This I Love

Blackstar wrote:From a later interview (2019):

Mike Clink called me and said, “Hey, the producers for this Robin Williams movie are coming down at some point and they want Guns to record a song for it, a song called This I Love. But we gotta find the tapes. I was like, “Okay,” because I guess they had written it and recorded it during the Illusions tour. Because I don’t know if you knew this, [...] Illusions wasn’t finished when they hit that tour, so Mike would fly with them and they would finish it up in different cities. So I remember getting four tapes, one from Australia, one was in England, the other was, like, somewhere in Wisconsin...

So they’d come in and they were from different parts. So when they finally got there, Axl – that was Axl who was really involved with that – said, “Hey,” he called me up. “Hey, don’t you come in?” “Yeah.” So he came in and goes, “This is what I’m looking for.” And I found the... because then there’s always a master tape, which has usually drums, rhythm guitars, bass and a scratch vocal; and then the rest are slaves, which have different parts. So they had, like, three different slaves. He was like, “There’s a certain part of the song that I want, that I really like, so you gotta find the right tape”. So I put it up and he was like, “Yeah, that’s it.” And it was a beautiful song. I guess it ended up on Democracy, but just the title. It’s a whole different song. [...] I remember I listened to it - I haven’t listened to Democracy in quite a while, but I go, “Oh, this isn’t the exact...” Because that was a piano ballad. [...] It was a ballad, it was a really cool song. So a guy, Kenny (?), who I mentioned earlier, who was around at the time, had become, like, my assistant during that, he would come in and he’d help me out.

I’m sure you’ve heard the famous Axl stories about him just being out of control and being, you know, rude, just yelling... Well, I never really got any of that, personally. He always treated me great, and he treated my family great, and he was always awesome. The only time he ever did really get upset with me was during that session. At the end of that song, This I Love, he was repeating the... oh what was his girlfriend? Stephanie Seymour. It was like “I love you, Stephanie” or “This I love, Stephanie.” He was, like, whispering it at the end of the song. And he heard it and he goes, “Just erase all that.” I was like, “Do you want me to back it up?” “No, erase it!” And he yelled and walked out of the room. So Kenny there, the assistant, and I said, “We’re gonna erase something GNR fans are never ever gonna hear. Like, they’re never gonna hear this.” That to me was like, “Wow, this is crazy. This is a GNR song that no one’s ever heard and no one is ever gonna hear this again.” I looked at him, “Are you ready?” And I put the tracks in the recorder and I erased it. [...]

It was pretty intense. That was the first time he got upset - I think the only time he ever got upset with me. And I was like - because I didn’t know. I was like, “Do you wanna back it up, just in case?” You know, I was gonna lock it to the A-DAT and back it up, so anybody could put it back. And he was like, “No.” I go, “Alright...” And I just remember, like, that was the only time I had butterflies on my stomach. I didn’t wanna erase the wrong thing. So he left the room, and I said, “I need ten minutes.” I would’ve probably only needed two minutes to do it, but I wanted to verify I was erasing the right thing. It was like, I did triple-quadruple checking, like, “this is it, here we go.” Yeah, that was pretty crazy.

GN'R Central, January 17, 2019

Blackstar wrote:Dominguez said he wanted to make sure he would erase the "right thing." The way I understand it, it sounds more likely that he erased that specific part than the full song.