1992.05.21 - MTV - Prague special (Slash, Duff, Matt, Gilby)

Transcript:
---------------

Vanessa Warwick: Hi, I’m Vanessa Warwick and this is the News At Night. Tonight’s show is coming to you from the beautiful city of Prague, where we’ve hooked up with one of the summer’s hottest tours, featuring Soundgarden, Faith No More and Guns N’ Roses.

[Footage from the city and the venue]

[Cut to interview with Soundgarden]

Vanessa Warwick: Kim, you’ve had a chance to look around the city of Prague. What do you think?

Kim Thayil: They have really affordable beer. They have plenty of it and it’s good.

Vanessa Warwick: What about the architecture that you noticed?

Kim Thayil: Oh yeah, nice bridges. I saw a guy who collected 500 Czech crowns – which, I guess, would be about 20 bucks or something? – and he jumped off the bridge and he swam. So it was an attractive bridge made more attractive by a guy jumping off of it.

[Live footage – Soundgarden]

Chris Cornell: I’ve never been in Prague before, but it’s nice to be back on MTV.

Vanessa Warwick: Thank you. Now, you guys have recently completed a tour stateside with Monster Magnet and Swervedriver, which sounds a pretty interesting lineup. How did that work out?

Kim Thayil: It worked out really great. We had fun, we got along with each other...

Vanessa Warwick: What are you most looking forward to about this tour with Guns?

Chris Cornell: Catering?

Vanessa Warwick: (Laughs)

[Live footage – Soundgarden]

[Cut to interview with Faith No More]

Vanessa Warwick: Now, when I saw you guys do your secret gig at the Marquee a little while ago, you described the album, that you were gonna call it, “Alienating Your Public,” but it ended up being called “Angel Dust,” of course. Why did you think that it might alienate some people? Is it because it’s not as heavy?

Mike Patton: Well, we didn’t really – that phrase was coined by our record company, oddly enough, trying to scare us into making a hit album.

Vanessa Warwick: Whoo whoo!

Mike Patton: Whoo! And we just made – we just did what we wanted to do, and we gave them the record, and they tried to make us panic, and they said, “Oh gee, don’t you think that this music that you’ve made might alienate your old fans?” And we said, “No,” and they said, “Okay, we like it.”

[Live footage – Faith No More]

Vanessa Warwick: Now, Mike, I think on the last record you didn’t have too much time to write the lyrics. You wrote them in a few weeks, didn’t you? Did you relish the opportunity of having more time for the lyrics of Angel Dust?

Mike Patton: Yeah. Yeah, at the expense of a lot of people’s sanity, yes, because I kept to myself and I kept it very secret, what I was doing, and everybody got a little scared. It was kind of fun.

Vanessa Warwick: Now it seems that some of the songs are almost being sung in, like, a different character or something, and you’re kind of schizophrenic there.

Mike Patton: No, no. It’s just, you know, the songs kind of call for a different – I mean, they’re drastic, they’re, like, different moods, and a different character should, you know... It just makes sense to me.

[Live footage – Faith No More]

[Cut to interviews with Duff, Gilby and Matt]

Vanessa Warwick: How have the relationships between you, Slash and Axl changed over the years? Have they changed?

Duff: They’ve strengthened, if anything. You know, we’ve been through hell and high water together. You pointed the three of us out, of course, because we’re the original members. We’ve been through a lot together. We’ve grown mentally, we have to go through business stuff and a lot of shit, a lot of stuff, and we’ve been through all this together. So we know each other like the back of our hands.

Gilby: I knew Izzy before he met most of the guys in the band, and Steven, and I met the other guys around town and stuff. I had actually known Matt forever. Forever and ever. Too long (laughs). So yeah, we go way back.

Matt: We’re gonna be playing some places that we never played before, like Prague, Czechoslovakia and Hungary. Then we’re going to Spain, Portugal... And it’s the first time for Guns N’ Roses in Italy, I believe. I played there with the Cult, when I was with the Cult. So for the Italian fans that’ll be good, because when we played Wembley in England by ourselves last summer, a lot of people came over from Spain and Italy that couldn’t see Guns N’ Roses in either one of those countries, so it’s nice now that we’re going to see them, you know?

[Live footage – Guns N’ Roses]

[Cut to interview with Slash]

Slash: We pick what song we’re gonna start with, like right when we’re all walking up to the stage, “What do you want to start with?” “Okay.” And then we know that the second song is gonna be Brownstone, but then, after that, it could be anything, in any order (laughs).

Interviewer: So the lighting guys are always frightened trying to listen?

Slash: Oh, it’s a circus (chuckles). You know, they’re all sitting there with their hands on the faders and stuff, going (whispers), “Okay...” (laughs). It’s fun. When the tour started, we said, “Look” – you know the girls, right? The 976 Horn Section and the two backup singers, Roberta and Tracey. We go, “Don’t leave the stage whatever you do, because we have no idea when we’re gonna pull this song out of the hat.”

[Live footage – Guns N’ Roses]

Slash: It [November Rain] was a song that, when it first surfaced – you know, first came up in Axl’s playing on the piano – it was way before Appetite for Destruction came in, and we’d been dicking around with it for years. It used to be, like, 25 minutes long. And, finally, everything that’s on the record - almost everything, all the melodies and all that - just came off the top of my head when I first heard the piano, and I did it all on acoustic. So that’s just the way that I heard it. And when we finally decided to record it, and we had an arrangement, it pretty much came naturally. There’s some new stuff in there, but not too much.  

[Live footage – Guns N’ Roses]

[Cut back to the interview with Duff]

Duff: We’ve only just begun, you know? Really, we’ve only just begun. We’ve only have, what, four records out. We’re still babies, we’ve got a lot to achieve.

[Live footage – Guns N’ Roses]

Vanessa Warwick: Okay, that’s it for this special edition of the News At Night from Prague on the Guns N’ Roses tour.