band with Slash, McKagan and drummer Matt Sorum may have lacked some panache without a frontman, but they would surely have been one of the most a–kickin’ bands of the past two decades. At any rate, “Dust N Bones” is one of the greatest, and most underrated, songs in GNR’s cannon.

After the McCartney cover “Live and Let Die,” it’s the album’s first single, the ballad “Don’t Cry,” another Rose-Stradlin’ co-write. These guys clearly had a rapport, particularly with ballads. It’s too bad they don’t write together anymore.

Track five is “Perfect Crime,” an Axl/Slash/Izzy co-write which is quintessentially Stradlin’, combining Stones swagger with Ramones/Clash/Sex Pistols attitude.

Next, a song written solely by Stradlin’, who sings lead: the acoustic kiss-off “You Ain’t the First.” It wouldn’t have sounded out of place on The Stones’ Exile on Main Street, or at least as an Exile outtake.

“Bad Obsession” is a Stradlin’ co-write with GNR associate West Arkeen and is as close to Aerosmith as Guns ever got without covering them. The song featured Hanoi Rocks frontman Michael Monroe adding some very Tyler-esque harmonica, and also saxophone reminiscent of “Same Old Song and Dance.” It was a great, and very rock and roll, and its use of a sax was no easy task. Guns tried to incorporate horns into their touring band after the Illusions were released; by then, Stradlin’ had quit. The horns (and backing singers) made GNR seem like a Vegas act.

Side two of the album featured less of Izzy’s contributions, although a highlight of the Illusions is the Stradlin’ written and sung “Double Talkin’ Jive,” another of the band’s most punk rock moments. And by “punk” we’re talking ’70s and early ’80s punk, not the later hardcore strain. Everything that Stradlin’ did, then and now, has a swing and swagger.

Izzy’s final contribution to Use Your Illusion I is “Bad Apples,” a collab with Axl, Slash and Duff. One of the group’s funkiest songs, it also veers closely to Aerosmith territory, so much so that you could actually hear Steven Tyler singing it. It’s proof of what these four guys were capable of when they worked together.

Use Your Illusion II was less Izzy-centric, but his contributions were pretty massive. Like I, the second song featured Stradlin’ on lead vocals: this time it was on “14 Years,” a co-write with Rose, who sang backing vocals. Had Izzy stayed with the band, and had the band continued, there would have been a good case for giving him 2-3 songs per album (and his solo career provides a couple of potential Guns gems).

“Pretty Tied Up,” another Stradlin’ contribution, was his one dud on the album. And then there was one more Rose/Stradlin’ song: “You Could Be Mine,” a song written in the ’80s that would have fit right in on Appetite for Destruction.

Stradlin’ brought a sense of Stonesy/New York Dolls swagger to Guns N Roses; he seemed to care neither for heavy metal, hardcore punk or the near-prog Queen influences that his bandmates had; he gave the band their swing. With him, they weren’t just a “rock” band: they were rock and roll.

Without his contributions: well, they were still great. A version of the Illusions albums minus Izzy’s songwriting contributions would still include their classics “November Rain,” “Civil War” and “Yesterdays,” as well as underrated album tracks “Dead Horse,” “Coma,” “Locomotive (Complicity)” and “Estranged.” And that’s a pretty solid album. But it wouldn’t compare to the alternate-universe single-album Illusion that only has Izzy’s songs. Check this track list: “Right Next Door To Hell,” “Dust N’ Bones,” “Don’t Cry,” “Perfect Crime,” “You Ain’t the First,” “Bad Obsession,” “Double Talkin’ Jive,” “Bad Apples,” “14 Years,” “You Could Be Mine,” and, OK, “Pretty Tied Up.”

It’s sad that the Axl/Slash/Duff/Izzy version of Guns N Roses (whether with Steven Adler or Matt Sorum on drums) said all they had to say in their brief discography. But it’s fair to say that Izzy Stradlin’s contribution was major, and was far greater than his rhythm guitar playing (which itself is an essential element of the band’s early sound).

By most reports, Guns N Roses’ summer concerts were great. They could have been greater: it would have been awesome to see Izzy take the mic for a few songs (a la Keith Richards at Rolling Stones concerts). Guns fans deserve to see performances of “Dust N Bones” and “14 Years.” Maybe next summer.

Jon Hotten wrote:The chaotic, crazed story of Guns N' Roses' Use Your Illusion

Drugs, rifts, hirings, firings, and the sound of a band falling apart. Slash, Duff McKagan, Steven Adler and more tell the story of GN’R’s Use Your Illusion. This article originally appeared in Classic Rock #160.

"We got these gigs supporting the Rolling Stones. We’re massive Stones fans, so that’s great for us. We get down there and the Stones each have their own limo, their own trailer, their own lawyer – you know, Mick has one, Keith has one, Charlie has one… I remember turning around to Izzy and saying: ‘Man, we’ll never be like that.’ Of course, six months later, that was us.”

Duff McKagan leans forward in his chair and uses both hands to push his hair back from his forehead. Two decades on, and he’s still somewhat bewildered by the speed with which things unravelled for the five original members of Guns N’ Roses. The last to leave, hanging on heroically until August 1997, he tries hard to reconcile the memories of those early years with the train wreck that was to come.

“You know,” he says, “I’m still not sure that I can tell you exactly what happened, and I was there.”



For a few brief, bright months in 1991 – beginning on the 17th of September at midnight, to be precise – Guns N’ Roses achieved that rare state: they were the biggest band in the world. At that moment, Donald Trump was in a limousine with five models, heading for Tower Records in Manhattan, on his way to buy Use Your Illusion I and II, the new albums that were, in a music industry first, being released simultaneously. Stores in every major city were opening at 12 in order to sell them. Slash, who was burned out by their creation and about to take a holiday in Tanzania, interrupted his journey to the airport to stop off at Tower on Sunset Boulevard to watch the records go on sale from behind the two-way mirror in the back of the shop, the very same mirror from which store detectives had arrested him for stealing cassettes ten years earlier.

“It was,” he says ruefully, “a magic little moment. Then I took off and went to Africa and got away from it. I went out to the Maasi Mara for a couple of weeks, and that’s about as far removed from ‘rock star’ as you can get.’

When he returned, Use Your Illusion II had sold 770,000 copies and was at No.1 on the US Billboard chart, while Use Your Illusion I had sold another 685,000 and stood at number two.



“Yeah, we had overnight success,” says Alan Niven, the man who managed Guns N’ Roses almost to that point. “It took us three years. The momentum you try and create then creates its own momentum. If you’re Sisyphus and you’re rolling the rock up the side of the mountain it’s hard freaking work. Then you get the rock to the peak of the mountain and suddenly the damn thing rolls away from you. Your labour turns into lost control.”

His control was gone already. He had been fired by Guns N’ Roses months before the albums were released. Just as it would with Slash, Duff, Izzy, Steven and Axl, success was about to extract its price from Alan Niven.

“It put me in a real black pit at one point,” he admits. “It did all of us. Look at what happened. They never made another meaningful record. Izzy was gone three months after I was. It just devolved from that point, because from then on, the shift was between a young up-and-coming band to something that is more recognisable today, which is basically, it’s Axl’s band, and you can be sidemen for as long as I pay you.”



Guns N’ Roses had always been fuck-ups, it was part of their appeal. Tom Zutaut, the young A&R man who’d signed the band to Geffen, was fighting not to have them dropped before they’d even released an album. He’d almost had to beg Alan Niven to take them on as they drifted towards self-immolation. Niven had agreed, in part because “the situation was so fucked up I couldn’t make it worse”.

Niven’s managerial strategy was based on the one that Peter Mensch and Cliff Burnstein had used with Metallica, another uncompromising, hard-sell of a band; underground at first, and then maybe gold with album number two and if they got really lucky, platinum after that.

“Nobody knew it would explode as it did,” says Niven. “Anyone who says they did is certifiable.”

He planned to build a profile in the UK to gain credibility in America. When the band appeared at Donington in 1987, they had sold 7,000 records. A week later, it was 75,000. By the Spring of 1988, Appetite For Destruction had irresistible momentum behind it, and all bets and strategies were off. The results of selling millions and millions of records were disorientating, terrifying even.

“I don’t want to speak on the other guys’ behalf,” says Slash, “but I went from a gypsy troubadour-type kid without anything, through touring with Guns and all those experiences just basically living on the road and never really living anywhere else, and then just sort of thrown into superstardom and not knowing how to handle that. Not having any domestic skills for living at home. Just not knowing which way to turn and not knowing whether I was happy or not. And then pulling into a major drug depression and having to get it all back together to go in and make the second record and being completely disjointed.”



“We all bought our houses and we all had our friends, and our friends would be saying: ‘You’re the glue that holds the band together’,” nods Duff McKagan. “And we’re all getting that. You don’t know what to think. It’s never happened to you before. The record finally broke in the States a year after everywhere else. All of a sudden we came back to LA, and everyone in the clubs, they’re all dressed like us. Imagine coming back and you’re a cultural phenomenon. People are dressing like you. Your music is being played on the radio all the time. You walk into a grocery store and you’re on the cover of Rolling Stone, and people see that magazine cover and they see you and they’re freaking out. This is in the grocery store I’ve always gone in…”

Alan Niven didn’t need to be a student of rock’n’roll history to understand what would happen next. He fought fires, and while he did, he bought time with a mini-album, GN’R: Lies.

“One of the things I’m proud of is that at least none of the band members died on my watch,” he says, his voice slower now. “That took a lot of effort. The bottom line is, you have to help them fight the battle, but only they can win the war. Slash went cold turkey in my home one time. I cleaned the vomit from his mouth, made sure he got clean. Then as soon as he’s clean, he calls a car and goes straight to his dealer. That was the sort of thing you were dealing with. You’d call Slash, say: ‘Come into the office, you’ve got an interview with Guitar Player magazine’. There was no interview. He’d come in and you’d stick him in a car, fly him off to Hawaii and put him on a golf course where he couldn’t score. We’d do that sort of thing.

“I put Steven on a plane one night to go to Hawaii, and he’s sitting in first class yelling: ‘We’re all going to fucking die… the plane’s going to fucking crash…’ Of course, they invite Mr Adler to exit the plane at that point, and so he’s back into LA and he can get to his dealer and his dealer can get to him and we’re fucked all over again.”



Bands exist as delicate ecosystems. Change in one part can affect others in unexpected and unpredictable ways. As Steven Adler has argued long and hard in recent years, GN’R and Appetite For Destruction had something unique, a rough magic that rose up from its constituent parts. “The five of us, we’re brothers,” he says, even now. “And what do brothers do? They fight.”

Guns N’ Roses were fuck-ups, and the biggest fuck-up in Guns N’ Roses was Steven. “He was suffering the worst and couldn’t pull it back,” says Duff, who remains in contact with the drummer. “We had this unwritten sort of code – pull it back when it’s sensible, when it’s time to record or time to play a show. Pull it back. Check yourself. There had been a few times where we’d check each other. You know: ‘hey dude…’ And that’s all you’d have to say. It was a sort of honour amongst thieves. But Steven wasn’t able to pull it back time and time again. The irony wasn’t lost, even then. Slash and I told him quite a few times: ‘Dude, it’s us talking to you. If we’re telling you you’re getting too fucked up, you’re getting too fucked up. Look who’s talking to you. We’re the guys that everyone else is worried about, and we’re worried about you.’ It was really heartbreaking. We warned him too many times.”

“It was totally regrettable,” says Slash. “But the band finally got to the place where we wanted to make a record, which was a hard enough place to get to… We’re talking about the span of about a year, which to us was like a lifetime, and Steven… we could not get him back to front. We were resigned to the fact that he wasn’t going to be able to do it in the time frame that we needed to get going, because we might miss the bus. We might fall apart again and take another year to get it together.”

In the summer of 1990, the window seemed to be open. But every time Adler went to the studio, he blew it – too drunk, too stoned to function. The band had a lawyer draw up a legal document informing him that he would be fired. They thought it would scare him but it had little effect. “All the way up to getting Matt Sorum to play on the record, we thought that would get Steven back,” says Duff. “Then we realised, it’s just not going to happen. It’s just not. I wouldn’t be being honest if I told you I knew exactly the point.”



“In no way was it minor,” says Alan Niven. “Firing a member of a band is a pain in the ass. It was incredibly painful and frustrating. I’ve got to confess I’m still capable of a flash of red hot anger with Steven at that.”

Adler’s own recollections of the moment are fractured, perhaps understandably given the state he was in. “Man, I was fucked up, and I have never denied that, I couldn’t really deny it because it was pretty fuckin’ obvious…” he says. “But I wasn’t the only one. I remember one day Slash called me to go to the studio and play Civil War, I think it was. I’d been given an opiate blocker by a doctor. I still had opiates in my system and it made me so sick. I must have tried, like, 20 times to play it, but I couldn’t. I was very weak and I didn’t have my timing. Slash and Duff were shouting at me and telling me I was fucked up.

“I got a call a few weeks after that and I had to go to the office and there was all these stacks of papers, contracts, for me to sign, and I realised that I was being fired. It ended up with me having to go to court to get my royalties and my writing credits.” [In 1993, Adler was awarded a reported $2.25m in an out-of-court settlement for his contribution to the band prior to Use Your Illusion. He does not have any writing credits on UYI].

Adler was sacked by Guns N’ Roses on July 11, 1990 ostensibly for being unable, through drink and drugs, to fulfil his duties. Yet for many years, a rumour has circulated that it was an incident in which Axl Rose’s wife, Erin Everly, OD-ed at Adler’s house that soured his relationship with Axl. In a 1992 interview, Rose claimed that Everly had been found ‘naked’, and was taken to the emergency room. “I had to spend a night with her in an intensive care unit because her heart had stopped, thanks to Steven,” he said. “She was hysterical and he shot her up with a speedball. She had never done jack shit as far as drugs go, and he shoots her up with a mixture of heroin and cocaine?”



In a 2006 interview with the Metal Sludge website, Adler denied giving Everly drugs, claiming that he was jamming in his house with Hanoi Rocks guitarist Andy McCoy when McCoy’s wife turned up with an already intoxicated Everly: “I called the ambulance and saved her,” claimed Adler, “[and] this bitch [McCoy’s wife] tells Axl I gave her heroin. He calls me up and says he’s coming over with a shotgun to kill me…”

“I kept myself from doing anything to him,” Axl told Del James in ’92. “I kept the man from being killed by members of her family. I saved him from having to go to court, because her mother wanted him held responsible for his actions.”

“Axl was fucking convinced that Erin had been overdosed,” says Niven today. “Well that’s going to go down well, isn’t it? That really helped everybody. Is it any surprise we got to the point that we had to seriously consider getting someone else?”

With Steven Adler went that ecosystem. Other drummers could drum, but they couldn’t drum like Steven. “Let me say this,” adds Niven. “Steven is not the world’s best drummer by any stretch. Duff even had to show him what to play sometimes. But he had a quality that he brought to the band that anybody would accept as being part of the magic. He had such an enthusiasm for what he was doing. Matt is a competent drummer but he can’t replicate that. He has a great consistency but he also has a heavy hand. He cannot match the feel that Steven had. So did we want Steven to go? Fuck no.”



Izzy Stradlin, whose gloriously offhand guitar playing itself lent such groove to the music of Guns N’ Roses, also felt Adler’s absence diminished the band: “[It was] a big musical difference,” he told Musician in 1992. “The first time I realized what Steve did for the band was when he broke his hand in Michigan [in 1987]. Tried to punch through a wall and busted his hand. So we had Fred Coury come in from Cinderella for the Houston show. Fred played technically good and steady, but the songs sounded just awful. They were written with Steve playing the drums and his sense of swing was the push and pull that give the songs their feel. When that was gone, it was just… unbelievable, weird. Nothing worked…”

Adler’s replacement, Matt Sorum, was no stranger to a little chemical enhancement himself, as he told Mick Wall: “Here I was replacing the drug addict drummer, right? But he did heroin and I had cocaine.” Nonetheless, Sorum had control of his lifestyle. It is only in the last two years that Steven Adler has been able to acknowledge that he did not, and that his failings had played a role in his dismissal. It’s a process that began with an appearance on a reality TV show, Celebrity Rehab With Dr Drew, in 2008.

“I blamed Slash and Duff and Izzy and Axl for my downfall for a lot of years, but when I started working with Dr Drew Pinsky, I learned that I got to talk about these things and get them out of my system,” Adler says. “I needed to apologise to Slash for blaming him for everything that happened to me. Once I did that, it was like this huge weight lifted off my body… Now I can move on.”

“Looking back,” says Slash. “I think that losing Steven was one of the major components in the disintegration of the original band, but I think that was more Axl anyway. Steven was just the tip of the iceberg.”



One thing that Guns N’ Roses always had was music. They may have been stoned, but they were not standing still. Unlike many second records, material was not a problem. November Rain, perhaps the pivotal song on Use Your Illusion, pre-dated Axl joining the band. A 20-minute acoustic demo of the tune was recorded very early on at Sound City in Los Angeles. Don’t Cry was, Axl remembered, the first song the band ever wrote together, a song about a girlfriend of Izzy’s: “I was really attracted to her. They split and I was sitting outside the Roxy, and you know, I was like really in love with this person, and she was realising this wasn’t going to work, she was telling me goodbye. We wrote it in about five minutes.”

Alan Niven had insisted that some material from the Appetite For Destruction sessions be held over: included in that was You Could Be Mine, Back Off Bitch, Bad Obsession and The Garden. In addition, Slash, Izzy and Duff were all prolific, and fast, writers.

“It was so splintered and such a struggle but I remember we finally got together after just a major rollercoaster ride of ups and downs,” says Slash. “It was at my house on Walnut Drive in the Laurel Canyon hills. We compiled 30 fucking songs, more than 30 songs, in one evening. That was the one time in all of it that I remember that the band felt like itself. Just the guys like I was always used to – Izzy, Duff and Axl. We managed to put a focus on 36 songs. That was the only group writing session we had where we were all together in one room. That was a very poignant moment. And the next thing you know we were looking for drummers. I remembered seeing Matt with The Cult and thinking that he was the only good drummer I’d seen, and calling him and having him come down. We started rehearsing this material and next thing you know we’re in the studio. Getting the basic tracks together so that we could play them front to back actually happened really quickly. But that’s a hell of a lot of material and it was an epic journey."



Slash had an 18-minute song, Coma, that he had written: “while I was completely stoned”. Duff had So Fine and Izzy had his usual raft of drop-dead cool rock’n’roll songs: Pretty Tied Up, Double Talkin’ Jive, You Ain’t The First, 14 Years and Dust N’ Bones.

“And,” Slash remembers, “there were other songs that Axl had, that I had never heard before. Songs that he had written with West Arkeen, back in the day.” Arkeen, a wild character of the sort you only seemed to get back in the 1980s who died of an overdose in 1997, had a co-credit on The Garden, Bad Obsession and Yesterdays, as well as It’s So Easy from Appetite For Destruction. Axl’s friend Del James also received a credit on Yesterdays and The Garden.

“I was good friends with West, but I never wrote with him,” says Slash. “We hung out and jammed a couple of times but there was only a couple of songs I was ever around where I was there with Axl and we were all playing together. West and Axl and Del and Duff, that was more what that was like. I didn’t mind. As long as the song was good and I could do something with it. I remember It’s So Easy being one of those songs that when I first heard in its original form I was like, ‘whatever’, but then I got to it and changed it to what it sounds more like now. I remember The Garden being really good. But no, I didn’t mind too much. I was usually too preoccupied doing whatever debauched shit I was doing. If everybody was busy doing that, nobody was looking over my shoulder while I was doing what I was doing.”

Although the band’s existence was precarious, their situation remained extraordinary. Appetite… continued to sell in its millions, and the non-appearance of its follow-up gave Alan Niven leverage to do things that had never been done before. Success in the music business, like success in most businesses, is built on having something that someone else wants.



“I’m getting a lot of pressure from an individual called David Geffen, saying: ‘When am I going to get my fucking record?’” says Niven. “His agenda was that he wanted to release the record before selling DGC so that he could benefit from the sale of the record and then sell his company. Then when you estimate that we were figuring Use Your Illusion would probably do about a hundred million dollars in worldwide commerce in the first week gross, you can imagine there’s a certain amount of pressure. David does have his reputation.”

Regardless of that, Niven decided that he wanted to renegotiate the band’s contract with Geffen. He’d been told that the managements of both Whitesnake and Aerosmith had tried their luck after selling five million records each, and had been turned down flat. David Geffen was notoriously hard-nosed, but then so was Niven. The undelivered Use Your Illusion was his weapon, his nuclear option. At a dinner with Geffen’s label president Eddie Rosenblatt, he pressed the button.

“After I’d made sure that Eddie had had at least half a dozen glasses of wine, I leaned over to him and said: ‘I hate to spoilt the evening and don’t freak out on me now, but you need to take a message to David, and that is until you renegotiate there will be no record’.” Niven got his deal. In return, he delivered an elegant and lucrative solution to the abundance of material that Guns N’ Roses had written. Instead of being a double album, the kind of bloated artistic and commercial proposition that had stalled and even sunk careers, Use Your Illusion would come as two single, standalone records, released on the same day. It was a classic music business masterstroke that allowed the band to claim it as an altruistic gesture to their fans, while providing not one but two revenue streams for everyone involved.

“We had a huge cloud to get out from under and that was the incredible sales of Appetite,” Niven says. “I was very nervous of a situation where we might sell two million double albums, having sold at that point something like 12 million on Appetite. I had a meeting with Rosenblatt, and he pushed a pencil and a piece of paper at me and said, ‘Write down what you think we’re going to do’. Believe it or not, I wrote down that I thought we’d do four million of each single album, which meant we could say we’d sold eight million albums. That, I thought, would have a sense of continuity as opposed to drop-off.”



What Niven and the band also gained was a sense of scale, an idea that Use Your Illusion was more than just a record (or rather two), it was an event, a statement. It set an already singular band further apart. Along with the changing line-up and the new scope of the music, the band’s aesthetic was shifting too. Out were late 80s stylings like skulls and bones and guns and crucifixes, a visual language that anchored the band to a certain time and place. In came something far more worthy of them: art.

Axl Rose had become enthused by Mark Kostabi, a controversial New Yorker who’d taken Andy Warhol’s idea of an art factory to a new level, opening a studio called Kostabi World and having teams of ‘assistants’ turn out thousands of paintings. “Axl really fell in love with his work,” says Niven. “But the thing about Mark Kostabi was that he was playing the art bullshit game. He had other people paint basic backgrounds and then he stole images from classic paintings and stuck them on the backgrounds. Axl loved his conceit, loved what he was doing and bought these paintings that he wanted to use for the covers. And paid a fortune for them.”

The Use Your Illusion sleeves were based on a detail from Raphael’s painting The School Of Athens, a priceless Renaissance masterpiece that hangs in the Vatican. It was completed in 1511, which, as Niven swiftly realised, meant that it was out of copyright by several centuries. “I’m looking at it and thinking, ‘Great – when it comes to the merchandising, we don’t have to pay Kostabi or anybody else a dime: these things are in the public domain’,” says Niven. “Those images that Axl paid a huge fortune for, he could have basically had for free. It always made me smile to think of Axl writing a huge cheque to this guy Kostabi when he could have had Del James paint similar backgrounds, cut out the same image, stick it on and give Del a six pack.”



Although the final album credits acknowledge a span of two years and seven recording studios, one of the most remarkable elements of the Use Your Illusion set is the speed at which they were recorded in their basic form.

“I was really happy with a lot of the material and I think we went in to do basic tracks and with a new drummer we did 36 songs in 36 days, so we weren’t fucking around,” says Slash. “After the basic tracks were done, I’d spend three weeks doing guitars, which for 30 songs was actually pretty fast. I was sometimes doing two songs in one day. But everything hit a brick wall when it came to doing the synthesizer stuff, and I never agreed with doing the synthesizer stuff anyway. Although I think some of it is brilliant, it was part of the new way, which was the beginning of the end. That was the beginning of the whole process taking forever. It was like a lot of days were not working, some days it was working, and most of the record was finished. It didn’t really need all the rest of it. That was the biggest disagreement for me.”

Izzy Stradlin was also exiling himself, distanced by the scale of the recording. “I did the basic tracks, then he [Slash] did his tracks, like a month or two by himself,” he said. “Then came Axl’s vocal parts. I went back to Indiana…”

“Well Axl’s a… perfectionist,” says Duff slowly. “That’s what makes him great. The end product’s great, but it gets maddening to work with that person. There’s no hashing out with them. November Rain in particular, the song was torturing him. He was happy he was finally finished with it. It wasn’t really characteristic of the band.”



“Axl had this vision he was going to create,” Matt Sorum told Mick Wall. “We’d start at noon, the work ethic was cool. There was a lot of alcohol around, but the heroin thing had definitely subsided at that point – Slash had quit, Izzy had quit. We were dabbling in cocaine and partying rituals… But it was never really cool to do a lot of drugs in front of Axl.”

But as the sessions became more drawn out and splintered, “It was later nights,” says Sorum. “We’d start at six or seven. Axl would want to do November Rain and Don’t Cry, his songs.”

Hindsight is a beautiful thing. It is tempting to look back at the records through the prism of the band’s impending devolution and see Axl Rose taking control and exacting his revenge on the world, living out all of the rock star fantasies he had as a boy in Indiana. The truth was more complex.

“When he was younger, he played piano and composed on piano,” says Alan Niven. “I’d lay a bet that a record like Elton John’s Goodbye Yellow Brick Road and songs like Funeral For A Friend had a huge impact on him. He aspired to that level, and anybody who has a hero and aspires to match a hero also in their heart hopes to exceed their hero and validate their presence.”

So Use Your Illusion had November Rain and Estranged; big, ambitious pieces with themes that hinted at Rose’s obsessive nature: November Rain is a song about “having to deal with unrequited love”, he said. “Estranged is acknowledging it and being there. And having to figure out what to fucking do, it’s like being catapulted out into the universe and having no choice about it and having to figure out what the fuck are you gonna do because the things you wanted and worked for just cannot happen.”



Yet their grandeur was counterpointed by shorter, more violent tunes like Get In The Ring, Right Next Door To Hell and Back Off Bitch, songs that sought to settle explicit scores and that made no secret of the depths of rage that fuelled their writer. It was an area in which he already had form.

“I thought they were tiresome, small-minded and mean,” says Alan Niven. “I’d already been through One In A Million with him. But with the meanness and the vitriol – if you’re going to apply it, apply it to something big. He’d make his attacks on his next door neighbour or journalists, and I’m thinking, ‘Axl, this is the scope of your world?’”

Rose addressed such accusations directly in 1992: “Back Off Bitch is a 10-year-old song,” he said. “I’ve been doing a lot of work and found out I’ve had a lot of hatred for women. Basically, I’ve been rejected by my mother since I was a baby. She’s picked my stepfather over me ever since he was around and watched me get beaten by him. She stood back most of the time. Unless it got too bad, and then she’d come and hold you afterward. She wasn’t there for me. My grandmother had a problem with men. I’ve gone back and done the work and found out I overheard my grandma going off on men when I was four. And I’ve had problems with my own masculinity because of that. So I wrote about my feelings in the songs.”

Use Your Illusion I and II became records that said plenty about their time: they are indulgent, bloated and created by men who weren’t hearing the word ‘no’ too often. And yet they are also unafraid and unapologetic, and contain some of the best work GN’R ever produced. Interestingly, too, they lend perspective to the band’s two other major releases: a clear line can be drawn through them from Appetite For Destruction to Chinese Democracy.



Bitter, raunchy little rockers appear alongside romantic ballads, Izzy Stradlin’s loose and groovy riffs sit with Slash’s heroic piledrivers, Axl’s bleeding heart is on his sleeve one minute and being rammed down your throat the next.

“We knew we had to bury Appetite in some way,” Rose told Hit Parader, soon after their release. “There was no way to out-do that album, and if we didn’t outdo Appetite in one way or another it was going to take away from our success and the amount of power we had gained to do what we wanted. I’ve never really looked at it as two separate albums. I’ve always looked at it as an entire package. For me it fits together perfectly for the 30 songs in a row. Everything that we decided to record for the album made it.”

The records ran over one more bump in the road before they were done. Bob Clearmountain was hired to mix the tracks that Mike Clink had engineered. “Basically Axl moves into the studio with him, and God knows what that was like for Bob,” says Niven. “Mr control freak breathing down the back of your neck. Bob Clearmountain was one of my heroes, but the mixes had no life and vitality.”

Tom Zutaut suggested that Bill Price, who had almost produced Appetite For Destruction when the band had planned to record it in London, should try out for the job. Price delivered a “loud, in-your-face, heavily compressed” mix of Right Next Door To Hell as an audition piece, and got the gig.

“It was a very long process,” Price recalled. “The last half a dozen songs were recorded, overdubbed, vocal’ed and guitar’ed, what have you’ed, in random recording studios dotted about America when they had a day off between gigs because the tour had already started. My mixing mode then switched into flying around America with pocketfuls of DATs, playing it to the band backstage.”

“I never sit down and listen to records once they’re finished, so it’s been so long since I heard them,” says Slash. “In hindsight I can look back and think about things I disagreed with and this that and the other, but at the time, I was just so gung-ho to finally be productive and to have the whole band in some sort of state of harmony. But to this day I have always thought that, for me as a guitar player, it was a fun canvas to play on and I felt I played really well on those records. I was enjoying myself. Three weeks with Mike Clink playing guitars, that was a fucking blast.”



Alan Niven can still remember the long, lost weekend with Slash when he understood that things had changed. That delicate ecosystem that Steven Adler somehow had a part in maintaining was gone. When a butterfly flaps its wings on one side of the world…

“We make choices every day. With Use Your Illusion, Slash made a choice and I totally understood it, and to this day I don’t agree with it. One night, he and I were sitting alone in his house up in Laurel Canyon and he was really bemoaning what he thought Axl was doing to the band, and he was doing it in the context of the material he was writing. He felt it wasn’t Guns N’ Roses, he felt that he was being compromised by having to apply himself to it. He felt that one song of that kind of epic style might be appropriate, but so many? I looked at him and said: ‘You’ve got to express this’. And Slash looked at me and he said: ‘Listen, my father [an artist who designed album sleeves] has got a cupboard full of gold records, and he hasn’t got a pot to piss in.’ And that’s where he folded. From then on, Axl was in charge.”

Slash’s response is measured, guarded: “Well…” he says slowly, “I think that Axl’s always been difficult, but we managed. Because of the five individuals, and Alan, and Tom Zutaut, we managed to make it work. So you lose Steven, and then the Alan thing… I backed Alan all the way up to a certain point and then he did actually do something that set me off and I said: ‘I can’t fight for you any more’. But that was a volatile situation that was going to explode at some point. Alan wasn’t going to take Axl’s shit and Axl could not stand that, so it was a battle. I think in hindsight, although it wouldn’t have been any fun, but all we could have done differently was just to refuse Axl everything that he ever wanted. I don’t think it would have been very productive, but all things considered, what we ended up doing was going along with a lot of stuff just in order to be able to continue on, which built a monster. All I can see happening is that nothing would have happened, because it would have been at a standstill. I think we probably would have broken up a lot sooner. But I can’t support hiring Doug Goldstein as a manager. I knew that he was a creep from day one.”



As the records were being mixed by Bill Price, Rose called Niven and told him that he could no longer work with him. “It’s pretty plain when the first thing that’s done after I’m fired is that the name is taken away from the rest of the band members [Rose demanded and gained legal ownership in the early 90s],” says Niven. “That tells you an awful lot right there. It was basically people taking control. Axl had an enabler and off they went. Doug Goldstein was a security guy when I took him on. Well credit where credit is due, one of the things that Doug was golden at was clean-up.

“Three months after I’m gone, Izzy quietly packs his bags, because it’s not the band any more, it’s not the band that he could feel any more. The feel of Izzy is something I profoundly connected to. For me he was the heart – and let me choose my words carefully – because he was not the heart and soul of the band, but he was the heart of the soul.”

“Alan was somebody that I trusted, whereas I knew Doug was somebody that played both sides against the middle,” says Slash. “In other words, he’s telling me one thing, telling Axl another and appeasing Axl all the time. And I was aware of it, but at the same time, as long as shit was getting done I was okay. As long as we kept booking tours and I was sort of kept in the mix as far as the mechanics, that’s how we managed to get from 1990 to 1990-whatever. We had the world record for touring. Even when we lost Izzy because we had all those shows booked, I was just like, ‘Let’s keep going’. But when the tour was finally over and it was time to get back to work, it was impossible, because Izzy wasn’t there, Steven wasn’t there, and it really dawned on me – the harsh reality that Axl and I had grown so far apart and we weren’t really all that close to begin with. We’d grown so far apart, and to this day, there’s no putting that back together.”

Rose, of course, saw things differently. In one of his rare utterances on the subject, he told Rolling Stone: “It was a king-of-the-mountain thing. It’s an old saying: ‘Don’t buy a car with your friends’. The old band all wanted to hold the wheel and ended up nearly driving the car over a cliff.”



Duff McKagan was making one of his periodic trips to London. It was October 2010, and he was in a hurry. He came in on the red-eye and went straight to his usual hotel, where the manager had booked out a meeting room for him. He had three in a row, all sober business planning stuff, the boring meetings that he’d learned he had to take if he wanted life to run smoothly. The Use Your Illusion experience had taught him that, and more.

Before he’d even put down his bags, the hotel manager said to him, ‘So you’re playing tonight?’

“Am I?” he’d replied absentmindedly, thinking to himself: ‘Man, you know why I’m here, you booked the meeting room for me,’ and then he’d picked up his key, taken the lift to his suite and put some music on, loud enough to shake the jetlag. Next thing he knew, there was an angry guy from the next suite along at his door complaining and when he looked up he realised that the angry guy at the door was Axl Rose. They hadn’t played together for 13 years.

“For me as a grown up man who looks at life the way I do, it was meant to be,” says Duff. “We had a grand old time. We went down to the gig together. I was tired by that point. I was drinking Red Bull so I was half out of my mind. Next thing I know I was playing. It was odd when I looked out in the crowd. I’m like: ‘Oh, I’m going to have to explain this in every interview I do now…’

“Axl’s way of rationalising things is sometimes the most genius thing ever and I’ve always liked that about him. Other things were maddening, and I’m sure I maddened him. On the Illusions tour I could have not gotten so fucked up all the time. Did I blame it on him for being late all the time? Yeah, for the longest time. But you gotta start taking responsibility for yourself and that’s what I didn’t do. I knew there were times I could have pulled up and been a real voice of reason, because I think I was looked at as a voice of reason I that band. I didn’t know how to and I didn’t do it, but at least in my lifetime I have come to terms with it. I think the path of that band happened the only way it could have happened. It was fucked up from the beginning, it was beautiful and fucked up.”



Duff McKagan remains the link between the original five members of the band. Although he doesn’t want to discuss his relationship with Axl, such as it is [“that’s personal”], he enjoyed spending time with him in London. A few months later, he jammed with Steven Adler at the Borderline, an event that, it’s safe to say, flew a little more under the radar than the appearance with Guns N’ Roses. And he is close to Izzy, too. “He has a cool fuckin’ life man,” Duff says. “I remember when he got sober, I was watching him. Early 90s, while we were still on the road. And the moment that he became at peace with himself, was the moment I also recognised he’s not going to be here very much longer. He’s a great guy and a very positive influence in my other life.”

The sales of Use Your Illusion I and II stand today at more than 15 million copies, almost double the estimate that Alan Niven made to Eddie Rosenblatt. The subsequent tour, which stretched on for years, grossed millions of dollars more.

The price was less easy to quantify. Alan Niven moved to Arizona and withdrew from the music business until very recently. Izzy Stradlin remains to all intents and purposes, retired. It took W Axl Rose 17 years and 11 band members to produce another Guns N’ Roses record. And Guns N’ Roses is still the name most readily attached to the careers of Slash and Duff. “I’ve wasted 20 years doing drugs,” says Steven Adler, “but I have a new start now and I’m taking it for all it’s worth. My book showed all my warts and scars. It’s something for me to make amends to everybody, for all the bullshit in my life.”

“Most people go through life saying: ‘I wonder what it’s like to get to the apex of your occupation?’” says Alan Niven. “A lot of people spend their lives worrying about anonymity. But when you get to the apex, you find out it’s a fucking illusion, it doesn’t exist. And when your anonymity is compromised, you find out its value. The toll came later and when it did come it hit hard. I went through the severest depression you can go into.”



“You know,” says Slash, “when I look back on it, it was a monumental achievement. The first thing I think of when I think of those albums is that it was such a whirlwind of shit was happening at that particular time, but it was a huge accomplishment. I think the Use Your Illusion records, if you know the backstory, were very victorious.” He pauses, while he thinks of one more thing he wants to say. “After all of it, we came through. Don’t put too much of a negative spin on it, man…”

“That record polarized people. I’ve come to understand that, and I’ve come to be at peace with the whole thing,” says Duff as he prepares to catch yet another plane, this time back home to Seattle. “I only figured this out a year ago. ‘When are you guys gonna get back together?’ Well, none of us guys have said we’re going to. I wonder if some people – not all – if some people think if we got back together, they’d get their teenage years back? Are they asking us to get back together so that they can get their youth back, even for a minute? The title of the record, it’s fuckin’ appropriate when you think about it…”

Paul Elliott wrote:THE BAND'S ex-manager Alan Niven described Use Your Illusion I and II as "Pink Floyd's The Wall meets Led Zeppelin's Physical Graffiti." Niven was on Axl's hit list, and he had to go (for a price), but he had a point. Though strictly speaking they don't constitute a double album, these two 70-minute records are a vast and important body of work, and as such are held up against rock's classic double sets, like the two mentioned by Niven, and The Rolling Stones' Exile On Main Street. The latter — surely the benchmark for all significant rock'n'roll releases — is perhaps the closest likeness.
It's a tough gig, but Guns N' Roses are the new Rolling Stones: public enemies on bourbon and heroin, and great songwriters too. 'Estranged' is as bitter a love song as 'Wild Horses', with a darkness and a flow like 'Gimme Shelter'. '14 Years' has the drowsy cool of 'Under My Thumb', while 'Coma', heavy like early Alice Cooper and Black Sabbath, is as fucked-up as 'Sister Morphine', and includes OD FX.
Izzy Stradlin, rhythm guitar, as the next Keith Richards? A loner, Izzy's influence grew with the acoustic GN'R Lies mini-album, and on Use Your Illusion he writes three more songs than lead guitarist and public figure Slash. Izzy even sings lead on a couple of tunes, sounding better than Keef on Happy, at least.
The straightforward hard rock'n'roll of Appetite For Destruction — the debut LP which sold eight million in the US alone — was compared less to the Stones and more to Aerosmith and AC/DC. Use Your Illusion has time and space for a much richer variety of musics. An awkward cover of Wings' Bond movie theme 'Live And Let Die' (Axl's folly) precedes 'The Garden', sinister psychedelia evocative of The Beatles circa Sgt Pepper and featuring guest vocals from Alice Cooper.
A half dozen of these 30 songs are punk thrashes inspired by Never Mind The Bollocks: 'Right Next Door To Hell', the first song on Volume I is, as Axl has it, one bad mother. 'November Rain', the big love song, has a piano and string arrangement reminiscent of Elton John. And closing Volume II is 'My World', a butt-kickin' hip-hop track wherein Axl speaks of his "sociopsychotic state of bliss".
Use Your Illusion is even comparable to Electric Ladyland in that GN'R have appropriated a Dylan song, 'Knockin' On Heaven's Door', much as Hendrix did with 'All Along The Watchtower'. Though lacking the innovation of Hendrix, Slash plays some great lead guitar, notably on the deeper songs, among them 'November Rain' and 'Estranged'.
Axl's singing borders on self-parody on 'Live And Let Die', but elsewhere he is spellbinding. Famed for his mood swings, Axl also has many voices; 'Estranged' features at least three. His lyrics on this song and on 'Civil War' are perceptive and emotive. 'Get In The Ring' and 'Back Off Bitch', meanwhile, are bullshit.
Axl can be a dick and a dictator (rumour says that three band members are on the brink of quitting) but that's all a part of being the rock star and the rock'n'roll enigma of the '90s. The smart money is on Guns N' Roses breaking up before they cut another record, but remember, they said this LP could never happen, and this — sorry, these — are the rock'n'roll albums of the decade; potentially, the biggest rock records in history. (10)

Guns N' Roses let loose a double-barreled blast of rock

Long on attitude, short on subtletly, Guns N' Roses' two resplendent new albums--due Tuesday--restore a razor edge to rcok n' roll.
Though sold seperately, they essentially constitute a double album that can be purchased in two installments. Bet you can't buy just one. Use Your Illusion I (****) barely betters Use Your Illusion II (***1/2); both serve up the kind of rebellious, ambitious and powerful rock that once made the genre dangerous and thrilling.
Each album immediately establishes an urgent momentum that never flags. Even sweeping ballads, like the new single Don't Cry (on both LPs in alternate versions) brim with tension and passion.
Of course, Illusion's primary ingredient is attitude--by the boxcar. And its chief purveyor is Axl Rose, whose feral growl and throat-ripping screech never sounded better--or scarier. "I'm wired on indignation," Axl Rose seethes on the vengeful Shotgun Blues. In the barreling Right Next Door to Hell, the singer lashes out with the fury of a wounded wildcat. And his ferocious diatribe in Back Off Bitch won't score any points with feminists, despite it's poitendly comic ending.
Humor also alleviates the acrimony of Get in the Ring, a hard-rocking, venemous harangue against eney rock critics (identified by name) it would be repugnant if it weren't so hilariously juvenile.
GN'R's players provide the perfect vehicle for such unapologetic wrath. Slash's guitar solos--from the blistering runs in Perfect Crime to the majestic soar of Don't Damn Me -- are technically and emotionally mesmerizing. Bassist Duff McKagan plays with rib cage-rattling force and steps out of character to sing his T-Rex/Iggy Pop inspired composition, So Fine. Guitarist Izzy Stradlin, GNR's low-profile personality, is Illusion's heavy lifter, he co-wrote most songs, including the hit You Could Be Mine, and penned such pugnacious gems as the sitar flavored Pretty Tied Up, an ode to kinky sex, and the loose-limbed country blues, You Ain't the First ("but you been the worst"). New drummer Matt Sorum is a solid, instantly indespensable anchor, and new keyboardist Dizzy Reed adds crucial flourishes throughout.
The band is at peak form in such wild punk riots as Garden of Eden and a runaway Locomotive. Even unremarkable rock workouts like Bad Apples, Dead Horse, and Yesterday eclipse the tired routines that pass as today's Top 40 hits. But Illusion is no aimless power-chord typhoon. GN'R's massive sound takes on new complexities and risks. The Garden dabbles in psychedelia. My World is a demented metal rap. Double Talkin' Jive's jackhammer beat segues into a classical guitar coda.
Though the prevailing mood is dark anger, GNR displays a breathtaking range of emotions, none synthetic. Romantic sentiments never turn treacly. Lapses into cliches are redeemed by earnest honesty.
In Estranged, Rose musters courage facing the end of a relationship , until anguish spills in the parting line: "I never wanted it to die." Vulnerability also colors November Rain, a touching, gorgeous epic.
The most involving composition, Coma, is a disturbing life-and-death odyssey of suicidal impulses and emergency-room drama, heightened by eerie special effects and abruptly shifting tempos.
With GNR's grand Illusions, rock n' roll seems real again.

Robert Hilburn wrote:

POP MUSIC : The Age of Rage : Led by Guns N' Roses, a brazenly aggressive energy coursed through the top albums of '91

"What we've got here is a failure to communicate."

Prison camp captain Strother Martin's reference to inmate Paul Newman in "Cool Hand Luke," the 1967 movie about a struggle between bullying authorities and a man who refuses to give in, could have served nicely as the precede to many of 1991's most significant albums.

This was a year in which much of the most forceful music dealt with anger and alienation--and it was fitting that Guns N' Roses was the band that actually used Martin's voice from the film, because it was the band that gave us the year's most defiant and audacious music.

The songs in "Use Your Illusion I" and "Use Your Illusion II," the two albums that were released simultaneously in the fall, aren't thoughtful and responsible in the manner of works by U2, Bruce Springsteen, Prince and most of the other artists that held the leadership reins in pop-rock over the past dozen years.

For most of the 2 1/2 hours of the "Illusion" albums, Axl Rose expresses the resentment and rage of someone who feels he has spent much of his life as pinned down by outsiders as the Newman character in "Cool Hand Luke."

This aggression was echoed in many of the year's other dominant works, including, to varying degrees, albums by Metallica, Nirvana, Anthrax and Soundgarden. These artists aren't expressing the politically focused energy and emotion of the '60s, when the issues--from civil rights to Vietnam--were easily identified and shared. It's more the howl of individuals who feel trapped or abused by forces beyond their control.

This new rock 'n' rage has struck a chord with many young people who are part of what sociologists speak of as the first generation of Americans to expect less than their parents in terms of the American Dream.

And the anger wasn't limited to rock. Rap's most powerful albums--by Public Enemy and Ice Cube--also lashed out. The difference is that Public Enemy's Chuck D.'s cry for black unity was fiery but controlled. Ice Cube's rage was unchecked--peppered with racial and ethnic slurs that led to the year's most disheartening debate in pop.

Ice Cube is one of rap's most commanding figures, and he has repeatedly denied charges ranging from anti-Semitism to inciting violence, but opponents continue to call his album hateful and, in one case, have even urged a retail boycott.

There is a lot of overreaction in the campaign against Ice Cube, but he is not blameless. He may be right in saying that he is using the controversial words as literary devices, not as vessels of hate. But he should have been aware that many listeners were going to reject his defense as easily as they rejected his music.

By going ahead, he neutralized to a large degree what was one of the year's half-dozen most important albums. Instead of focusing debate on inner-city injustices, he made his own motivation the topic of the debate. That doesn't dilute the power of the record, but it does undercut much of its influence.

Here's my ranking of the year's 10 most powerful and accomplished albums.

1. Guns N' Roses, "Use Your Illusion II" (Geffen). It's more than Axl Rose's tantrums and bad-boy pranks that make this band one of the few mainstream groups in recent years to stand alongside the the Rolling Stones and the Doors in the tradition of rebellious hard rock.

Guns N' Roses can be thoughtful and poignant. If you didn't know that "Civil War," the opening song on "Illusion II," was by the L.A. group, it would be easy to think that its lyrics against war and hypocrisy were from the U2 songbook:

Look at the shoes you're filling
Look at the blood we're spilling
Look at the world we're killing
The way we've always done before .
Look in the doubt we've wallowed
Look at the leaders we've followed
Look at the lies we've swallowed
And I don't want to hear no more.

Similarly, there is a tenderness, lost innocence and regret in such songs as "Estranged" and "Yesterdays" that could have been expressed by any of a number of pop-rock's most respected mainstream writers.

Sample from "Yesterdays":

Yesterday, there was so many things
I was never told
Now that I'm startin' to learn
I feel like I'm growin' old.

One of the things that makes Guns N' Roses such a vital band is that it is able to place emotions this personal alongside the anger and aggression of such songs as "Get in the Ring" and "Right Next Door to Hell" (from "Illusion I"). This isn't music that is carefully filtered. It is music that virtually explodes, and the band is spitting in the eye of rock convention as surely as any of the great punk bands of the '70s.

They could have picked up more critical support by toning down some of the anger and compressing the albums into one. They could have endeared themselves more to the hard-core rock audience by dropping some of the ballads. They could have moved more safely to the mainstream of rock by eliminating some of the venom.

But the band rejected all of those easy options. Instead, it gave us a double jolt of honest, if often unruly and disturbing, rock 'n' roll emotion. This was the album from 1991 that rock 'n' roll won't forget.

Chad Childers wrote:26 YEARS AGO: GUNS N' ROSES DOUBLE DOWN WITH 'USE YOUR ILLUSION I' AND 'II'

In retrospect, the much revered "classic" lineup of Guns N' Roses was together a relatively short time, with the first significant changes in the band coming in the early '90s, but even with the initial alterations to the group, it was still one helluva ride the band was enjoying after monstrous success of their debut album Appetite for Destruction and the follow-up compilation Lies. While it could have been easy to capitalize on the early successes and churn out another album quickly, the band instead chose to double down on their work and release an ambitious two-volume collection on Sept. 17, 1991 called Use Your Illusion.

Frontman Axl Rose told Rolling Stone in 1991 that the project was well thought-out and a calculated career move, choosing to challenge themselves to do something special rather than taking the easy road. "People want something, and they want it as soon as they can get it," Rose says. "Needy people. And I'm the same way, but I want it to be right — I don't want it to be half-assed. Since we put out Appetite for Destruction, I've watched a lot of bands put out two to four albums, and who cares? They went out, they did a big tour, they were big rock stars for that period of time. That's what everybody's used to now -- the record companies push that. But I want no part of that. We weren't just throwing something together to be rock stars. We wanted to put something together that meant everything to us."

But getting there was no easy task. The band had a tumultuous split with drummer Steven Adler after his hard-partying ways became too much for the band to ignore. Adler would later file suit against the group. Guns N' Roses also bid adieu to manager Alan Niven amongst other key members of their crew. Rose stated, "There's a lot of desire to keep what we have together. I mean, we already lost one guy. Actually, we lost a lot of people. It would've been nice to stay with Alan [Niven]. It would've been nice to work with certain photographers, certain security, road crew, stagehands.... Whether you're glad you're in a situation or not, there's always a part of you that goes, 'I wish I could've been happy there, just stayed happy somehow.'"

But as one chapter closed, another began. In 1990, keyboardist Dizzy Reed was invited to join the group. And with Adler on the way out, the group needed a new drummer and found their man in Matt Sorum, whom the band had seen drumming with The Cult. "Having a keyboard player in the band was something they talked to me about a long time ago," Reed stated. "I never really thought it would happen." But Reed got the call at just the right time as he was about to be thrown out of his apartment right as he got the invite. As for Sorum, he took over behind the kit for a majority of the songs, though Adler still received credit on the song "Civil War."

With the new lineup intact, Guns N' Roses started putting together the disc in 1990, spending nearly a year on the recording. The band made use of numerous studios, including A&M, Record Plant, Studio 56, Image Recording, Conway Studios and Metalworks Recording Studios. Ever the perfectionists, the band also mixed 21 tracks with engineer/producer Bob Clearmountain, but later scrapped the mixes, starting from scratch with Bill Price handling the mixing. But when it came down to it, Guns N' Roses had set the bar high with their previous work and were intent of maintaining that push for excellence.

"I've had a good understanding of where I wanted Guns N' Roses to go and the things I wanted Guns N' Roses to achieve musically," says Rose, "And I can't say that everybody's had a grip on that. We're competing with rock legends, and we're trying to do the best we can to possibly be honored with a position like that. We want to define ourselves. Appetite was a cornerstone, a place to start. That was like 'Here's our land, and we just put a stake in the ground. Now we're going to build something.'"

Released on Sept. 17, 1991, Use Your Illusion I and II arrived with much fanfare. The second volume opened at No. 1 on the Billboard Album Chart, with the first volume finishing second. As for the separation of the tracks, Rose told Here Today Gone To Hell, "We didn't actually take into consideration that people knew more songs on II than I. We thought that 'Civil War' and 'Knockin' on Heaven's Door' would be old news, rather than people wanting to get them in their hands. We looked at it like the first half of Use Your Illusion I was more similar to the energy on Appetite for Destruction, and would be a lot more fun to skateboard to. We thought of it that way. We thought it would be more successful in the beginning and we'd have to work on II, but actually II took off harder so it gave us the time to work on I and also drive wide and push it."

He added, "I'd say 'Civil War,' 'Heaven's Door,' 'Breakdown,' 'Estranged,' 'Locomotive,' and the second version of 'Don't Cry' are a bit deeper and more mature than some of the songs on the first side of Illusion I. Those are just as important to us, but were more fun and more raw expressions of emotions."

The first song to arrive came from the Use Your Illusion II album. The propulsive rocker "You Could Be Mine" was used for their soundtrack of the film Terminator 2: Judgment Day after Arnold Schwarzenegger personally invited the band to dinner at his home to negotiate a deal. The song actually had a long history with Guns N' Roses, with guitarist Slash revealing that the earliest origins of the song dated back to the first pre-production session for Appetite for Destruction.

Other Use Your Illusion II songs to hit included the band's cover of Bob Dylan's "Knockin' on Heaven's Door," the power ballad "Yesterdays," the protest song "Civil War" and the powerful "Estranged." While most of the Use Your Illusion II songs would not become major radio hits, they did become classics within the Guns N' Roses catalog. Of "Civil War," bassist Duff McKagan told Rockline, "Basically, it was a riff that we would do at sound-checks. Axl came up with a couple of lines at the beginning. And... I went in a peace march, when I was a little kid, with my mom. I was like four years old. For Martin Luther King. And that's when: "Did you wear the black arm band when they shot the man who said: 'Peace could last forever'? It's just true-life experiences, really."

As for "Estranged," Rose would become particularly attached to the emotion evoked by the track. He told Here Today Gone to Hell, "There's something really wild, for me, in performing 'Estranged' 'cause all of a sudden I realized I don't want to be sitting at the piano playing this song to keep the energy of the song moving live. I need to be moving around and there's something about being able to be up there moving around during it that's actually a present, a gift or something. Being able to dance and rejoice in a song. That came from situations and emotions that were killing me. You know, we pretty much mean everything we say. We don't put anything down that we're not willing to stand behind or attempt to stand by for the duration. "Estranged" also has a video that's part of a key trilogy for the band that also included clips for Use Your Illusion I songs "Don't Cry" and "November Rain."

Speaking of Use Your Illusion I, it had more success at radio, with the tracks "Don't Cry," "November Rain" and a cover of Paul McCartney's "Live and Let Die" all commanding the airwaves. Fans also latched on to such favorites as "Garden of Eden" and "Right Next Door to Hell."

"Don't Cry" proved to be one of the band's biggest hits and a key track in linking the two albums together as different versions of the song appeared on both discs. The Use Your Illusion I track became the hit, with the Use Your Illusion II version offering alternate lyric and a slightly different melody. Also of note on "Don't Cry" is a backing vocalist who appeared on a number of Use Your Illusion tracks -- Shannon Hoon -- who would later rise to fame as the vocalist for Blind Melon. Hoon and Rose both hailed from Indiana and relocated to Los Angeles to pursue music and found a common bond in their journey. Hoon also appeared in the video for the song.

"November Rain," an epic power ballad, climbed all the way to No. 3 on the Billboard 100. It too was a long-in-the-works track, with Tracii Guns revealing that Axl had been working on it as early as 1983. Guns stated that Rose started the track on piano, adding, "It was the only thing he knew how to play, but it was his. He'd go, 'Someday this song is gonna be really cool.' And I'd go, 'It's cool now.' 'But it's not done, you know,' he used to say. And, like, anytime we'd be at a hotel or anywhere, there'd be a piano; he'd just kinda play that music. And I'd go, 'When are you gonna finish that already, you know?' And he'd go, 'I don't know what to do with it.'" With a killer guitar solo from Slash, orchestral backing and several shifts in tempo, the track would become a classic, well fleshed out from its earliest incarnation.

As for the touring cycle, it took it's toll on the band. There was the incident in St. Louis when Rose was cited with inciting a riot after going into the crowd after a photographer. There was the ill-fated 1992 tour with Metallica where riots erupted. And during the run, Izzy Stradlin tired of life in the band and eventually exited, with Gilby Clarke eventually joining the group.

Amidst the fame and drive for success, it was a tough road to haul. But as Slash stated in an almost eerie Rolling Stone interview given what was to come, "You know, I love the band f--king with all my heart. I mean, there will be a point when this will all finish, the tour will end, the album will die and I'll keep jamming with cats that I dig playing with. But then we'll just go do another record. I don't think anything's really gonna break us up. The only thing that ever made it look that way was just our own f--king insecurity. We just flip out, because everything seems to be so much."

He added, "Sometimes you go, 'What the f--k is it for?' Then you try to look where to escape to, and there's nowhere to go. We've been doing it for so long that we really would all feel sort of lost and lonely if it fell apart and we had to go out and do solo records. Because it wouldn't be Guns. None of us could reproduce that. Axl's got so much charisma -- he's one of the best singers around. It's his personality. He can go out and do something. What freaks me out is, if the band falls apart, I'll never be able to shake the fact that I'm the ex-Guns N' Roses guitar player. And that's almost like selling your soul."

Sadly, Guns N' Roses would record one more album, the covers disc The Spaghetti Incident, with much of their "classic" core intact. Slash would exit in 1996, McKagan a year later, leaving Rose as the sole original member and a decade-plus process in putting together the Chinese Democracy album amidst numerous lineup changes took the band out of the spotlight for a good part of the latter '90s and early 2000s.

But during the early '90s, there weren't many acts that could touch Guns N' Roses and the Use Your Illusion albums were an example of a band on top of their game pursuing something special. Both albums would go on to be certified seven times platinum by the RIAA and the wealth of singles from the two discs remain staples in the band's catalog to this day.

After feasting on "Appetite for Destruction" for four years and listening to "Lies" for almost that long, mid-valley Guns N' Roses fans have snapped up the band's two new LPs at a brisk pace.
"Use Your Illusion I" and "Use Your Illusion II," the long-awaited releases from the heavy metal band, were released Sept. 17.

"It was huge," said Mike Bartol, manager of Camelot Music Store in Heritage Mall. "It was the biggest initial seller our store has ever seen. We sold about 150 copies that first day. Which is a tremendous number for a store this size.
"When Michael Jackson's new album broke, it was pretty big, but not quite this big."
Albany's Fred Meyer store also reported record-breaking sales.
"On the first day it was out, we got 200 units of each title, and we've had two more shipments since then," said Sonya Kroese, a Fred Meyer employee.
"We had people ask about the albums up to four weeks ahead of time," she said.
Geffen Records released 4.2 million copies of each album on the first day -- an all-time high. It has since produced an additional 1.2 million copies for this country alone. Eddie Gilreath, Geffen's vice president of sales, said in an interview from Hollywood.
The LPs mark the first time a group released two separate albums at the same time. Last week, they made Guns N' Roses the first group to occupy the top two spots on the Billboard album chart.
"I think it's different, original," said Troy Morris, 17, of Albany. "It lets you get just one if you're short on money. But if you're going to get one, you'll probably get the other, so it's probably just one big sales pitch."

Bartol said Kroese both said "Illusion II" is selling better than "Illusion I."
The releases temper the usual hard sound with the somewhat softer ballad "Don't Cry" and with "Civil War." They also feature remakes of "Knockin' on Heaven's Door" and Paul McCartney's "Live and Let Die."
The band has been controversial. Guns N' Roses has been blasted for sexism for the song "It's So Easy" and for a reproduction of a rape painting on their debut album, "Appetite for Destruction." The legacy continues with the song "Pretty Tied Up" on "Illusion II."

The group also has been attacked for racism and bashing homosexuals. Its songs are full of profanity.
Rose asks listeners not to judge his lyrics harshly in the song "Don't Damn Me," saying, "I've been where I have been and seen what I have seen. I put the pen to paper 'cause it's all a part of me."
"It makes them honest," said Brent Foster, 17, of Albany. "The thing I don't like about pop music is they're so cheesy. You've got to be honest and upfront, otherwise you'll end up like Donny Osmond."
Some national and regional retailers have refused to see "Illusions" I and II.
Emily Walters of PayLess in Lebanon said it is the chain's policy not to carry Guns N' Roses because of vulgarity. Neither "Illusion" album can be found at Albany's Kmart, although other albums by the group are sold there.
"I never even saw the albums," said Kmart music manager Dwayne Bloom. "These decisions can be local, regional or national, but all I know is they never came here."
At Fred Meyer, Kroese said consumers should retain the choice of what to purchase. "Guns N' Roses have helped a lot here," she said. "Our sales would have been down this week if not for their releases."

Kyle Dowling wrote:How Guns N' Roses began to break apart with the ambitious 'Use Your Illusion I & I'

On Sept. 17, 1991, Guns N' Roses ended a three-year period of silence in style, issuing Use Your Illusion I and Use Your Illusion II simultaneously.

At the time, a wait that long between Guns N' Roses albums – their most recent release had been 1988's G N' R Lies – felt like an eternity. But it seemed reasonable, given that they were working with a new drummer in Matt Sorum, and the advance word was that they were branching out into new sonic territories.

Thankfully, the scope of the group's ambition was met by the consistency of 30 tracks split between two sprawling discs. Guns N' Roses frequently strayed from their hard-rock-with-the-occasional-acoustic-ballad roots to include everything from funk metal ("Locomotive") political commentary ("Civil War") to epic balladry ("November Rain" and "Don't Cry"). To further cement their connection to their heroes, they also recorded covers of Paul McCartney's "Live and Let Die" and Bob Dylan's "Knockin' on Heaven's Door."

Because of the anticipation, record stores around the country opened at midnight in order to accommodate fans who wanted to hear the new music as soon as possible. When the dust settled, both Use Your Illusion albums sold an amazing seven million copies. However, closer inspection of the liner notes soon revealed that there were cracks within the band. Where every song on 1987's Appetite for Destruction was credited to the band in full, now all the tracks on both albums were credited to the individual musicians, with "Bad Apples" listed as the closest thing to a full-band collaboration.

Guitarist Izzy Stradlin quit shortly after the tour began, citing his desire to stay sober and difficulties with Axl Rose. He was replaced by Gilby Clarke. After the release of the underwhelming covers album The Spaghetti Incident in 1993, Sorum, Slash and Duff McKagan followed Stradlin out the door, leaving Rose as the only original member in Guns N' Roses until Slash and McKagan returned in 2016 for the Not in This Lifetime tour.

Use Your Illusion I

JANISS GARZA
September 20, 1991

Security was so tight surrounding the simultaneous release of Guns N’ Roses’ two new albums that Geffen Records would not lend me an advance copy. I had to go to the label’s offices in Hollywood, where I was searched and my purse temporarily confiscated. Only then, with no chance that I might tape the CD or walk off with it, was I allowed to hear all 2 1/2 hours of Use Your Illusion I and Use Your Illusion II. ”What’s the world coming to,” I thought, ”when reviewing a record feels like being in jail?”

But what’s the world coming to when one of its most popular groups is also one of its most unmanageable? Guns N’ Roses have gained more fame for their riots and uncontrollable blasts of temper than for the excellence of their mega-platinum albums. This probably won’t change with the two Illusion records, and that is unfortunate because the group’s antics pale in comparison to the unbridled power of these 30 songs.

What makes Guns N’ Roses stand out is their understanding of a crucial contemporary duality: How can you maintain innocence when you’re constantly assaulted with small-screen images of hate, fear, and destruction within the confines of your own home, let alone what happens when you step outside? The band’s often-neglected search for light is honest and open, and so is its fatal attraction to darkness; on both Illusion albums the quintet teeter-totters between the two extremes. ”There’s a heaven above you, baby,” Axl Rose croons reassuringly on ”Don’t Cry” from I, but on the very next song, ”Perfect Crime,” he swears menacingly, ”Don’t f— with me.” On II, that violence springs to life on ”Get in the Ring,” when Axl spews vitriol at the press. His defensiveness is especially unnerving in light of a tune like ”Estranged,” a tale of lost love that is so full of naked emotion that it’s almost painful to hear. When a group is so openly willing to bare its soul, Guns N’ Roses seems to say, does anyone have the right to play the role of judge and jury? Over and over, in tunes like ”Bad Obsession,” ”Don’t Damn Me,” and ”Locomotive,” they answer with a resounding ”No!”

Musically, the two albums are as diverse as the band’s moods. On I, the psychotic nature of Guns N’ Roses is expressed in the otherworldly blues of ”The Garden,” in which Alice Cooper adds his wicked vocals to a couple of verses, and in ”Coma,” a shredding, frighteningly realistic account of death. II offers the fire of ”Shotgun Blues.” ”I” also contains the classically arranged ”November Rain,” and II has ”So Fine,” a tune that’s half torch song and half honky-tonk blues. To view this band merely as hard-rockin’ bad boys is a big mistake. They also write songs that are complex, structurally and emotionally.

Guns N’ Roses’ only problem is that they have yet to understand how to transcend their negativity. But they may be doing better than the many people who prefer to deny the dark side of themselves. No wonder Guns N’ Roses are controversial: In their own twisted way, they may be giving the world exactly what it deserves. A

Will Guns N' Roses Deliver a One-Two Punch?

September 14, 1991|CHUCK PHILIPS and PATRICK GOLDSTEIN | SPECIAL TO THE TIMES

The nation's record retailers are bracing themselves this weekend for what is expected to be an unprecedented sales barrage Tuesday when Guns N' Roses releases two albums simultaneously.

More than 4 million copies of "Use Your Illusion I" and "Use Your Illusion II" have been shipped by Geffen Records to U.S. retailers, by far the highest advance order in the history of the record business.

This should, most industry sources agree, enable the albums to claim the first and second positions on the national sales charts during its first week of release.

But Ed Rosenblatt, the president of Geffen Records, cautions that those chart positions may be jeopardized by the refusal of about 4,500 of the more than 18,000 record retail outlets in the country to carry the albums because of what they consider objectionable lyric content.

"It's possible it could cost us a No. 1 album (ranking)," he said.

Officials at SoundScan, the company that compiles statistics for the Billboard charts, disagree.

"Geffen won't be penalized by the decision (of some stores) to not carry the album," SoundScan chief operating officer Mike Shalett said in a phone interview from New York.

"Look at it this way--Metallica debuted at No. 1 without any significant sales (in the same stores). . . . Consumers will simply buy more albums at retail outlets."

SoundScan's Mike Fine said the stores that won't be carrying the albums--chiefly discount chains such as K mart and Wal-Mart--only account for about 10% of the nation's album sales picture because those stores do far less volume in records than full-line record stores, such as Tower and Wherehouse.

Recession-pinched retailers who have decided to stock the album are banking on the double Guns N' Roses package to bolster sagging record sales and stimulate foot traffic in the malls.

"We need it," said Tower Records advertising manager Bob Akin. "The first half of the year has not been great for record retail. We hope that this record and other big albums about to be released will give us a boost."

In a marketing ploy to dramatize sales interest, an estimated 1,000 U.S. record stores will open at 12:01 a.m. Tuesday--the first minute they can legally sell the records. The list includes about 100 in Southern California, including some Tower, Wherehouse and Musicland outlets.

Plus, numerous mall record retail outlets operating under leases that prevent them from partaking in the late-night sale plan to open at 7 a.m. to accommodate consumers on their way to school.

"This album is going to be huge," said Bob Feterl, regional manager of Tower Records on Sunset in Hollywood, who expects a turnout of at least 1,000 fans during the two early-morning hours the store will be open. "Anticipation for the Guns N' Roses release has been building since last May. I would be shocked if this record didn't enter the charts at No. 1."

Arnie Bernstein, president of Musicland, the largest retail chain in the nation, said there was so much consumer interest in the album that the company--borrowing a technique from video retailers--instituted a pre-purchase policy for "Use Your Illusion" so that fans could be guaranteed copies on the day of release.

"This is a very rare occurrence," Bernstein said in a phone interview. "We've only ever pre-sold one or two other superstar albums before. I think Michael Jackson's 'Bad' was the last time I saw a frenzy anything like this."

Due to crass lyrics, Geffen Records has stickered both "Use Your Illusion" albums with a warning label that reads: PARENTAL ADVISORY, EXPLICIT LYRICS." But that isn't the only advisory notice that appears on "Use Your Illusion."

Axl Rose and the rest of the band also requested that an additional sticker be placed beneath the shrink wrap packaging. The message on the sticker says that there are some lyrics that may be objectionable to some listeners and goes on to suggest, using a thinly disguised vulgarity, that those people buy something from the New Age section.

As a result, Western Merchandisers Inc. and the Handleman Co.--the "rack-jobbers" which supply records to more than 4,500 discount stores--have refused to stock the record.

Handleman Co. officials declined to comment on the firm's decision. Robert J. Cope, vice president of Western Merchandisers, cited Wal-Mart's refusal to carry the Guns N' Roses record as part of a longstanding corporate policy.

"Wal-Mart feels that revenue realized from the sales of a record with objectionable lyrics would be more than offset by the discontent it might cause customers for making such product available to children," Cope said in a phone interview from the company's Amarillo, Tex.-based headquarters. "Their philosophy is that albums with objectionable lyrics do not conform to the store's family image."

Musicland's Bernstein took a different position regarding the impact of explicit lyrics on his customers.

"We're not in the censorship business," Bernstein said. "We're in the retail business. We feel the industry has taken the proper precautions to advise parents as to what kind of lyrics are contained on the album."

Marketing Triumph for Guns N' Roses: Pop music: Fans' eagerness to get the group's two new albums translates into huge midnight sales. The take--an estimated $5 million.

September 18, 1991|STEVE HOCHMAN | SPECIAL TO THE TIMES

As midnight approached on Monday, a group of about 400 Gun N' Roses fans (as in fanatics) counted down the seconds before a clerk at Tower Records on the Sunset Strip unlocked the store's door.

At the head of the line, a 21-year-old Hollywood woman who had been there for four hours rushed in and grabbed cassettes of the group's two new albums: "Use Your Illusion I" and "Use Your Illusion II." Within seconds, she had paid for her treasure, emerged from the store to greet a phalanx of cameras and reporters, popped "Illusion I" in her player and became one of the first of hundreds of thousands of GNR loyalists at about 1,000 record stores around the country to hear the albums.

It was no surprise that she was at the front of the line. Her devotion to the Los Angeles-based hard-rock group was so complete that she says she has even taken the name Leathur Rose in honor of Axl Rose, the lead singer of the controversial band.

"Gun N' Roses is the best in the world," she said. "I love them more than anything."

From Leathur Rose's neck hung a shiny metal cross to which was attached a picture button of the singer; on her ankle a Guns N' Roses tattoo, which she gladly showed off to all the television news camera crews covering the scene.

Her eagerness, and that of others in this and the lines around the country, translated into just what Geffen Records had hoped: big sales. On Tuesday morning, Geffen head of sales Gil Reath said initial reports put figures at an average of more than 500 total copies of the two albums per store. That projects to more than 500,000 sales for the two albums combined in the one two-hour period, for a total take of more than $5 million.

Tower Sunset was responsible for more than 800 of those, having accommodated about 400 wee-hour customers. The store got a trial run recently when it did midnight sales of Metallica's new album, though that night in Southern California only this store and the Tower in Anaheim opened at midnight. Tower Sunset sold about 600 copies of "Metallica" to about 400 customers.

Needless to say, anticipation was high for this release: Guns N' Roses hadn't released an album of all-new material since its 14-million-selling 1986 debut, "Appetite for Destruction." Geffen shipped a combined 4 million copies of the two new albums to stores this week.

For many loyal GNR fans, Tower Sunset was the Mecca of metal, just blocks from such clubs as the Whisky and Gazzarri's, at which the now-huge band got its start. Guitarist Slash even once worked at the store, and singer Axl Rose did a stint in the Tower video outlet across the street.

At about 11, a guy dressed like Axl--long stringy hair, torn jeans, red bandanna under a baseball cap--walked by on the sidewalk. Leathur glared at him, muttering, "Not even close. Not even in your dreams!"

Later, farther back in the line, Victor Wolder, 26, the Axl impersonator said, "I'm starting a band called Pistols N' Daisies."

As midnight approached, a curious collection of Geffen Records executives and staffers arrived--following dinner a few blocks away at Le Dome, where they were joined by GNR members Slash and Duff McKagan. (Slash even came by in a limo later and talked with Geffen publicity director Bryn Bridenthal. He stayed in the safety of the car, though.)

"This is the most exciting thing that's ever happened in the record business," gushed Geffen Records president Eddie Rosenblatt, nervously looking like a campaign manager watching the polls on election night.

Finally, with the line of several hundred fans now reaching up the block to Larrabee, the Tower doors opened. Inside the store, "Use Your Illusion I" boomed over the sound system, as a well-mixed, though generally young, stream of consumers were efficiently rung up. A trio of young men who were visiting from Manchester, England, paid for their music with traveler's checks.

"It's L.A., isn't it," said Alan Williams, 20, on why he was buying the albums here instead of waiting to get home. "It's famous."

Almost out of place was a young family of six, parents Carlos and Annie Vasquez and their four children, aged seven to 13.

Why did the La Mirada-based Vasquez clan make the nocturnal family outing?

"That's what Annie keeps asking me," said Carlos, 33, adding that it was son Rick, 13, who suggested it. "But I told him, 'No days off from school to listen to the albums.' "

As 1 a.m. passed, Leathur Rose remained in the Tower parking lot, headphones blasting. But she seemed a bit weary as the night dragged on.

"I hope it's not another four years until they release another one," she said with a sigh.

GREAT GUNS: Everybody called it a marketing coup when Guns N' Roses became the first act in rock history to release two new studio albums at the same time and they entered the sales chart at No. 1 and 2, selling more than 1.4 million copies in one week.

But the albums haven’t maintained that pace.

In the most - recent Billboard chart, “Use Your Illusion 11" was No. 7 and “Use Your Illusion I" was No. 11. In fact, they weren’t even the hottest rock albums in the country. Upstart Nirvana's “Nevermind" was No. 6 on the chart.

So was it a good idea to put out the two albums simultaneously?

Would Guns N' Roses be higher on the chart now if it had only released one album during this recession-dampened market so that fans and marketing campaigns could be focused on a single work?

The verdict from the industry: Everybody seems happy.

Lew Garrett, vice president of purchasing for the Midwestern Camelot chain, terms the dualalbum release an resounding success. “We've bought and sold in excess of 300,000 of the albums combined, and the albums have only been out a short time, which means it’s still in its infancy."

“There’s been little or no confusion,” says Chuck Lee, director of music buying for the 300-store Wherehouse chain. “It’s been almost like two separate pieces of product, so it’s worked out well.

“When they first came out, kids were buying both. Now it’s slowed down a bit and people are buying the one with their favorite song or the one with the new video or whatever. . . . But if they'd only released one record, I don’t think we’d have sold as many as we have with two units.”

Eddie Gilreath, Geffen vice president of sales, says that the company has shipped more than 3 million copies of each of the two albums (“Illusion II” is about 150,000 copies ahead). And, he adds, “sales are picking up.”

The single and video release last week of “Live and Let Die” from “Illusion I” is expected to boost that album into the lead. And with Geffen planning to work perhaps six more singles from the albums, retailers are looking at the pair to be among their top sellers for at least a year to come.  —S.H.