Appetite for Destruction [Geffen, 1987]

UYI is interesting in terms of why people like or loathe it. People who say it ruined what they built with Appetite and became a bloated pompous mess when they were supposed to be the opposite of that have a point, and I can see their point....I just don't agree with it. I love those albums, and neither is as concise or consistent as Appetite, but there are some damn good songs and I don't care if they went more arty or "big" or whatever, Estranged is a masterpiece IMO.

I do subscribe to the idea that they could have cut out the fat and made one really goof album though as opposed to a double album with a bit of filler.

The honky-tonk piano ruins cd2

Oh, forgot about Had it with You, which could have fit in perfectly on Exile. I even dug Winning Ugly.

>he was buttfucking retarded enough to give Chinese Democracy a B
so its his highest rated gnr album...
cuckgau is the eptiome of subjectivity in music criticism. its interesting to see what a retard thinks about so many different bands

I agree that UYI were pretty great in their own way. I bought them both day of release and first listen, after everything that had come before, was an unexpected journey with many fascinating turns along the way, Coma was a neat surprise to run up on. I think my favorite is probably Civil War. The covers were very appropriate because the thing as a whole had much more of an art project feel to it.

>I do subscribe to the idea that they could have cut out the fat and made one really goof album
Geffen, from everything i heard, encouraged and pushed them for two albums, because they were making money hand over fist. GnR went from scruffy Strip rats to a multi-million dollar machine in a very short time, there's no way they could have sustained it, and Geffen knew what was going on internally with them, with the booze and drugs. Throw in a manager who let Axl do anything he wanted, and Axl being a "never small measures for anything" person, and you get Use Your Illusions.
And, as flawed as they are, they're masterpieces compared to the trainwreck that was Chinese Democracy.
I saw GnR in the clubs before AFD. Stripped down to the core band, they were fucking ferocious. That band didn't survive the first tour. Then they became this bizarre, bloated corporate thing that shit money.

CD had exactly three good songs on it, all of them leftover ones from the 80s that Axl never used.

Forgot. The Spaghetti Incident was like omg classic punk covers. They even covered the New York Dolls. I love GNR now. XD

More like F-

UYI is what happened when they tried to be the Beatles, the Rolling Stones, Queen, Led Zeppelin, Bowie, and Elton John all on one album.

That album is easy to forget.

yeah and then Axl had a bit of an early midlife crisis as he turned 30 and started making gay music videos where he runs around in bike shorts and goes swimming with dolphins

I think the single greatest disappointment I have in Axl is that he had plastic surgery. What a sheer fucking anti everything he seemed to stand for letdown.

>neither is as concise or consistent as Appetite

Right but that's ok. It was diverse enough (just assume for the sake of this argument that UYI I & II were both the "same" album [technically they were; they were only released as separates for budgetary purposes]) to where you could pair just about every song with a 2nd song that sounded very similar to it in terms of style (For instance: the "country'ness" of Yesterdays is arguably comparable to the "country'ness" of Bad Obsession; or the "thrashiness" of Shotgun Blues and then Garden of Eden; or the straight up "rockness" of You Could Be Mine and Dead Horse or Don't Damn Me). The only exception is My World.

> I do subscribe to the idea that they could have cut out the fat and made one really goof album though as opposed to a double album with a bit of filler.

Disagree with this, too as to me (and I know it's all subjective, anyway), there was no filler. Even a song like You Ain't the First (another arguably country song) is highly excellent.

> I bought them both day of release
Fuck... that must have been so awesome. I'm so jealous. I can say, however, that I became a fan right when Illusions were released so I got to experience it all in their "heyday."

> corporate

See like, I never really understood how they could have ever been tagged as "corporate" because, even though AFD was very opposite of all their hair metal peers, the music was still extremely commercially accessible. And I mean, they weren't the first band to play that style of music. Sure, it was very aggressive and raw sounding but you could argue that Aerosmith were doing the same thing before them. It was blued-based rock, so nothing really original. But, they've been my favorite band since I was 8 years old and I believe even if they weren't anything too original, for what they did, they were the best there has ever been of it.

What about Skynyrd? They're not really that punk and the whole redneck confederate image probably didn't help with the typical lefty punk crowd yet he gave them pretty high ratings.

> The Spaghetti Incident was like omg classic punk covers
Not entirely, though. Hair of the Dog was by Nazareth and they weren't a punk band. Neither was Since I Don't Have You by the Skyliners.

> I think the single greatest disappointment I have in Axl is that he had plastic surgery. What a sheer fucking anti everything he seemed to stand for letdown.

I don't think so. From day 1, he aspired to have good things. For instance, on one page of this journal he kept full of goals, one of them was to buy a BMW. He also wore fur coats around the Appetite days.

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Sure, but there's quite the difference between "good things" and having your fuckin' face rearranged!

>the shit about buying them first day
Indeed, and also bought Lies day one, the moment school let out (HS, can't recall grade). Appetite was the real treat though, as I legit got it before there were massive hits and such. I'd read about them in Metal Edge magazine as being "something *really* worth keeping an eye on" essentially, got my mom to run me to the little local shop, picked it up, and sat down to take a shit with my Walkman. Imagine not getting up from the toilet the whole time because you're getting one incredible surprise after the other running up on shit like the opening riff for Sweet Child and that killer guitar and drum opening to Paradise, totally fresh before becoming overplayed to the point of sickness. Rocket Queen...

Anyway, I loved the shit out of Guns back then, they were really refreshing after being into hair metal shit for some years and watching it become more and more of a fucking cartoon.

Oh, you know why he liked LS. He convinced himself they were some postmodern deconstruction of redneck machismo, until decades later when he was extremely let down that the surviving members endorsed George W. Bush.

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>And I mean, they weren't the first band to play that style of music. Sure, it was very aggressive and raw sounding but you could argue that Aerosmith were doing the same thing before them. It was blued-based rock, so nothing really original

Their sound wasn't that original but if you were a 13-14 year old in the late 80s and weren't around for 70s hard rock, you had nothing else to compare it to especially when mainstream rock was nothing but plastic glam metal and MTV ran Bon Jovi videos 25x a day.

>He also wore fur coats around the Appetite days.
Those were Erin's, she was a model and got them free from designers. He used to wear those out in public, the few times he showed up before AFD came out, and would be all pissy if someone almost spilled a drink on them. One of them was claimed to be worth something like 60k - but considering how much gossip flew around about them, who knows? But he didn't buy those.

>back in the day Axl and Slash used to buy pristine classic muscle cars, smash them up, and then go buy another one and repeat process

"Corporate", in that they went from a street band to this megolithic machine of crew and managers and lawyers and stage sets that took 18 trucks to haul around (TWO of them, on the Illusions tour), and horn sections and ego ramps and constant media and marketing around them.
They blew up FAST, and it takes big money to blow up that fast. They went from dudes we all used to bump into at clubs and at the 7-11 to 1%ers flying on the MGM private jet in around two years.

I was born in 73, so a kid and teen in the 80s, but had collected and listened/been into all kinds of 60s and 70s shit before Guns, including Aerosmith, Jeff Beck, Humble Pie, Hendrix, Sabbath, Free, etc but it still stuck out as quite original in some key ways. There was something fresh in the rhythmic and melodic sensibilities, and definitely his voice. They stuck out pretty profoundly desu.

There was a Creem (?) review of Shout At The Devil that went like "You've already heard Aerosmith, Van Halen, and AC/DC. But to your 13 year old cousin, it's all completely new."

Oh, and was a total fucking Stones fanatic by then especially.

>They blew up FAST, and it takes big money to blow up that fast. They went from dudes we all used to bump into at clubs and at the 7-11 to 1%ers flying on the MGM private jet in around two years.
That's what killed Metallica. TBA instantly turned them into jetsetting celebrities who owned like three vacation homes in the Caribbean and they lost any actual touch with the metal scene.

LOL, no. Slash had a sweet fucking Cobra, and Duff had a black corvette that I fucking lusted after, but Axl drove Erin's white convertable rabbit until he got his first big AFD check, went out, bough a convertable BWM, had a stereo put in it that cost more than most people made in a year (and that you could hear 10 blocks away), and never crashed it. He's probably still got it in Malibu. It got magazine articles written about it.

Now, what Slash used to do - and everyone knew about it, is he'd drive the band's rental van, and smash the fuck out of it, they'd return it, get a new one, and the label would pick up the tab.

As far as I know Axl has never owned a muscle car, let alone wrecked one, and Slash loves his cars, he'd never wreck them.

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