Guns N' Roses - Use Your Illusion Roughs

I am not embarrassed to admit that I'm a fan of Chinese Democracy and what Axl is doing now, although I definitely don't think of it as proper GNR. Unfortunately, that album is a bit of a laugh now due to it's sales and ridiculous marketing plan with Best Buy. For crying out loud, you can go in to just about any Best Buy and find STACKS of that CD and it's vinyl counterpart for sale at full price. I kinda feel bad for Best Buy, but not that bad because they were in bed with Irving Azoff and nobody really did their job. Axl has to suffer some of the blame too for taking so long to finish the album, but honestly that part didn't surprise me, especially after the Use Your Illusion and "The Spaghetti Incident?" delays.

In case you don't know the details, the two Use Your Illusion albums were delayed over the course of several years prior to their releases in 1991. Everyone seems to blame Axl for being a perfectionist, but it really seems like it was a perfect storm of bullshit from all parties involved, save Izzy. Stories circulate that Axl or Slash would approve a mix only to have the other reject it, and this occured on a regular basis. Add to that the firing of Steven Adler and search for his replacement which led to the hiring of Matt Sorum and about seven months of mixing sessions by Bill Price, the legend who mixed the Sex Pistols' Never Mind The Bollocks, much of which involved him flying all over the US to play new mixes to the band for their approval and to collect multitracks for unfinished songs. They went on tour months before the album was even done!

It's really amazing that GNR got anything done with all that chaos around them, although the Use Your Illusion albums were the nail in the coffin for the band, at least as they were, as Axl intended for those albums to erase the memory of Appetite For Destruction, same as Chinese Democracy was supposed to erase the memory of Use Your Illusion. Still, the Use Your Illusion albums meant a lot more to me than Appetite ever did, and I have fond memories of the insane amount of vitriol all over the first Illusion album. The second Illusion album never did as much for me, but I've always heard that it was meant to be the "friendly" record. Personally, if I never hear Estranged again it won't affect me one way or another, but Civil War, Shotgun Blues and You Could Be Mine are still killers.

Anyway, back in March I received an e-mail from a very friendly fellow named Mark who pointed me in the direction of a site filled with lossless GNR boots, mostly live recordings although there were several studio collections too. There were three collections of Use Your Illusion roughs there, all of which I grabbed with much glee and abandon. I thought about posting all of them but I decided that was simply too much GNR to share, so I've made a collection of highlights for all to examine. As for the lossless files, they are still up if you want to grab them. The name of the site is Guns N' Roses Bootlegs and the links for the individual boots are below as well as the highlights collection for download. Enjoy!

Use Your Illusion Outtakes
This is apparently a bootleg comp someone pressed and sold a while back. Much of the content is from other boots but there is some unique stuff on it too like session excerpts and instrumentals.

Axl's Advanced Copy
Who knows if this set of tracks were really ever in Axl's possession, but this is a great boot regardless. Apparently it's collected from two CDs of rough mixes from the Illusion sessions. Not all the tracks are hugely different and the quality is lacking, but it features the unreleased Ain't Goin' Down and a rather odd version of Don't Damn Me where Axl ad libs the end of the song. This is one to grab!

Use Your Illusion Sessions: Rough Mixes and Q Sound Mixes
This is another really interesting collection. The first part is from a DAT tape labeled Rough Mixes with new Slash Guitars, which is just what it says it is. Axl is nowhere to be found on those tracks so you get to hear the band sans overdubs as well as early instrumentals of some of the covers that ended up on "The Spaghetti Incident?". The second part is labeled Mixes And Q-Sound and contains a number of rough mixes but also features QSound variants. QSound was a "positional three-dimensional sound processing algorithm" that was supposed to make you feel like you were in the middle of the music if you placed your head just right between the speakers or were wearing good headphones. I don't remember it working AT ALL, but apparently people in the video game industry believed in it enough to use it in arcades and some console games for a while. You can read a lot more about it at the QSound wikipedia reference which also contains a list of the albums that were mixed in QSound. It's a pretty short list.

One other note about this particular bootleg, while the mixes are high quality recordings and when ran through a spectral analyzer it's apparent they fill the full frequency range of a CD quality recording, whomever transferred them did so at ridiculously HOT levels. The instrumental roughs with new Slash guitars sound alright, but the rough mixes and their QSound counterparts are totally brickwalled. So, if you're listening to these and wondering why they sound distorted as hell, there's your answer. I give credit to whomever leaked/shared them but if you load 'em up in Audacity you're gonna cry at how badly damaged they are.


And now, a collection of highlights from the above bootlegs for your listening pleasure!


Guns N' Roses - Use Your Illusion Roughs

01 Ain't Goin' Down
From Axl's Advanced Copy, this leftover was apparently used in a Guns N' Roses pinball machine, although I've never seen one. Decent track.

02 Civil War
The third version of the track on the Use Your Illusion Outtakes boot, this one features vocals but not the intro from Cool Hand Luke.

03 The Garden
Rough instrumental track from the Rough Mixes with new Slash Guitars DAT. Pretty cool.

04 Get In The Ring
This is a mostly instrumental mix but there are some vocals on it. Get In The Ring was one of the last songs to be finished for the albums as Axl was still working on the lyrics.

05 Double Talkin' Jive
Rough Mix

06 New Rose
Instrumental from the Slash Guitars DAT.

07 Coma
From Axl's Advanced Copy, this isn't much different from the released version but it is missing a lot of the extra sounds from the emergency room and, as the record credits them, the "bitches".

08 November Rain
A December 1990 rough mix.

09 Locomotive
Slash Guitar Instrumental

10 Pretty Tied Up
Rough Mix

11 Don't Damn Me
This is the version where Axl ad libs the very end of the recording. Funny.

12 You Could Be Mine
Rough Mix

13 I Don't Care About You
Slash Guitar Instrumental

14 My World
This one is very suspicious. Load this up in your favorite audio editor and you'll see that the right and left channels mirror each other, making me wonder if this is really someone's attempt at tweaking the track. It also sounds strange, like it's out of phase. Regardless, even though I'm pretty sure EVERYONE hates this track (except me) I thought I'd include this since it's mostly instrumental and gives one a better chance to examine the backing track. I have no idea what possessed Axl to record this or why no one else in the band knew about it until the CD was pressed, but this ridiculously over-the-top abuse track is for me a lot of fun. I can't take the lyrics seriously, but I get the impression that Axl was trying to be Nine Inch Nails or Skinny Puppy. It's not great, but I gotta give the guy a lot of credit for trying.


PS - No offense intended with this photo Axl, I just thought it was cute and worth sharing. Get the next album out man! I know I'm not the only one that will buy it!