1991.09.29 - MTV - News Report (Use Your Illusion albums)

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Tabitha Soren: ... albums, which went on sale September 17th, together sold between one-and-a-half and two million copies in their first week of sale. Album II outsold I by only 100,000 copies. This, despite the albums being banned at nearly 4,000 Kmart and Walmart stores, who objected to GNR’s bad-boy image and raw lyrics. Also banning GNR for obscene lyrics is the South Pacific nation of Singapore, but authorities there have cited only Use Your Illusion II.
Back here, meanwhile, controversy is growing over the Use Your Illusion II track “Get in the Ring” in which Axl Rose attacks various members of the rock press for printing lies about the band. One of his targets is Bob Guccione Jr., editor and publisher of Spin Magazine, who’s running with Guns centered on extraordinarily demanding contract the band’s management wanted prospective interviewers to sign. Instead of signing it and doing an interview, Guccione printed the contract in Spin. Here, in the final installment of our interview of the week, is Axl Rose discussing his differences with Spin:

[cut to interview with Axl at Alpine Valley, East Troy, May 25, 1991]

Axl: Well, in regards to Spin Magazine, I read a review of that piece somewhere else and it was like, kudos to Spin Magazine for not bowing and scraping for an interview, when the facts are that that’s basically what they’ve been doing for a really long time. And since they couldn’t get it, they decided to be hostile. And that was a test contract basically because of certain situations we’ve had with the English press that we tested in Rio. And the most outrage that we really got was from the magazines that we were having problems with to begin with, you know. And because we weren’t going to talk to them anyway, then they saw that and went running with it. But no, we’re not trying to control everything. We just want what we said or anything we say to be in the proper context, to be something that we really said.  

Tabitha Soren: Spin’s Bob Guccione Jr. of course has his own view of this situation and he spoke about it recently with the Source Radio Network.

Bob Guccione Jr.: They wanted and demanded approval of the interview, right down to every single word, including captions and cover lines and pictures, and the contract even stated that the journalist was for the purposes of the interview actually an employee of Guns N’ Roses. That’s how obnoxious it was, that’s how insulting it is to talk about ripping off people for their hard-earned money. Now these guys try to manipulate you in a way that the chairman of Exxon wouldn’t even dream of doing.