FEATURE:
You Ain't the First
Guns N’ Roses’ Use Your Illusion I and II at Thirty
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THIS is a slightly different…
IN THIS PHOTO: Guns N’ Roses in 1991/PHOTO CREDIT: Herb Ritts
anniversary feature, as two albums from Guns N’ Roses were released on 17th September, 1991. Use Your Illusion I and II were launched into the world. Three years after their underwhelming second studio album, G N' R Lies, the Los Angeles band delivered two incredible albums. To be fair, there is a bit of a discrepancy between the albums. I think that I is a lot stronger than II. Not that the second instalment was full of material not strong enough for the first album. We do not really have that today, where as an artist will release two albums on the same day! Some might say that it was ego from Guns N’ Roses. To mark thirty years of the twin albums, I will quote some reviews. Use Your Illusion I debuted at number two on the Billboard charts, selling 685,000 copies in its first week - behind Use Your Illusion II's first-week sales of 770,000. It is amazing to think that Guns N’ Roses released two hugely impressive albums just a week before Nirvana put out Nevermind. What a fortnight that was for fans of Rock and Grunge! If you are not familiar with both of the Use Your Illusion albums, I will pop them in this feature. The first alum features a cover of Wings’ Live and Let Die, November Rain, Garden of Eden and Coma. The second has Civil War, 14 Years and Knockin' on Heaven's Door. I love how there are two classic cover versions. The band took two very different songs and made them their own!
W. Axl Rose, Izzy Stradlin, Slash, Duff McKagan, Matt Sorum and Dizzy Reed are fantastic through the two albums. Before sourcing two reviews for each of the albums,. Rolling Stone took us inside the making of the albums in 2016 (to mark the twenty-fifth anniversary). I have selected some sections from a hugely interesting and revealing feature:
“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.”
Guns N' Roses, Guns N' Roses Use Your Illusion, Use Your Illusion, Use Your Illusion sessions, Guns N' Roses Rolling Stone
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.
“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 THIS PHOTO: Guns N' Roses performing live at Rock In Rio II on 15th January, 1991/PHOTO CREDIT: Ke.Mazur/WireImage/Getty
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”.
I love 1991 for music. Amazing that two huge bands released such important albums a week apart. If Nirvana’s Nevermind is the more celebrated and popular, Use Your Illusion I and II are not to be overlooked. There is, inevitably, some weak material on each album. That said, when you have classics like November Rain in the pack, one cannot be too critical! They are among the best albums of the 1990s, that is for sure. I know lots of Guns N’ Roses fans around the world will mark thirty years of Use Your Illusion I and II.
It is time for a couple of reviews for each album. Let’s start with Use Your Illusion I. This is what AllMusic wrote in their review of the unexpected first Use Your Illusion.
“The "difficult second album" is one of the perennial rock & roll clichés, but few second albums ever were as difficult as Use Your Illusion. Not really conceived as a double album but impossible to separate as individual works, Use Your Illusion is a shining example of a suddenly successful band getting it all wrong and letting its ambitions run wild. Taking nearly three years to complete, the recording of the album was clearly difficult, and tensions between Slash, Izzy Stradlin, and Axl Rose are evident from the start. The two guitarists, particularly Stradlin, are trying to keep the group closer to its hard rock roots, but Rose has pretensions of being Queen and Elton John, which is particularly odd for a notoriously homophobic Midwestern boy. Conceivably, the two aspirations could have been divided between the two records, but instead they are just thrown into the blender -- it's just a coincidence that Use Your Illusion I is a harder-rocking record than II. Stradlin has a stronger presence on I, contributing three of the best songs -- "Dust n' Bones," "You Ain't the First," and "Double Talkin' Jive" -- which help keep the album in Stonesy Aerosmith territory. On the whole, the album is stronger than II, even though there's a fair amount of filler, including a dippy psychedelic collaboration with Alice Cooper and a song that takes its title from the Osmonds' biggest hit. But it also has two ambitious set pieces, "November Rain" and "Coma," which find Rose fulfilling his ambitions, as well as the ferocious, metallic "Perfect Crime" and the original version of the power ballad "Don't Cry." Still, it can be a chore to find the highlights on the record amid the overblown production and endless amounts of filler”.
I want to bring in a different perspective. The reviews for Use Your Illusion I were largely positive. Despite a couple of weaker tracks on the album, this was a band regaining the sort of form we saw on their 1987 debut, Appetite for Destruction. This is Rolling Stone’s take on the band’s 1991 ‘revival’:
“If it was just down to riffs, hooks and body-slam sonics, loving Use Your Illusion I (by itself the equivalent of a double LP) would be no problem. Imagine Exile on Main Street‘s epic grunge, the shotgun eclecticism of the Beatles’ White Album and the lunatic pagan sport of Alice Cooper’s Love It to Death and Killer albums (Alice himself pops up on one track), all whipped together with the junkyard grace of Rocks-era Aerosmith. That breathless Exile feeling is especially ripe on rockers like “Right Next Door to Hell” and “Perfect Crime,” in which you can barely make sense of Rose’s rapid-fire yelp over the molten guitar soup of Slash and Stradlin. “Dust n’ Bones,” sung by Stradlin, is grim n’ greasy, feral guitars and funeral-parlor keys echoing Izzy’s shorthand yarn of sex and psychosis out on Highway 666.
There are backfires. The ballad “Don’t Cry,” a relic of the Gunners’ L.A. club days, is too sweet and pleading; Rose is more convincing busting chops. Slash’s classical-guitar break at the end of “Double Talkin’ Jive” comes out of nowhere and should have stayed there. But “November Rain,” overlong at almost nine minutes and overrich with electro-orchestration, has a cool, “Layla”-like coda with sublime high-wire guitar by Slash. In “Dead Horse,” Rose’s desultory acoustic complaint bookends a stunning, volcanic outburst of electric Aero-Stones slammin’.
On the other hand, it’s not enough to simply be indignant about Illusion I‘s verbal rancor. You ought to be scared for the future. Get past the “parental advisory” buzzwords and you hear a declaration of insolence fueled by self-righteous anger and fearful confusion. Guns n’ Roses’ rock & roll niggers-with-attitude act, however indefensible at times, is emblematic of a greater adolescent cancer: an almost total loss of hope compounded by blind, impotent rage and the perverted Reagan-Bush morality in which the actual cloth of the Stars and Stripes is deemed more holy than the freedom and humanity for which it stands.
It’s all there in “Don’t Damn Me,” the best song on the record and a striking crystallization of Rose’s — and his generation’s — dilemma. “So I stepped into your world/I kicked you in the mind,” Rose declares in a proud full-moon howl against fierce staccato guitars and a galloping rhythm section. “But look at what we’ve done/To the innocent and young/Whoa listen to who’s talking/’Cause we’re not the only ones/The trash collected by the eyes/And dumped into the brain/Said it tears into our conscious thoughts/You tell me who’s to blame.” Empowered by celebrity and his own rock & roll might, even Rose feels dazed and helpless, violently seesawing between “Don’t damn me!” and “Don’t hail me!” as the band explodes behind him in one last orgasmic, twin-guitar rush.
Was Use Your Illusion I worth the wait, the traumas and the onstage tantrums? Yes, if only for “Don’t Damn Me” and the album’s ten-minute closer, “Coma,” a locomotive parable about suicide dreams and troubled resurrection. A few tracks (“Live and Let Die,” the weird art-metal nightmare “The Garden”) could have stayed on the outtakes shelf and no one would have minded. But the Gunners’ anything-worth-doing-is-worth-overdoing spirit is a bracing slap at the reigning fascism of studio perfection.
For better and worse, Illusion I also mirrors the turmoil in Teenage Wasteland, one nation under a grudge. “Not bad kids, just stupid ones,” Rose snaps in “Right Next Door to Hell.” “Yeah, thought we’d own the world.” This is the sound of that dream all shot to hell”.
Let’s finish with a couple of reviews for Use Your Illusion II. It was an expensive (yet exciting) day for Guns N’ Roses fans on 17th September, 1991! They had two quality albums to get their teeth into! I will start with Rolling Stone, as I like their perspectives on the Use Your Illusion albums. This is what they had to say about the counterpart:
“During the fifty-three and a half minutes of Appetite, the guitars antagonized, the drums slammed, and Axl howled about their savage lifestyle, the perils of drugs, the glory of booze, dreaming of Eden, wide-eyed romantic love, their oppressors and sex. Old-fashioned rock & roll stuff, it proved they were hard; it proved they were bad; it proved that metal could rise again; it sold 14 million copies and remained on the charts for three years. During the seventy-five and a half minutes of Use Your Illusion II, the guitars antagonize, though now with more dexterity, varying in tempo and mood; the drums slam, though now at the hands of new band member Matt Sorum; and Axl of course howls, but he also whispers, croons, talk-sings and plays piano like he did back in Indiana, up in his room, idolizing Elton John. In the four years that have passed since Guns n’ Roses first combined opposing symbols and upset the apple cart with willful disregard for rock & roll legend, interest in the band hasn’t waned: 18,000 people will actually wait for them to come out onstage two hours late; the single “You Could Be Mine,” off II and featured in Terminator 2, has sold nearly 2 million copies; and the band’s slightest misstep becomes controversy and turns established magazines and newspapers into veritable Guns n’ Roses fanzines. No wonder they take themselves so seriously.
With Use Your Illusion II, the band rewards the loyal legions – with fourteen songs, which range from ballad to battle, pretty to vulgar, worldly to incredibly naive. The seven-minute power ballad “Civil War,” which opens the album (and which previously appeared on the Romanian orphan-relief album Nobody’s Child), begins with fingers studiously squeaking on acoustic-guitar strings and a few lines of dialogue from Cool Hand Luke, then drops the band’s characteristic patriotism for amplified rage and a sober look at political deceit: “So I never fell for Vietnam/We got the wall of D.C. to remind us all/That you can’t trust freedom when it’s not in your hands.” Because the band is reaching beyond its own experience on this song, Axl’s question “What’s so civil ’bout war, anyway?” – backed by thunderclaps and rainfall – is almost excusable. The outstanding cover of Bob Dylan’s “Knockin’ on Heaven’s Door” is epic, beautiful and heartfelt, with little flourishes like guns cocking behind the obvious verse (“Mama put my guns in the ground/I can’t shoot them anymore”) and Axl wailing as only Axl does, through his discolored teeth, turning vowels into primitive cries of pain or resolve.
Quite a few songs mine the territory of love gone awry: the spiteful “14 Years,” the disillusioned “Locomotive,” the lonely (and very long) “Estranged” and the bittersweet “Don’t Cry” (a different version from the one that appears on I), which is chapter 2 of “Sweet Child o’ Mine,” the song that, at least in the summer of ’88, bridged the distance between rural route and urban drawing room. The clunkers on II are “Shotgun Blues,” a sonic assault with surprisingly little impact, and “Get in the Ring,” which challenges the band’s detractors by name but basically hits below the belt. On Appetite it was “Feel my serpentine”; on Illusion II it’s “Suck my fuckin’ dick” – meant in a different spirit, yes, but it’s beneath them just the same.
Axl Rose has stopped teasing his hair, taken a few of the chains off his cowboy boots, left the pink lipstick to Skid Row’s Sebastian Bach and gotten a bit of perspective. So he shouldn’t be bothered by his critics, because even with years of practice, no one has come close to that snaky dance of his, that dance that whips victimization, menace and struggle into one fluid, triumphant motion”.
Just before rounding up, there is one other review for Use Your Illusion II that is worth seeing. This is what Sleaze Roxx had to write about Use Your Illusion II on its twenty-fifth anniversary:
“Gone were the raunchy, sleazy, drug and alcohol fueled songs from Appetite For Destruction and in were a more polished, mature band complete with a full-time keyboardist. In addition, gone was the rather loose playing drummer Steven Adler who was replaced by a more formidable and technically sound drummer Matt Sorum. Just like Appetite For Destruction, there were many songs on the album but the big difference was that this time around, Guns N’ Roses had released two albums so a total of 30 songs! Let’s face it, no band can release 30 songs at one time and expect all of them to be good ones. It’s hard enough to come up with one to three stellar songs, yet ten strong ones on an album, and simply impossible to muster 30 great or even good songs in one shot. Not surprisingly, this is where Guns N’ Roses faltered. Granted, you’d never guess from the album sales with both Use Your Illusion albums occupying the #1 and 2 spots on the Billboard chart the week after their release and with the two records selling over 35 million copies worldwide combined.
Nevertheless, the reality is that having 14 songs on one album (Use Your Illusion II) and 16 on the other (Use Your Illusion) will result in some rather poor songs making the cut. Given that I first listened to Use Your Illusion II and since I have always preferred that album over Use Your Illusion I, it’s only fitting that I review the former first. Use Your Illusion II started off with the now “famous” intro for “Civil War” in “What we’ve got here is a failure to communicate…” The song “Civll War” was the perfect showcase for the new Guns N’ Roses‘ approach on the Use Your Illusion albums — serious and lengthier more epic like tracks with varying tempos and a lot more instruments. On Use Your Illusion II alone, the instruments listed included piano, keyboards, a banjo, a sitar, an organ and even a drum machine. It felt like Guns N’ Roses had matured very much like The Beatles expanding their wings with more complex arrangements and more instrumentation. And for a good portion of Use Your Illusion II, the results were/are fantastic. The first three tracks “Civil War,” “14 Years” and “Yesterdays” were slowed down quite a bit compared to what could be found on Appetite For Destruction but they worked brilliantly and are the type of songs that you can listen to many times over discovering something new. Guns N’ Roses‘ cover of Bob Dylan‘s “Knockin’ On Heaven’s Door” has never been a favorite of mine but was a logical inclusion considering that it was already in the band’s live setlist a number of years beforehand.
“Get In The Ring” was probably my favorite track (aside from “You Could Be Mine”) early on when I got the Use Your Illusion albums given that it had the attitude from the Appetite For Destruction days with the charged up lyrics. While it seemed so cool for Axl Rose to take a shot at various publications such as Kerrang, Circus and even single out Hit Parader‘s editor Andy Secher, my enthusiasm has subsided considerably given my new role as Sleaze Roxx editor! Looking back now, “Get In The Ring” is the first taste on Use Your Illusion II that the quality of the songs might have been compromised a little bit by including too many songs. I have to think that “Get In The Ring” and “Shotgun Blues” — while decent songs — would not have made the cut on Appetite For Destruction. “Breakdown” is a quality track once again encompassing the new songs’ direction with a lot more keyboards and piano incorporated. “Pretty Tied Up” had a cool arabic feel to it and again showcased the more mature Guns N’ Roses. The lengthy “Locomotive” and the Duff McKagan sung “So Fine” were decent rockers but again would have probably not have made the cut on Appetite For Destruction.
“Estranged” was Use Your Illusion II‘s answer to “November Rain” on Use Your Illusion I. It was (and still is) an epic track that took the listener on a great journey and still reminds me a lot of what Alice Cooper would have come up with in his heyday with all the nuances and varying tempos. It’s definitely one of the most mature, brilliant and underrated tracks in Guns N’ Roses‘ repertoire. It’s kind of odd to find “You Could Be Mine” buried as the twelfth track on Use Your Illusion II considering that it was the showcase advance single. Funny enough, “You Could Be Mine” was really not representative of what the rest of the songs turned out to sound like on both Use Your Illusion albums. It’s almost like it was a remnant of the Appetite For Destruction days that was dusted off just in time for the release of the Use Your Illusion records. I am not sure why Guns N’ Roses would think we needed an alternate lyric version of “Don’t Cry” but it was included in any case on Use Your lllusion II. Perhaps Axl just could not decide on which lyrics he liked better… Sadly, a great album ended on a terrible note with the industrial tinged “My World” which was apparently recorded in a mere three hours. Clearly, this type of filler material should not have been concluding an otherwise very fine album”.
A very happy thirtieth anniversary to two different but equally important albums. Use Your Illusion I and II are considered to be among the best Guns N’ Roses albums. One week before the genius Nevermind, we got this treat from Axl Rose and co. Whilst I think their greatest album is Appetite for Destruction, the Use Your Illusion albums are hugely ambitious, varied and incredibly consistent! I am surprised there hasn’t been a thirtieth anniversary reissue with extras and demo versions. That said, I am sure there will be celebration on 17th September. People will be playing two classic albums. If you have not investigated them for a while, go and spend some time with Use Your Illusion I and II. Thirty years later, the third and fourth albums from Gun N’ Roses (if you see G N' R Lies as an album rather than a long-E.P.) are…
SIMPLY stunning.