new Gilby Clarke interview

There is a new Gilby Clarke interview out, from songfacts.com: http://www.songfacts.com/blog/interviews/gilby_clarke/. Here are some highlights:

Songfacts: What are some memories of the recording of The Spaghetti Incident? album?

Gilby: The Spaghetti Incident?, some of it was recorded while we were on the road, so they booked a studio and sometimes we'd go into the studio not even knowing what song we were recording until we were on our way. When we recorded "Since I Don't Have You," I didn't know we were recording that song until I got to the studio. We jammed that song a couple of times at soundchecks, and I was like, "Well, if we're going to do it slow like that, my contribution is acoustic guitar." I'm all the acoustics on it, because I liked what Slash was doing and I didn't want to get in his way putting an electric guitar just for the sake of putting a rhythm guitar on it. I wanted to complement it. That's why a song like that I played acoustic: because I didn't want to mess around with that melody.

A lot of the stuff also was recorded when they were doing the Illusion records, which I had no part of. They recorded some of them before I got there.

A lot of people think I erased Izzy's parts. That's actually not true. Izzy didn't play on a lot of them, so I got to just put my parts on songs that were recorded. So it was a little bit of both. It was a little bit working with Mike Clink [The Spaghetti Incident? co-producer], just myself and him, and then some of it was the whole band in there recording together.

Which, by the way, was very easy. At that point we had been playing live for a long time and we were definitely clicking. One of the things about a band is knowing your part, knowing what you do. Everybody had their gig in that band: Slash was lead, I played rhythm, Duff and Matt knew what to do. We knew how it would work with each other, so it actually was fairly easy to record with those guys. There were never click tracks - Matt was always on time. It was a lot easier than one would think.

Songfacts: What do you remember about G n' R's recording of "Sympathy for the Devil"? I remember hearing somewhere that band members said they could sense that that was the ending for the band. Did you have a sense that that was either the ending or the beginning of the end for the band right there?

Gilby: I might say yes and no on that. I wasn't that involved with the "Sympathy for the Devil" recording - they did that while I was on the road touring for my solo record.

I knew that that was the ending because nobody told me about it. Officially I was in the band at that time, and they did that song without me. That was one of the last straws for me, because nobody had said anything to me and they recorded a song by one of my favorite bands. It was pretty clear I'm a big Stones fan, and they recorded the song without me. So I knew that was it.

My official end was actually at the last show of the last tour. Axl was jokingly saying "Bye" to everybody, but he was really saying "Bye" to everybody. He even came up to me and said, "Hey, enjoy your last show." At that point I thought he was being funny, but he wasn't being funny. He knows what he's doing. He's a smart guy. So I knew it was the end at the last show.

Songfacts: Okay. And lastly, what are your thoughts on the Chinese Democracy album?

Gilby: I think it's a very good record. I don't think it's a great record. Here's what I think is very good about it: I still think that there's a lot of creativity on it. I think there's some really good songwriting. I think Axl delivered some incredible vocal performances. There's great lyrics, there's great performances.

What I missed about that being called a Guns N' Roses record is the identity. You hear Slash play guitar, it doesn't matter if he was playing a Stratocaster and a Vox, you can tell that's Slash. And that's what I miss on this record is that consistent identity with Axl, that guitar, that one guitar that really complements him. There's some great guitar playing on the record, it's just a little hard to concentrate on it. It's almost like a pinball machine: there's just so much going on. You can't say it's bad, because it's all very good, it's just there's a lot going on on that record, and it's kind of hard to concentrate.