Appetite for Instruction part 1

Well, anyone remember what they did on September 17, 1991? I sure as hell don’t, but you know who does? Axl Rose. Probably because that was the last time his band Guns and Roses put out a full length album of original material. Since that time he has been busy kicking people out of the band, and replacing them with other people who play exactly like the people he had just kicked out of the band, all the while signing them to contracts to guarantee them a royalty free future from the forth coming album. Welcome to the jungle baby!

So for the last 16 or so years Axl Rose has been working on his follow up, Chinese Democracy. Every year around the same time, Aprilish, I hear something about this finally coming out and last year was no different. And you wanna know why it happens this special time of year? Because someone will make an April fools joke about it. True to form, last year it was spin magazine who published a fake review of it on there website. That’s right, it took Axl and three producers to create one long running joke.

In the Early days of this great century, leaks of album’s demos were few and far between often showing up in Internet discussion groups. The promise of a actual tracks from the album were usually just songs that had been poorly attributed to the guns based on whatever song titles had been named dropped in recent interviews about the forth coming album. Occasionally clips of leaked were played over the radio. Many of them have been provided by G n’ R fans who spend most of there lives looking for things to trade each other (song clips, bootlegs) who then use these clips to call up shock jocks and play them during “open discussion hours”.

Although we had flirted with the idea of Chinese Democracy, it was New York Met’s catcher Mike Piazza who had slipped us the metaphoric roofie at the symbolic company Christmas party, and took advantage of our collective rock subconsciousness when he played several songs well on an appearance of Eddie Trunks radio program. Unfortunately a cease and desist was ordered by Axl’s team of lawyers and all songs and mentions of the band have been removed from re airings of the show. However luckily for G n R fans, but unfortunate for the rest of the humanity, some people do in fact tape Mike Piazza when he’s on the radio.

With renewed interest in the album, and a couple of years of hard work on behalf of fans, 8 complete songs have been brought to light. So, 15 years, many missed deadlines, 12 different line up changes, and an astounding 13 million dollars spent by the record company to get the album finished and whats produced? 8 leaked demos.

To be Continued…

-robwhite