appetite for destruction - absolute classic

it was its a shame they crumbled

I haven't heard that before.

my cd is so old it skips on all the best songs. cant get a good rip.

that is biblical material right there.

brownstone.

i have never wanted to add some fucking idiot to my ignore list more than i want to add you.

god fucking damn.

fuck it.

bye

fucking kids.

My favorite band of all time. I never got to see them in concert

http://iusers.com/images/jungle.mp3

brownstone no doubt

axl on that album as well as some others, is great.

hes a wacky one now, but man, that old shit just rules.

kids cant do it that way, you gotta live in hotels and on cocaine for a while to do that.

I agree.. it is one of the best!

starting it over again. almost too great.

That's right. It's hard to admit but drugs sometimes do good for the musicians.

fletch, hit me up on icq if you want a proper quality rip of the album.. ill be on for about 20 more minutes.

shit man, rip it, upload it.

hit me here

http://www.overmindesign.com/contact.html

instantly delivered to my mind.

I used to love her.. but I had to kill her.. I had to put her .. 6 feet under and i can still hear her complain lol

and god damn.

welcome to jungle makin a nigga crazy

one of my favorites

out to get me is one of my faves.

man this is triggering some old school shit i aint felt in awhile.

i been buried in horror punk and hate core.

i forgot about this shit.

regardless.

have you ever prayed to the night sky?

white trash anthem

cheers man

sent you a message fletch, let me know if you want it. i'm gonna hit the sack in a bit

this music hits me hard.

i was 16, left home with my gf. played this shit everday during that time.

damn.

legendary nights are not simply made, they are forged.

beautiful thread

Good call. I have a solid 4 hours of work ahead of me. Gonna crank that shit and put it on repeat right now.

man, im not supplying ftps, but thanks.

dont listen to aflex, hes full of shit

a clean, well-lighted post (and thread).

fletch, hey i offered a nice clean scene rip. but youre welcome anyway!

bmk, is it true that you had sex with 3 japanese men at the same time?

no fucking drinking thread complete without pics

i got this shit cranked, reverberating off the walls

Appetite is a classic, but I think some of the material on Use Your Illusion 1 & 2 are timeless as well.

Coma
Dust N Bones
Back Off Bitch
The Garden
Dead Horse

I recall being about 19 or 20 at the time, and tripping my ass off to those tunes. Ah, the bad ol days!

i haven't seen you post in one hell of a long time

I am so surprized that Sherie and Shann haven't posted in this thread They are crazy when it comes to GNR cuz that's the way they roll

The New York Times
March 6, 2005
The Most Expensive Album Never Made
By JEFF LEEDS

WEST HOLLYWOOD, Calif.

IN the faint red light of the Rainbow Bar and Grill, Tom Zutaut sips
at his drink and spills a bit of regret. It's been 19 years since he
signed the then-unknown rock band Guns N' Roses to a contract with
Geffen Records, where they turned into multiplatinum superstars. Back
in those days, the Rainbow was their hangout of choice.

Years after he left the label, he returned in 2001 to try to coax Axl
Rose, the band's magnetic leader and by then its only original member,
into completing one of the most highly anticipated albums in the
industry: an opus tentatively titled "Chinese Democacy." The deadline
for turning in the album had passed two years earlier.

"I really thought I could get him to deliver the record," said Mr.
Zutaut, who spent nine months trying. "And we got close."

He is speaking in relative terms. Mr. Zutaut is but one of a long
series of executives and producers brought in over the years to try to
conjure up the maddeningly elusive album - to cajole the reclusive
rock star into composing, singing, recording, even just showing up.
Like everyone else who had tried, or has tried since, Mr. Zutaut came
away empty-handed.

Mr. Rose began work on the album in 1994, recording in fits and starts
with an ever-changing roster of musicians, marching through at least
three recording studios, four producers and a decade of music business
turmoil. The singer, whose management said he could not be reached for
comment for this article, went through turmoil of his own during that
period, battling lawsuits and personal demons, retreating from the
limelight only to be followed by gossip about his rumored interest in
plastic surgery and "past-life regression" therapy.

Along the way, he has racked up more than $13 million in production
costs, according to Geffen documents, ranking his unfinished
masterpiece as probably the most expensive recording never released.
As the production has dragged on, it has revealed one of the music
industry's basic weaknesses: the more record companies rely on proven
stars like Mr. Rose, the less it can control them.

It's a story that applies to the creation of almost every major album.
But in the case of "Chinese Democracy," it has a stark ending: the
singer who cast himself as a master of predatory Hollywood in the hit
song "Welcome to the Jungle" has come to be known instead as the
keeper of the industry's most notorious white elephant.

off topic: earlier we were doing girlfriend songs. i wasn't done. play this one later when you off the GNR kick.

im gonna spin this one now, but do it later, this to me is the ultimate "girlfriend" song.

cheers man

where did you sleep last night

not fucking nirvana

i took joe sixpack to rainbow for rollingrocks.

AT THE STROKE of midnight on Sept. 17, 1991, Guns N' Roses was the
biggest band in the world. Hundreds of record stores had stayed open
late or re-opened in order to cash in on the first sales that night of
"Use Your Illusion," Vols. 1 and 2, the band's new twin albums. On the
strength of that promotion - and the coattails of the band's
blockbuster 1987 debut - the band set a record: for the first time in
rock history, two albums from one act opened at Nos. 1 and 2 on
Billboards national album sales chart. But by 1994 their fortunes had
changed. After years of drug addiction, lyric controversies, onstage
tantrums and occasional fan riots, their members had started to drift
away, their lead singer had become bogged down in personal lawsuits,
and "The Spaghetti Incident?," their collection of cover versions of
classic punk songs, had been released to mixed reviews and
disappointing sales.

The members of the band - what was left of it - reconvened at the
Complex, a Los Angeles studio, in a massive soundstage with a pool
table and a Guns N' Roses-themed pinball machine, to prepare for their
next album, which Geffen executives expected to release some time the
following year. But they quickly began suffering from an ailment that
has proved fatal to bands from time immemorial: boredom.

"They had enough money that they didn't have to do anything," said a
longtime observer of the band, one of the 30 people involved with the
album who spoke for this article. He spoke on the condition of
anonymity, as did many others who had signed a confidentiality
agreement while working with Mr. Rose. "You couldn't get everyone in
the room at the same time."

Mr. Rose had appointed himself the leader of the project, but he
didn't seem to know where to lead. As Slash, the band's longtime
guitarist, said recently, in reference to the singer's songwriting
style: "It seemed like a dictatorship. We didn't spend a lot of time
collaborating. He'd sit back in the chair, watching. There'd be a riff
here, a riff there. But I didn't know where it was going."

Geffen was riding toward an uncertain destiny as well: its founder,
David Geffen, retired, and its corporate parent, MCA Inc., was sold to
the liquor giant Seagram, led by Edgar Bronfman Jr. With all those
changes swirling, and with old Guns N' Roses material still ringing up
millions in new sales, executives decided to leave the band alone to
write and record.

A cover of the Rolling Stones' "Sympathy for the Devil," however,
which was released as part of a movie soundtrack, would be the last
addition to the original band's catalog. Slash quit the band in 1996;
the drummer Matt Sorum and the bassist Duff McKagan were the next to
go. Of the founding members, that left just Mr. Rose. But instead of
starting something new, he chose to keep the band's name and
repopulate it with new musicians. Geffen wasn't in much of a position
to deny him. The label was on a cold streak and wagered that fans
would still flock to the singer, even if a band had to be rebuilt
around him.

Geffen wasn't in much of a position to prod him forward, either. In
1997 Todd Sullivan, who was then a talent executive for the company,
sent Mr. Rose a sampling of CD's produced by different people, and
encouraged him to choose one to work on "Chinese Democracy." Mr.
Sullivan says he received a call informing him that Mr. Rose had run
over the albums with a car.

The singer had encouraged everyone in the band's camp to record their
ideas for riffs and jams, hours and hours of song fragments that he
hoped to process into full compositions. "Most of the stuff he had
played me was just sketches," Mr. Sullivan recalled. "I said, 'Look,
Axl, this is some really great, promising stuff here. Why don't you
consider just bearing down and completing some of these songs?' He
goes, 'Hmm, bear down and complete some of these songs?' Next day I
get a call from Eddie" - Eddie Rosenblatt, the Geffen chairman -
"saying I was off the project."

Around the start of 1998 Mr. Rose moved the band that he had assembled
to Rumbo Recorders, a three-room studio deep in the San Fernando
Valley where Guns N' Roses had recorded parts for its blockbuster
debut, "Appetite for Destruction." The crew turned the studio into a
rock star's playground: tapestries, green and yellow lights,
state-of-the-art computer equipment and as many as 60 guitars at the
ready, according to people involved in the production. But Mr. Rose
wasn't there for fun and games. "What Axl wanted to do," one recording
expert who was there recalls, "was to make the best record that had
ever been made. It's an impossible task. You could go on infinitely,
which is what they've done."

As time and dollars flew by, pressure mounted at Geffen. The label's
dry spell lingered, making them more dependent than ever on new music
from their heavy hitters. "The Hail Mary that's going to save the
game," the recording expert who spoke on the condition of anonymity
explained, "is a Guns N' Roses record. It keeps not coming and not
coming." The label paid Mr. Rose $1 million to press on with the
album, with the unusual promise of another $1 million if he delivered
"Chinese Democracy" by March 1 of the following year. Geffen also
offered one of the producers Mr. Rose had recently hired extra
royalties if the recording came in before that.

He never collected. The producer, who goes by the name Youth (his real
name is Martin Glover), started visiting the singer in the pool room
of his secluded Malibu estate, to try to help him focus on composing.
But that collaboration didn't go any better than his predecessors'
had. "He kind of pulled out, said 'I'm not ready,' " Youth said. "He
was quite isolated. There weren't very many people I think he could
trust. It was very difficult to penetrate the walls he'd built up."

Youth's replacement was Sean Beavan - a producer who had previously
worked with industrial-rock acts like Marilyn Manson and Nine Inch
Nails - and under his care the riffs and song fragments that the band
had recorded slowly began to take shape. But costs were spiraling out
of control. The crew rented one piece of specialized equipment, for
example, for more than two years - at a cost well into six figures -
and used it for perhaps 30 days, according to one person involved with
the production.

Mr. Rose appeared sporadically, some weeks just one or two days, some
weeks not at all. "It was unorganized chaos," the same person said.
"There was never a system to this. And in between, there were always
parties to go to, different computers Axl was trying out or buying.
There were times when we didn't record things for weeks."

So the studio technicians burned as many as five CD's per week with
various mixes of different songs, which were driven to Malibu for Mr.
Rose to study. The band's archive of recorded material swelled to
include more than 1,000 digital audio tapes and other media, according
to people who were there at the time, all elaborately labeled to chart
the progress of songs. "It was like the Library of Congress in there,"
said one production expert who spent time on the album there.

By one count, the band kept roughly 20 songs it considered on the A
list and another 40 or so in various stages of completion on the B
list.

All that material, however, didn't do much to reassure the band's
label. "In 1998 and 1999 you start getting a little bit nervous," Mr.
Rosenblatt, the executive who led the outfit after David Geffen's
departure, said delicately. "Edgar Bronfman picks up the phone more
than once. He wanted to know what was going on. You unfortunately have
got to give him the answer, you don't know. Because you don't." To
take the pressure off, Mr. Rose's manager at the time presented the
idea of releasing a live album from the original band, which. Mr.
Rose's crew began to assemble.

In January 1999 Seagram orchestrated a massive restructuring of its
music division, firing 110 Geffen employees, including Mr. Rosenblatt,
and folding the unit into the corporation's bigger Interscope Records
division. The unfinished album was placed in the hands of Interscope's
chairman, Jimmy Iovine. Mr. Iovine declined to comment for this
article.

Mr. Rose was said to be crushed by the departure of his Geffen
contacts - just as "White Trash Wins Lotto," a musical satire that
sent the singer up as a star-eyed hayseed forced to learn the harsh
lessons of the music industry, was developing a cult following in Los
Angeles. When he missed his March deadline, however, he set a pattern
that would repeat itself for years to come: a flurry of energetic
activity, followed by creative chaos and a withdrawal from the studio.

Same here.. Left when I was 16 with boyfriend and jammed to GNR every single day.

It has been so so long since I have listened to them.. I am going to go download some of it now lol

Hi, Quiet.

Yeah, haven't been posting for about a year. After my wife and I had a baby, time was critical. I was busy expanding business and changing diapers.

That June he allowed a version of the old Guns N' Roses hit "Sweet
Child O' Mine" that begins with the original band playing but almost
seamlessly shifts into the new band to appear on the soundtrack of the
film "Big Daddy." Later that summer he agreed to release his first
original song in eight years, the industrial-flavored "Oh My God," for
another soundtrack and introduced it in a commercial on MTV. (Mr. Rose
fussed over the song so much that he, Mr. Iovine and studio
technicians stayed up until nearly dawn adjusting the final mix,
according to people involved.) News of its release stoked speculation
that an album might follow. But it was panned by many critics and
quickly forgotten.

In late 1999 he invited Rolling Stone to preview about a dozen tracks.
The magazine reported the album appeared "loosely scheduled" for
release in the summer of 2000. In fact, Mr. Rose's visits to the
studio had become so irregular, according to several executives and
musicians involved with the band, that an engineer working with him,
Billy Howerdel, and the band's drummer, Josh Freese, found time during
that period to start their own project, the band A Perfect Circle, and
to begin recording an album, "Mer de Noms," which went on to sell 1.7
million copies.

Label executives still clung to the idea that if they could just bring
in the right producer, he could find a way to finish the album and
finally bring a return on their ever-growing investment. They summoned
Roy Thomas Baker, famed for his work with the art-rock band Queen.
(Mr. Beavan, who was said to have tired of the project, soon bowed
out.) But instead of wrapping things up, Mr. Baker decided that much
of what the band had needed to be re-recorded - and painstakingly so,
as he sometimes spent as long as eight hours on a few bars of music.

The process was drawn out even further after Mr. Rose hired two new
musicians - the guitarist Buckethead, a virtuoso who wore a
mannequin-like face mask and a KFC bucket on his head, and the drummer
Brian "Brain" Mantia - whom the singer directed to re-record all the
music that their predecessors had spent months performing.

Still, Mr. Rose seemed to be emerging from his sullen shell. In
mid-2000, for what was thought to be the first time since the
"Illusions" tour ended in 1993, he performed in public, with the
Thursday night bar band at the Cat Club on the Sunset Strip. "He was
psyched," recalled one person who worked with the band at Rumbo. "It
seemed like it boosted him again, people still want to hear him."

At about 4 a.m on New Year's Day 2001, at the House of Blues in Las
Vegas, he and the new lineup of the band finally unveiled some of
their new material. "I have traversed a treacherous sea of horrors to
be with you here tonight," Mr. Rose told the crowd, which received him
with roars of approval. Warm reviews followed. Making the most of the
moment, he took his band on the road, going to Brazil to play in the
Rock in Rio festival.

With the band's return, Mr. Rose's machinery cranked up again. One
internal cost analysis from the period pegs the operation's monthly
tab at a staggering $244,000. It included more than $50,000 in studio
time at the Village, a more modern studio where Mr. Baker had moved
the band. It also included a combined payroll for seven band members
that exceeded $62,000, with the star players earning roughly $11,000
each. Guitar technicians earned about $6,000 per month, while the
album's main engineer was paid $14,000 per month and a recording
software engineer was paid $25,000 a month, the document stated.

Label executives were losing patience. Interscope turned to Mr.
Zutaut, the original band's talent scout. Could an old friend succeed
where so many others had failed? He was offered a roughly 30 percent
bonus, he said, if he could usher the project to completion within a
year.

But Mr. Rose's renewed energies were not being directed toward the
finish line. He had the crew send him CD's almost daily, sometimes
with 16 or more takes of a musician performing his part of a single
song. He accompanied Buckethead on a jaunt to Disneyland when the
guitarist was drifting toward quitting, several people involved
recalled; then Buckethead announced he would be more comfortable
working inside a chicken coop, so one was built for him in the studio,
from wood planks and chicken wire.

Mr. Rose was far less indulgent of his producers and label. Around
Christmas, he ousted both Mr. Baker and Mr. Zutaut (who said there had
been a miscommunication). It would be weeks before the singer would
even allow an Interscope executive to visit him in the studio,
according to people involved with the production. Interscope
dispatched a senior talent executive, Mark Williams, to oversee the
project. Mr. Williams declined to comment for this article.

If Mr. Rose appeared more remote, his vision of the project became
more grandiose, people involved with the band said. He directed that
music produced by Mr. Baker be redone again, those people said. He now
spoke of releasing not merely one album but a trilogy. And he planned
one very big surprise.

At MTV's annual awards show in 2002, publicists buzzed through the
audience whispering about a big finale. And with just minutes to go in
the broadcast, a screen lifted away to reveal the band and Mr. Rose,
in cornrows and a sports jersey, looking strikingly young. The
musicians burst into "Welcome to the Jungle," one of the original
band's biggest hits, and the crowd went wild. But on television Mr.
Rose quickly seemed out of breath and out of tune. He ended the
performance, which included the new song "Madagascar" and the original
band's hit "Paradise City" in a messianic stance, raising his arms and
closing his eyes. He left the audience with a cryptic but tantalizing
message: "Round one."

Round two never came. The band went on a successful tour, but in the
hours after their triumphant Madison Square Garden appearance, Mr.
Rose was reportedly refused entry to the Manhattan nightclub Spa
because he was wearing fur, which the club does not allow. That killed
the mood. He didn't show up for the band's next performance, and the
promoter canceled the rest of the tour.

Months dragged on as the band waited for Mr. Rose to record more
vocals. In August 2003 when label executives announced their intention
to release a Guns N' Roses greatest-hits CD for the holidays, the
band's representatives managed to hold them off with yet another
promise to deliver "Chinese Democracy" by the end of the year. But the
album, of course, did not materialize. And then the game was over.

"HAVING EXCEEDED ALL budgeted and approved recording costs by millions
of dollars," the label wrote in a letter dated Feb. 2 , 2004, "it is
Mr. Rose's obligation to fund and complete the album, not Geffen's."
The tab at Village studio was closed out, and Mr. Rose tried a brief
stint recording at the label's in-house studio before that too was
ended. The band's computer gear, guitars and keyboards were packed
away. Over a legal challenge by Mr. Rose, the label issued a
greatest-hits compilation, in search of even a modest return on their
eight-figure investment.

Released in March of 2004, it turned out to be a surprisingly strong
seller, racking up sales of more than 1.8 million copies even without
any new music or promotional efforts by the original band. The
original band's debut, "Appetite for Destruction," which has sold 15
million copies, remains popular and racked up sales of another 192,000
copies last year, according to Nielsen SoundScan. It is a sign that
Mr. Rose's audience still waits.

Mr. Rose is reportedly working on the album even now in a San Fernando
Valley studio. "The 'Chinese Democracy' album is very close to being
completed," Merck Mercuriadis, the chief executive officer of
Sanctuary Group, which manages Mr. Rose, wrote in a recent statement.
He added that other artists including Peter Gabriel and Stevie Wonder
"have throughout their careers consistently taken similar periods of
time without undeserved scrutiny as the world respects that this is
what it can sometimes take to make great art." There's certainly more
than enough material; as Mr. Zutaut says, even years ago "people felt
like the record had been made four or five times already." But of
course, rumors of the album's imminent release have circulated since
almost the very beginning of the tale, more than a decade ago.

And at the center of that tale, now as then, is the confounding figure
of Axl Rose himself. A magnetic talent, a moody unpredictable artist,
a man of enormous ideas and confused follow-through, he has proven
himself to be an uncontrollable variable in any business plan.

His involvement on "Chinese Democracy" has outlasted countless
executives, producers and fellow musicians - even the corporate
structure that first brought the band to worldwide celebrity. Even, in
fact, the recognizable configuration of the recording industry as a
whole, which since the band first went into the studio in 1994 has
consolidated to four major corporations from six, and staggered amid
an epidemic of piracy, leaving it more focused than ever on the bottom
line, and on reliable musicians with a proven track record of
consistent performance. The sort of rock stars that the original
members of Guns N' Roses, who recently submitted a claim seeking $6
million in what were called unpaid royalties from its catalog, used to
be. But which Mr. Rose, with his mood swings, erratic work habits and
long dark stretches, no longer is.

He hasn't disappeared entirely. His voice can be heard on the latest
edition in the "Grand Theft Auto" video game series, in the character
of a grizzled 70's-style rock D.J. "Remember," he advises the radio
station's audience, "we're not outdated and neither is our music."

Interscope has taken "Chinese Democracy" off its schedule. Mr. Rose
hasn't been seen there since last year, when he was spotted leaving
the parking area beneath Interscope's offices, where witnesses
reported that a small traffic jam had congealed when attendants halted
other cars to clear a path for his silver Ferrari. Mr. Rose punched
the gas and cruised into the day.

Copyright 2005 The New York Times

without being an ass, i'm guessing your in the 30ish range? once the music is playing, i can remember it like it was yesterday

hey reporter. if you aint covering dr hunter thompsons death please drop it

Aww the original. Good on Fletch


BTW... Rocket Queen is my fav.

all those times

bottoms up

i was raised by a blues guitarist. i was listening to otis redding and lightnin hopkins LOOOONG before i knew of nirvana ;)

hell yeah goo d shit

I bought the tape version of Appetite for Destruction the day it came out. KNAC had been playing it in advance of its release and I couldn't believe what I was hearing. As a guitarist, it still think it stands out as one of the greatest rock albums of all time. I also saw them a few times before they got really big in Pasadena. When they were on, they could tear your face off.

The only bummer is that I recently bought a new replacement CD, and the mixing doesn't sound nearly as good as I remember. It's a bit washed out.

truly a classic album. I think i listen to a track off it at least a week just randomly on my ipod

http://gofuckyourself.com/showthread.php?t=442685