2007.11.09 - Musikbyrån (SVT2) - Swedish Sleaze Rock (Duff)

Swedish TV special on contemporary Swedish bands influenced by '80s "glam/sleaze metal" featuring interviews with Duff and Nikki Sixx.



Extra segment with Duff:



Transcript of the related parts in the first video:
------------------------------------------------------

Interviewer: Can you define the word “sleazerock”?

Duff: Oh. I can’t define that, but I can give you pictures to put next to the definition. And that would have been New York Dolls…

[…]

Nikki Sixx: [...] And up until… ’87, so, like six or seven years after we exploded, Guns N’ Roses came out. They were friends of ours, we took them under our wing, we took them on tour. And besides Guns N’ Roses and Motley Crue, and before us Van Halen, I didn’t really pay too much attention. I think there was a time in there where I was like, “Why does everybody keep comparing us to these bands that we’ve never even heard or met?” You know, it’s like the “Sunset thing.”

[…]

Interviewer: It’s twenty years this year since Appetite for Destruction was released.

Nikki Sixx: Mmm-mmm.

Interviewer: What do you think of that album?

Nikki Sixx: Well, it was a great record. One of my biggest mistakes was not producing it. It was literally one of my biggest mistakes.

Interviewer: They offered you to do that?

Nikki Sixx: Yeah. And I was high. I was high on junk and I passed. And at the same time, someone said to me the other day - internally, he said, “Wow, maybe it would have been a different record if you had produced it.” I said, “Yes, maybe I would have fucked it up.”

[Clip from Welcome to the Jungle video]

Interviewer: You know, I was talking to Nikki Sixx of Motley Crue the other week and he told me something about that he was asked to produce Appetite. Is that true?

Duff: Um, no (laughs). But he was pretty high back then, and we were pretty high back then. So somebody might have said, you know, drinking with Nikki somewhere, “Hey dude, you should produce our record.” But… no.

[Voice-over in Swedish – clip from Welcome to the Jungle video]

Duff: Yeah, we were happening at the same time as, you know, Poison and Warrant and all those bands. We had absolutely so little to do with those bands and, you know, we went out and we made Appetite for Destruction – we got signed, we made Appetite for Destruction and went out on the road for two years. We came back to Hollywood and we’d see, like, ads for these bands and they looked just like us, and it freaked us out. And we realized that rock ‘n’ roll in L.A. was dead, because they were all trying to be something they weren’t, and that’s not what rock ‘n’ roll is about.

*

Transcript of the second video:
------------------------------------

Duff: I met Slash through an ad in the Recycler, and Steven Adler. And they weren’t, like, glam rock dudes, they were just these two guys. And Izzy moved across the street from me - and Axl was his friend - and Axl moved right around the corner. Izzy and I lived on this street where rent was cheap, because it was all hookers, drug dealers and cops, you know? But the five of us shared this vision of what music was, and it was uncanny how the five of us shared this kind of vision of how to write a song. And, you know, the first gigs we got were opening for Social Distortion and, like, more punk rock bands, Tex and the Horseheads – although you probably don’t know them – Fear… and all of these types of bands. And these were the gigs we did, like punk rock gigs. And on the other side of town there was this glam scene. But you had to have really sort of a secret handshake or something. We couldn’t figure out what that was about, but those glam bands were playing Friday and Saturday night at the Troubadour. And we were like, “Man, we’d like to get on opening up on the Friday and Saturday night,” but we couldn’t get into that private club that was glam rock; and we didn’t want to get into the club, we just wanted to open for those bands that steal their girlfriends, you know, and that was it – and drink their beer. You know, I could tell you stories about our scene in L.A. then, but I don’t know much about the glam or sleaze rock scene. Because we just did our own thing.

Interviewer: But at the same time, I mean, you were talking about it, this album is like… people hold it like some kind of milestone for the sleaze genre.

Duff: But, you know, the songs on this record are about the things we dealt with, we weren’t talking about a scene. Mr. Brownstone is about heroin addiction. You know, heroin wasn’t ramping around the glam scene; heroin is a very personal thing, you know? It’s So Easy is about where our apartment where we… it wasn’t even an apartment, it was a room we lived, and around the corner was a place where we’d get this Nightrain wine, and it was $1.29 a bottle. And It’s So Easy is just about, like, us making a buy, and kind of doing what we wanted, and saying “fuck you” to everything. And Nightrain is about the wine, man, that we bought. And it’s all pretty - Welcome to the Jungle is about Axl getting off the bus, you know, in Hollywood. So these songs are all really pretty personal songs, you know…

Interviewer: It’s a great, great record.

Duff: Oh, thanks. Yeah.