We had intricate songs, we had complex songs, and I think only bands like Metallica were doing anything similar to what we were doing. They seriously focused on meter changes and all that on The Black Album, and I don’t know what their process was, but we would get our framework together, then just jam on it. If we made a mistake or did a real train wreck section, we’d go back and do it again, and usually we’d pull it together really quickly. Everyone in the band had a short attention span at that point, and no one wanted to work too long on one thing. We’d spend a few days on the arrangements, but when it came down to recording, we’d do one run-through and then the red light was on. It was a given that there would be some guitar overdubs and some vocals done later, but when it came to the basic guitar, bass, and drum tracks, all of those live takes had to be keepers. No one wanted to embarrass himself by causing us to do it over and over while the other guys in the band waited for you to get it right. That’s what happens when you have good musicians, good chemistry… just the right people, in a good fucking band.
Guns took over the Record Plant. It was definitely indulgent, but we had a lot of work to do, and we had a really, really good time being Guns N’ Roses again. I did guitars in one studio and Axl more or less made the other studio into an apartment, because he had decided that he’d get more work done if he lived there. He moved his exercise equipment in, as well as a bed and couches—it became a glorified lounge where he and his entourage might be comfortable. We definitely had a lot of traffic coming through the Record Plant in those days.
In my opinion none of that was conducive to getting our work done any quicker. All the same, while recording the Illusion albums we had a very bohemian, 1960s kind of scene going on around the studio; the combination of our friends—musicians and otherwise—plus all the other people we knew made for a very cool backdrop. Any given night I might be laying down guitars in one studio while Axl was doing vocals in the other while a cast of interesting characters hung around participating in one way or another. Shannon Hoon from Blind Melon came by often because he was an old friend of Axl’s from Indiana; he sang backup on “Don’t Cry,” which made that song all the more soulful.
The biggest change in the band, aside from Matt replacing Steven, was the overwhelming presence of keyboards and synthesizers. Axl had introduced a screaming synth line in “Paradise City,” back in the Appetite days. That was the start of it, I suppose, and I was opposed to that, too. As I mentioned, on the Illusion albums Axl was insistent on a major piano and synth presence. After we’d done the basic tracks, after I’d done my guitar parts, once it was time for Axl to do his vocals, he spent a lot of time adding synthesizer parts. He was like a kid in a candy store with all of these banks of keyboards he’d had installed in the studio. He’d sit there for hours to get the right sound for one section of a song, and remember, this guy was not strung out, he was not wasted, although he was stoned on pot a lot—which probably made him obsess over that stuff even more. Axl was that into the grandiose production thing, which was not so good on the one hand, but all things considered, on the flip side he had so much integrity about it that he’d spend however long it took to ensure that the sonic drama was perfect. What he ended up with at the end of the day was fucking brilliant. I don’t know if it represented Guns in my head, but it sounded amazing regardless. When we did “Live and Let Die,” it was all synths—those horns are not horns. What Axl did there was really complex; he spent hours dialing all of that shit in, getting the nuances just right, and I have to give him that. He did the same for “November Rain” with all of those fucking string arrangements—they were all synth. I’ve heard songs with real strings that sound less authentic. The only time that we brought in outside musicians on those two records were the gospel singers on “Knockin’ on Heaven’s Door” and the harmonica on “Bad Obsession.” The only other effect that wasn’t synthesized was the defibrillator at the very beginning of “Coma.” Yeah, that was real.
AFTER I WAS DONE DOING MY GUITAR tracks, I vacated Studio B and Axl took it over and turned the entire Record Plant into a complex where his friends could hang out while he spent a few weeks finishing his vocals and adding the aforementioned synths. The rest of us weren’t too happy about that because every day that setup cost us a lot of money. It would have been fine if there was activity all day long, but none of us saw anything getting done on a consistent basis. In the end, Axl finished his work, but fuck, those two records cost a fortune to make—and I’m talking studio time alone.
This was when Axl started getting obsessive about the details of everything to do with Guns N’ Roses, starting with the publishing splits of the songs on Illusion I and II. The days of band members getting a straight 20 percent were long gone because there were so many outside writers this go-round, especially on the old songs that existed before Guns that were now in the equation, such as “Back Off Bitch.” We also had to factor in Matt, who wasn’t a full-fledged member: he hadn’t been around during the writing of the songs, though he’d played on all of them. In the end, because of contributors like Paul Huge and West Arkeen and Del James, Axl insisted upon splits that were like 22.75 percent or 32.2 percent per song for us core members. It was mathematically worked out according to who wrote what, which made it easy in the sense that we’d never have anything to fight over, but at the same time, it was pored over and complicated things to a corporate degree.
The songs we worked on in Chicago also posed a problem because those months there were so disjointed, and for the most part, Axl wasn’t even there, so the splits he devised for songs like “Garden of Eden,” “Don’t Damn Me,” and “Get in the Ring” were totally arbitrary; Duff and I wrote them instrumentally when Axl wasn’t even in the room. There were piano-driven songs with complex guitar parts that I’d had to write and arrange that I wasn’t even being given a songwriting credit. It was the same with “November Rain” and “Estranged,” to be specific. It concerned me, to say the least, but I chose to overlook it.
WHEN IT CAME TO GETTING THE ALBUM mixed, we had a decision to make. Thompson and Barbiero, who’d mixed Appetite, were no longer a team. The temperament of the band as we now were didn’t suit them, or their temperament didn’t suit us, I can’t remember which. We decided to hire Bob Clearmountain, a guy whose credentials spoke for themselves: he’d mixed everyone from the Kinks to Bowie to the Stones to Springsteen. We had a lot of material ready for him to start on while Axl continued to work on what wasn’t finished yet. Clearmountain came in and talked endlessly about Q Sound 5.1, a technology that was still in its formative stages. He was really into it, and I remember that he got Axl pretty excited about it, too. That was all great, but I wasn’t having it at all; Q Sound sounded like a wash to me. I didn’t care that Bob insisted that it was the future; to hear it properly required five speakers, and especially back then, in the early 1990s, most people had only two. And if you listened to something mixed in Q Sound through two speakers, it sounded like an indistinct mess. It was one of those much-hyped things that time proves to be nothing but a short-term, bridge technology: much like the minidisc, and the Laserdisc, Q Sound was a weak, impermanent version of what was to come.
That said, rather than make a big scene and get the whole band up in arms, which would have resulted in Axl and me arguing the pros and cons of Q Sound until we were blue in the face, I bit my lip and hoped that this would work out. And it did; Clearmountain shot himself in the foot almost immediately: one afternoon we discovered a notepad of his where he’d notated all of the drum samples he planned to mix in over Matt’s drum tracks. I’m not a drummer, so I can’t explain the technical ins and outs, but he’d brought in samples that would change Matt’s sound drastically. We showed it to Matt who had no idea and he wasn’t too pleased at all—and that was the excuse we needed to fire Bob Clearmountain.
We ended up hiring Bill Price to mix. We respected Bill’s resume, to say the least: he’d mixed the first Pretenders record, the Sex Pistols’ Never Mind the Bollocks, and as far as I was concerned, that was all that I needed to know to sign off on him. Bill worked out of a studio in Larchmont, California, and I made it my personal mission to be there every day, watching him work, contributing where I could, and ensuring that the mixes he did each day were sent out to Axl’s house in Malibu immediately.
It was a long, tedious process: I’d show up in the early afternoon and listen to the mix that Bill would have up. Once it was at a place where I was satisfied with it, we’d make a tape of it and send it to Axl. We’d hang around the studio or start working on the next song while the messenger got it there. When he did, I must say, Axl wasted no time in listening to the tape and calling in with his comments, which were usually very helpful. We’d then make whatever adjustments needed to be made, mix it down again, and send another copy out to him. And so on, song by song. It took forever to get them all just right, but it was worth it.
DURING THIS PROCESS, THE ANIMOSITY between our manager, Alan Niven, and Axl came to a head. The rest of us had been trying to squash it for a while, but Axl’s issues with Alan had been brewing for years—since the
