38. MAY 2017-JULY 2018: MORE TOURING AND THE RELEASE OF APPETITE FOR DESTRUCTION: LOCKED N' LOADED

Well, according to Tom Zutaut, who's heard the track, he thinks Steven was replaced, too.

So for it to come out now, I mean, you know, I hope he asked Erin whether she minded at this point, but it's, you know, I'll say it bluntly, it's the great band being compromised by the one individual again. Do I think it's appropriate, no, I think that's a bit personal. I mean, if you want to make, you know, bondage tapes with your girlfriend, you know, keep them at home, Axl. I'm not sure the rest of the band want to be associated with it, you know. And it's just another marker of Axl thinking, "It's my band, I'm in control."

And I'll tell you, obviously a lot of people have got in touch and said, "Did you see this is out?" and I took a look at it and it's been expensively transferred and it's a re-edit of the original edit that Nigel did. It's a different edit. So they've spent time and money on it. And really, I mean, you know, whatever.

When you have live footage as good as that life footage is, I mean, that band is on fire, it's just wonderful footage. When you've got that then you've got everything you need. And I'll tell you back in the day one of the battles that we used to fight all the time was between video production people and the record label going, "Well, we've got to have a storyline in here because just looking at the band playing their instruments is not interesting enough." Bull-fucking-shit. What it really boils down to is all you really want to do is see the band [...] And for me, I would say that with It's So Easy and the footage filmed in the Cathouse, Guns had potentially a perfect band video. And did the rest of the band really want to make it about Axl and his girlfriend, either? I mean, you know, there's a certain imperious arrogance that that's forced on the rest of the band.

I mean, how fucking clueless - to borrow Fernando's word - can you be? Have you heard the name Harvey Weinstein? Have you forgotten, Axl, that you were on the cover of People Magazine and the headline on the People Magazine was, "Battered beauties"? I mean get a fucking clue! I mean, this is not going to be accepted that well. Michelle Anthony, who runs Uni, she's a feminist, for God's sake. I'm absolutely stunned that she has associated her company with the content. That blows my mind. I mean, I employed Michelle Anthony to replace Peter Paterno as the band's primary attorney back in the day. I thought it would be really good to have a brilliant and bright woman's touch involved in the whole situation. You know, and now I'm looking at this and going, "Michelle, you are a feminist, what the hell have you agreed to put this out for?" And at the end of the day, you know what the observation is? The observation is really simple: A brilliant piece of band performance is compromised by Axl's ego. End of story. So go watch it. You know, go watch that footage, it was intense, it was amazing, it was an amazing night in that club. And had somebody not being clueless in their management they'd have been smart enough to sit Axl down and say, "Listen, let's just do the band footage and get the band footage out there," because that really did capture a moment and an intensity. And you can watch that footage and go, "Yeah, let's see another band up there with that kind of vibe.

Well, yeah, and let's not lose sight of something. When this whole project was announced the conventional wisdom was, "Well, let's see if they actually play both Coachellos and they'll probably have an argument and fall apart by the time they get to Mexico." I gotta an e-mail from one of the band members saying, "18 months, who would have believed it?" You know, I'm just gonna take my hat off and go, "Hey guys, well done, because you've exceeded expectation. You've gone out there and you've really delivered." And whatever I think of that Ax on a personal level, on a professional level I am very impressed with the fact that he's gone through an amazing workload for anybody of any age, let alone somebody in his 50s. And the fact that he's prepared to go out there and do a three hour show is just to me mindboggling. I don't know how he does it.

But what I would say is it would take grace and brotherhood, and for those who are to make that decision to have a sense of brotherhood and a memory of how it all got put together. And if that memory can be revived, if contemporary egos can be put aside, and if there can be a little brotherhood in it, then I think it might be possible. [...] if the five of them can recreate in their consciousness the perception of "we are a band," which they were at one time, instead of certain egos deciding that they're more important than the other or wanting to be controlling. If they could just remember, when they had nothing and everybody was against them, and remember what it took to be together and to be supportive of each other, to be brothers, if they could do that I think they could do it.

For me personally I think it's a little bit unfortunate. Actually, I might borrow a word from the esteemed manager of Guns N' Roses, Fernando, and used the word "clueless". [...] But with the box set, first of all the pricing I thought was absolutely out of the park. To ask somebody to pay a thousand dollars for a box set especially since it's basically stuff that anybody who's a real fan of the band they'd have found most of that stuff back in the day. The word "bootleg copies", that I think came from one band member's cassette of demos - and I think Zoots has even found out which band member it was - but [there were] bootleg copies of the GN'R demos available in the cool vinyl stores in Manhattan before we even had Appetite for Destruction released. They've been around forever. So, I mean, the fact that the demos are there is, you know, okay, it's cool, whatever. But let me walk you through this from my point of view.

[...]

Now, as far as the pricing goes, I don't know if all your listeners are aware but basically you can manufacture a printed CD for about 80 cents, you can press a vinyl record for a dollar, if your run is big enough, and I'm not talking about a huge run I'm talking about if you press a thousand records it's gonna cost you about a dollar a unit to press it. So there are your fundamental costs and the actual items themselves, alright, so keep that in mind. Now let's look at it from a different perspective, I - rightly or wrongly, you know, we all have our own points of view - but my point of view is that rock and roll is fundamentally a blue-collar and working-class medium, and at its best rock and roll does a couple of things, it brings people together by their own consent but it also gives at its best a voice to who I might call disenfranchised. And "disenfranchised" sounds a little scholarly, I'll take a phrase out of one of the songs: it gives a voice to urchins from under the street. To me it's fundamentally a blue-collar exercise and part of its beauty and its power is that there are those that we have come to love who speak truth to power and it's a medium way you can give the finger to the man and deservedly so. Part of the reason why I love rock and roll is it's anti-authoritarian and anti-establishments. And I cannot imagine anything more establishment than Rodeo Drive pricing on a box set that is basically old music. That tells me that whoever is in the band, or running the band, has lost the plot in terms of who is your audience. And how did you end up in Malibu? You ended up in Malibu on a wave of blue-collar response. That's how you surfed into that community. That bothers me, that really bothers me, that I look at...Who's going to spend a thousand dollars on a box set? One of your actor friends? Some of your model wife's friends? Maybe, but who else? It's certainly not going to your fundamental audience and that tells me that somebody somewhere has lost the plot. To use Fernando's word, I think it's "clueless".

Now let's talk about it creatively. Mixing is probably one of the hardest things you do from a production point of view. As a producer you make sure the song is worthwhile and worth recording, you try and record the very best performance of that song, and then you have to mix it to make sure that that song reads. And in the mixing of Appetite for Destruction I had the pleasure of watching Barbiero and Thompson mix and they mixed manually, they did not use the automations to the board, so it's like watching two people dance. And they were utterly visceral in the way that they approached the task, and that kept it visceral and it kept it physical, and that was one of the reasons why their mixes work so well. Once you finished mixing you had somebody master, prior to getting the record made into a mother and pressing, and if back in the day you were fortunate enough to be able to get on George Marino's calendar at Sterling Records, you would take your mixes - which will hopefully realized to the maximum - to George and he would do the mastering. And George, when he was alive, was the master of mastering. Go and look at his discography. It's not a matter of opinion, it's a matter of fact. You just have to look at who wanted him to work on their records and the records that he worked on. And when he was alive he was the master of mastering. So 1, we have good mixes; 2, we have a mastering that nobody else could match at the time and certainly can't today. So to "remaster something" to me is merely a bullshit way of saying, "This is how we're going to repackage and resell something," and I think it's invalid and I think the ultimate sense of invalidity is that if we're still talking about this record 30-35 years later, however long it's been - oh yeah, we're a year late on the 30th anniversary - you know- [...] If that record is still in people's consciousness 30 years later and I think there's a reasonable argument to be made that Thomson and Barbiero Moreno did their jobs brilliantly and got it right, you know. So the real whole remastering aspect of it is bullshit. Now, it's all well and good to, you know, get a shotgun down and, you know, shoot the three legged fat pig outside because he can't miss.

What should have been done and as much as I think that the pricing is wrong, the content is wrong, and all he extra little bits and pieces are bullshit as far as I'm concerned. What might have been done is this: You're playing a theater in Harlem, reconvene the original actual band that actually played on the record, play it live from top to bottom and release that. And since you want to make it into something that's a little bit special, take the Marquee recordings from 1987 that never got released and were recorded on the RAK mobile and include that in the package. And that way you're honoring the past by being in the moment and maybe creating something that might have a future. And it'll have a future if you put a realistic price on it. So you've got, you know, four CDs, call it 20 bucks, call it 25 bucks, and they've done something that's of the moment, honoring the past and worthwhile. I think the box set is just ridiculous.