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!

Mike Doughty - Skittish Roughs

I know a lot of us here love Mike Doughty, be it with Soul Coughing, as a solo artist or collaborating with someone else. Since I haven't posted anything related to Mike or the Cough in a while, I thought it was about time for something wonderful from the house of Doughty.

If you missed it in the age of Napster, a rough tape of Mike's Skittish record leaked way back when. The album was recorded with studio-wiz, Kramer, while Soul Coughing were still together and Mike wanted to make a stripped-down, acoustic album all on his own. Being signed to Warner Bros. at the time, it was offered to them for release but they shot it down, leaving it shelved indefinitely. Wait a few years, the Cough have broken up and Mike isn't doing much, although he notices that the album somehow leaked onto the net and was being shared by fans with a lot of love for the material. As only can be expected of Mike, he decides to burn a bunch of CDRs of the finished album, get his guitar, rent a car and go traveling across the country, booking shows where he would show up, play Soul Coughing classics and his own new songs, all completely solo and sell a bunch of copies of the album. Mike proceeded to clean up his life, win back his audience, get a lot of new fans in the process and eventually land a deal with ATO Records which is owned by his buddy, Dave Matthews.

After years of selling the finished Skittish album at shows along with a live CD and the original pressings of the Rockity Roll EP, ATO released Skittish and Rockity Roll as a double CD with some unreleased cuts. It's a great release and you should grab it if you haven't heard it, and it is available digitally at iTunes or Amazon for your digital needs, although several of the tracks from Skittish still have not seen the light of day, at least officially.

So, in case you didn't catch them when Napster was still around, here are the rough versions of the Skittish recordings that are circulating. Despite the simplicity of Mike's mostly acoustic set-up you can hear interesting differences between these versions and the finished ones.

If you like this, please buy the official Skittish/Rockity Roll release. Despite being signed to a label, ATO Records isn't a massive, multi-national corporation, it's kind of like an indie with major label distribution. So please support an artist who can benefit from your purchase, especially one who lives and breathes the music they're making. I know I placed the links for digital purchase above, but again, you can grab them at iTunes or Amazon. Also, if you like this and haven't heard Mike's other solo releases, he has three other great albums, Haughty Melodic, Golden Delicious and Sad Man, Happy Man, all also available digitally. The most recent, Sad Man, Happy Man, is REALLY EXCELLENT and you get a TON of bonus tracks with the iTunes release, all of which are quality!


Mike Doughty - Skittish Roughs

01 The Pink Life
02 Real Love/It's Only Life
03 No Peace, Los Angeles
04 Mean Curl
05 Where Have You Gone?
06 All The Dirt
07 Unluckier
08 World Of Suck
09 Shunned + Falsified
10 Skittish
11 Thank You, Lord, For Sending Me The F Train
12 Mr. Bitterness
13 Laundrytown
14 Looks
15 Rising Sign
16 I Failed To Use It
17 Cobain's Sarcoma
18 Language Barrier

Iggy and The Stooges - Search and Destroy

I'm reminded of Johnny Mnemonic's words in William Gibson's Burning Chrome, although I may not get them completely right, so to paraphrase:

When everyone else is coming high-tech, you go low-tech, and vice-versa.

I don't know if I can always agree with that sentiment, but there is a logic there that can definitely enhance creativity. It almost sounds like one of Eno's Oblique Strategies, although it doesn't sound nearly as intelligent as any of those. Regardless, sometimes a drastic change in perspective is exactly what you need.

The funny part about the mention of Eno is this all ties back in with one of his best known collaborators, David Bowie, someone who has always been interested in modern technology and was partially responsible for one of the odder releases on a major label for it's time, Iggy and The Stooges' Raw Power.

In case you're unfamiliar with the history behind Raw Power, Iggy and Bowie met in New York a few years after the end of The Stooges as they were known for their first two albums. Bowie and his then business partner, Tony DeFries, signed Iggy and his collaborator, James Williamson, to their company, MainMan, and proceeded to try and get them with a new rhythm section. For Bowie and DeFries, any attempt to commercialize Iggy was thwarted when it was decided that Ron and Scott Asheton, the original guitarist and drummer, respectively, for The Stooges, would become the new group's rhythm section, with Ron taking over on bass, Scott remaining on drums, James becoming the lead guitarist and Iggy retaining his permanent position as vocalist and rabble rouser. They would be rechristened Iggy and The Stooges and return to the recording studio to create their third album, although by this point DeFries had distanced himself from the band, most notably after Bowie offered to produce the album and was turned down flat.

In the studio, The Stooges really didn't need Bowie. They had their songs readied and refined, but when it came time to mix the final product, CBS wanted Bowie's name somewhere on the final product. So, despite a number of band-prepared mixes, they were rejected and Bowie entered the studio with Iggy to mix the album. This was achieved in one day and has been considered one of the most controversial album mixes of all time. Bowie's mix, while dynamic and interesting, rendered a band known for it's full and loud sound tinny and full of treble. It's not as bad as my words may paint it, at least in my opinion, but many fans consider it a turd on a wedding cake.

For years since, fans traded bootleg tapes of alternate, unreleased mixes of Raw Power until 1997 when Sony enlisted Iggy himself to remix the album. Iggy's mix was supposed to put the power back in line with the raw, and he didn't do a terrible job apart from the fact he insisted on mastering the album so loud that it is now considered the loudest album in existence. On paper that probably sounds pretty cool, but when the album is almost entirely in a state of perpetual distortion, it becomes somewhat unlistenable. Actually, that might be putting it too kindly as I can't stand to listen to Iggy's mix, at least as it was released, and I know I'm not the only one.

Finally, Sony made the decision to issue a deluxe version of Raw Power this year. It would be released in two forms, the Legacy Edition which contains a remastered version of the Bowie mix with a previously unreleased live show and two leftovers from the era, and the Deluxe Edition containing everything from the Legacy version plus an extra disc of relics from the era and a documentary DVD. The remastered version of the Bowie mix was supposed to be a revelation and fans were thrilled about all of this until they found it to be just as tinny as before. The live show was a welcome addition though and the additional unreleased tracks looked to be wonderful, but it was all a mixed blessing. None of the outtakes were essential or terribly enlightening, but the liner notes to the Deluxe Edition claimed a completely unreleased, alternate mix, labeled the Embassy Reels, was found, but this too was misleading.

Sometime in the mid to late seventies, Raw Power was reissued on a British label named Embassy. There is a lot of confusion regarding this because apparently some versions of this reissue may have been pressed from a slightly different master, or the very first UK pressing of the album was accidentally pressed from this slightly different master, or both. On top of this, some cassette releases of the album also contained a variant of this master, just to make things more confusing. This version of the album was pretty much the same as any other release though, apart from an otherwise unreleased and significantly different mix of Search and Destroy. Now, one would think that if you're going to include a significant find from a different version of the album that it would be the one track that is significantly different, but instead they included two of the tracks which were essentially the same as the standard Bowie mix. Go figure, eh?

After all this, the only other interesting find on the Deluxe Edition were two of Iggy's 1997 mixes in a non-distorted state, which begs the question "why not include Iggy's remix in it's entirety in this state?", to which everyone seems to be saying "WHO KNOWS?????". In the end, an excellent opportunity to please a notoriously difficult to please fan base was lost and we're all left upset with another major label. No shock there, but when the major labels are approaching the end of their ability to release physical product regularly it's unforgivable. What happened, did they fire everyone who knew how to research their archives with more than a passing glance?

Bowie's mix is still the one to get, at least for the time being, although the other variants are worth finding as well. Rough Power is mighty fascinating with it's varying mixes of the whole album, although the WABX tracks sound like the were recorded with a dictaphone next to a boombox. The Iggy remix is cool, just don't try to listen to it with headphones or through a loud system. The "Embassy" version is pretty much the regular album, though that mix of Search and Destroy is worth hearing.

Now I'm not about to post every variant of the album for you to check out, especially with the Legacy Edition, Iggy remix and Rough Power all being readily available, but the one track where the differences are most obvious is Search and Destroy, and I don't think it will hurt anyone if I post some variants for you to compare against each other.


Iggy and The Stooges - Search and Destroy

01 Unmixed Version
This was played on Detroit radio station WABX. The general consensus is that it's unmixed so whether that's accurate or not, that's how I'm labeling it for now. This is taken from a superior tape copy than the one featured on Rough Power.

02 Rough Mix
Labeling this a rough mix may be inaccurate as this may be Iggy's original mix circa 1973, but we haven't gotten any straight answers about details like that. Anyway, if it's not the final mix, it's generally considered rough, so that's how this is labeled. This is taken from Rough Power.

03 Original Bowie Mix
The standard Bowie mix as featured on almost all original pressings of the album, the Sundazed vinyl reissue, the Legacy and Deluxe Editions as well as the late eighties CD issue. This rip is from the 180 gram Sundazed vinyl edition because it sounds AWESOME!!!

04 Alternate Mix
This is the version that is either on some copies of the Embassy version, the first UK pressing, possibly both and also on some early cassette releases. Some speculate that this may have been Iggy's final mix, though it could also be an alternate Bowie mix. It doesn't matter though because it's pretty damn cool all on it's own. I prefer the "Original Bowie Mix", but this is worthy of replays despite the echo on the drums.

05 Iggy Remix, Nice Version
Most versions of Search and Destroy that appeared on compilations post-1997 were the Iggy Pop remix, but they are almost all mastered significantly "cooler" than Iggy's "hot" version. This version is taken from Iggy's A Million In Prizes anthology which was released on Virgin Records. As it stands, there are now five tracks from the Ig's 97 remix that have been released as better mastered versions, and while that's great it's ridiculous that all eight aren't out there somewhere. Anybody got the hook up?

REQUEST FOR HELP: Soul Coughing - Ruby Vroom Rough Mixes

Would any of the fine visitors to this blog be able to point me in the direction of a copy or download of the rough mixes of Soul Coughing's "Ruby Vroom" album? I've seen it in trade lists over the years but I've never been able to procure a copy for myself.

For those wondering, the rough mixes of the Cough's RV feature several differences between the finished mixes including samples and performances that have been deleted. I've heard samples of the original intro to "Bus To Beelzebub" and the rather spare mix of "Down To This" which also features Doughty imitating a sample from the musical "Guys and Dolls". There are other differences but the biggest draw is two different versions of "Disseminated" which was re-recorded for their second album, "Irresistible Bliss".

If any of you could help me I would be ETERNALLY greatful and I would be more than happy to share any rarities in my collection you might be looking for. Either drop me a line via my e-mail (it's in my profile) or leave me a message in the comments. Thank you in advance for any help you can send my way! :)