1990.05.DD - Rage Magazine - Rose On Record (Axl)

Transcript:
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GUNS N' ROSES

ROSE ON RECORD

as told to Beth Nussbaum

MAKING "HIS" ART

My main motivation for all of this (and it could never be anything but) is the music; the songs. I look at it like I’m a painter, or something and that’s my motivation, just to be able to get the material out the way I want it. I’m not driven for financial things, those are a bit more than secondary. It’s like, I can get as excited about making money as the next person in that I’m gonna be able to buy this and that, but if the song doesn’t come out the way I really wanted it to then I’m more disappointed, and the money doesn’t really mean anything to me, then. I know that’s hard for a lot of people to believe, but that’s something that we’ve kinda stuck by the whole time, as much as possible. You have to make compromises, here and there because. . . Since Appetite For Destruction was our first record we had to make compromises to get a certain level of sales so that we could get a certain level of power to do exactly what we wanted, the next time around.

TRYING TO BE FREUD

Without being humorous it’s like I have multiple personalities—schizophrenic. It depends on the situation and the mood I’m in. Basically, I like to be in a situation where I can just do whatever I want to do, now I feel like doing it, and a lot of times that doesn’t work out. Then in those situations you find out other things about yourself, that maybe you didn’t already know. Right now I don’t want to close the door and say that I’m this kind of person, or that kind person. I find myself having a tendency of wanting to get set in my ways, but at the same time it’s like, I keep finding a lot of obstacles and saying, ‘Yeah, you get set in your ways, then you lose this and you lose that.’ So, I haven’t really figured what I am yet. I’m just as confused as the next guy.

PARENTHOOD

Would I make a good father? Umm, not yet. I love kids but I think I would be too hard on them because... A lot of people say that when they’re raised a certain way, ‘I’ll never be like that with my children,’ but then those things seem to come out, whether you want them to or not. Cause that’s how you were taught to raise a kid. And, I’m still wrestling with things, and until I come to terms with feeling like I could give a child the upbringing that it would deserve, I don’t want to attempt it.

SENSITIVITY

I don't like to hide anything, and basically that’s why I take every song, if I wrote it directly about somebody I know—I take it to that person. It’s because I have to, because some of the times I’m treading on very personal ground in their lives. . . Plus, I gotta see if they can like, cut it down. That’s gonna help me even write it better. It’s like, I have to take it to these people so they can go, ‘Well, that’s not really me. I never did that,’ unless I can point out, ‘Well, yeah, you did,’ then I didn’t word it right. See, I’m trying to describe something. To me, it’s like a portrait of somebody, and I’m trying to do my version, how I would paint this person.

PERFORMANCE

I’m too much of a perfectionist. I’m a perfectionist so much, that I don’t get a lot of things done. It’s like, I used to run cross country and when you’re working at everything, it wings a lot easier when everything’s going right, of course, because everyone’s doing what they’re supposed to. When it’s going a lot smoother, then you can give more and you can maybe break a record or something. That’s what people see, and that’s what I like to give ’em. I like to be able to go out there and give my ultimate rather than just get by, by the skin of my teeth. Everyone may have loved it, but I know it sucked compared to what I should have done. Like, I can go out and not be able to hit the notes in the end of “Rocket Queen’’ and I can make up a melody on the spot, right there on the stage, and people think they’re getting something special cause they’re hearing it in a different way, but I know the fact is that I couldn’t hit the f*cking notes cause I haven’t slept for two days, because of insomnia. I don’t think that’s fair to the people in my own mind.

I like a lot of solitude but then every now and again, I get claustrophobic with that and I want to be around a large group of people. After I’ve had a lot of solitude I tend to get very vulnerable. It’s like, when you get outside and start dealing with a lot of stuff, which there doesn’t seem to be a way to slow things down—it’s like, if you get out of the scene for a while, and taking care of business, then when you get back out in the club scene, it all comes caving down on you. And, I find myself pretty vulnerable, like a little kid, out in the world he hasn’t seen before. It really takes a while to get your grips back on that.

THE NEXT ALBUM

There was a lot of stuff written before the last record, before we even went into the studio, in which case we picked 12 songs to go on the first album and so that left a lot of ideas and material that we didn’t use—left over. This is stuff that we care about. There’s songs that Slash wrote, guitar parts, like four or five years ago and I just started writing words to some of them. It was something I always liked but never found the right words for. There’s a lot of stuff like that. There’s other tracks that we decided we didn’t want to put on the first album, we wanted to wait until we had a larger listening audience, and spring it on them. Just for the fact that say you have a really good song and you think it can go really far, and really help push the band. It would be better to spring it when a million people like you, rather than ten. With the ten you might gain another hundred, with this, we might gain an extra million. All those million that bought your last record might go out and buy it again. There’s a song called, “Don’t Cry” and one called “November Rain,” either one of them would have possibly taken the place of “Sweet Child,” but we opted for the latter, being what we felt was the weaker of the three actually, where, I don’t think that “Sweet Child” is a weak song at all!

All of these quotes are from different interviews in 1988-1989. Basically a rip off of other's work to sell magazines to kids.

Soulmonster wrote:All of these quotes are from different interviews in 1988-1989. Basically a rip off of other's work to sell magazines to kids.

Not exactly a rip off of other's work, since all the interviews were by Beth Nussbaum (mainly for Rock Scene Magazine) who then became the chief editor of the - probably short-lived - Rage Magazine. But yes, it's a compilation of quotes from older interviews.

Blackstar wrote:

Soulmonster wrote:All of these quotes are from different interviews in 1988-1989. Basically a rip off of other's work to sell magazines to kids.

Not exactly a rip off of other's work, since all the interviews were by Beth Nussbaum (mainly for Rock Scene Magazine) who then became the chief editor of the - probably short-lived - Rage Magazine. But yes, it's a compilation of quotes from older interviews.

Ah, yes, you told me.