I edited a interview. Here's some highlights\ enjoy
In his first interview in six years, Axl Rose talks about rebuilding Guns N Roses for the new century.
It is 2AM in dimly lit recording studio deep in Los Angeles' San Fernando Valley. Sitting back on a couch in the control room is a once omnipresent rock figure who has been out of the public view for most of the last decade. The music he's been playing on this long night has been the focus of his obsessive perfectionism since 1991, when Guns N Roses last released an album of new material.
But in late November, Axl Rose plays nearly a dozen tracks from the long in the works Guns N` Roses album for Rolling Stone and gave his first substantial interview in more than six years.
He was only an hour late to do so. Occasionally getting up to whisper details about what still must be done to complete the tracks- ''I gotta put some guitar here!'' - Rose comes across as intense but hardly humorless as he speaks at length about his music and the fate of his former band mates.
At 36 Rose looks a bit older and more solidly built than the lean rock god of his ''Sweet Child O' Mine'' days, the result perhaps not just of the passage of time but of his kickboxing regimen and a lifestyle that's said to be largely nocturnal but zealously healthy.
He's dressed tonight in Abercrombie & Fitch, with his reddish hair intact and cut to a Prince Valiant-ish mid-length. Having failed to deliver a new album by the end of the twentieth century, is Rose ready to commit to releasing a record sometime during the twenty-first?
''Yes, I think that would definitely be the right time,'' he answers, a slight grin coming to his face.
The new Guns N Roses album is tentatively titled Chinese Democracy and loosely scheduled for summer 2000.
''As far as I can tell,'' says GnR's manager Doug Goldstein, ''we are now 99% musically done and 80% vocals done. I see the record being done Feb or March for a summer release.''
But time is of little consequence in the world of Axl Rose.
In passing, Rose mentions that he recently ''cancelled Thanksgiving'' delaying his celebration a few days until it better suited his timetable. ''I'm trying not to do that with Christmas,'' he adds, ''since New Years comes up right away.''
From time to time, Rose gets up to pace the studio where he has spent the last year recording and re-recording material (his workday tends to start around midnight and run through the early daylight hours). ''What we're trying to do is build Guns N` Roses back into something,'' Rose explains quietly as he stands in front of a sunken isolation booth.
''This wasn't Guns N` Roses, but I feel it is Guns N` Roses now.''
Furthermore, because the new material has been composed collaboratively with the new players, he insists, ''It's not an Axl Rose album, even if it's what I wanted it to be. Everybody is putting everything they've got into singing and building. Maybe I'm helping steer it to what it should be built like.''
Throughout the night, Rose seems anxious to finally have his say but wishes he could wait until the new album is released and can ''speak for itself.''
According to Rose, part of the delay in building the new model of Guns N` Roses has been ''educating myself'' about the technology that's come to define rock in the nineties: ''It's like from scratch, learning how to work with something and not wanting it just to be something you did on a computer.''
By 1996, Slash was gone; Izzy Stradlin was long gone. Duff McKagen officially quit in 1998. They were replaced by a shifting group of collaborators, who've helped Rose create music that plays to his old strengths while also playing catchup. ''Oh My God'' - the industrial flavored track that surfaced on the End of Days soundtrack - is only one hint of what's to come.
Imagine Led Zeppelin's Physical Graffiti remixed by Beck and Trent Reznor, and you'll have some sense of Axl's new sound.
Song after song combines the edgy hard rock force and pop smarts of vintage Guns N Roses with surprisingly modern and ambitious music textures. In addition to the album's almost grungy title track, tentative song titles include ''Catcher in the Rye,'' ''I.R.S,'' ''The Blues'' and ''TWAT,'' which he says stands for ''there was a time.''
Another song, called ''Oklahoma'' - heard tonight only as an instrumental - was inspired by a court date with ex-wife Erin Everly. ''I was sitting in my litigation with my ex-wife, and it was the day after the bombing,'' Rose remembers with a wince. ''We had a break, and I'm sitting with my attorneys with a sort of smile on my face, more like a nervous thing - it was like, 'Forgive me, people, I'm having trouble taking this seriously.' It's just ironic that we're sitting there and this person is spewing all kinds of things and 168 people just got killed. And this person I'm sitting there with, she don't care. Obliterating me is their goal.''
Rose seems estranged from many old associates -
Everything I've heard is spectacular. It's exciting and diverse and - I think - absolutely well worth the wait.''
The rebuilding - and ongoing reinvention - of Guns N Roses has been a difficult and, quite obviously, slow and expensive process. Rose does point out that the expense will be less glaring if, as he expects, he gets another record out of the hours and hours of material he's committed to tape, possibly one that's even more industrial and electronica-influence than Chinese Democracy. ''I'd like to take some of the old Guns fans along with me gradually into the twenty-first century,'' he says. Along the way, assorted producers - including Youth (the Verve) and the loose lipped Moby (''I appreciate all the publicity he's been getting us, but...
Having stayed publicly silent so long, Rose appears to view the album as a final offering\ he want's seymores son to grow up listening\ come across to CD
As for his reputation as a recluse locked away mysteriously at his Malibu estate, Rose says, ''The reality is that I'm not clubbing because I don't find it's in my best interest to be out there. I am building something slowly, and it doesn't seem to be much out there as in here, in the studio and in my home.
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