“I wouldn’t do it”: the Guns N’ Roses album Axl Rose refused to make
Every artist has their fair share of albums that are lost to history. There are bound to be millions of people wondering what another Beatles album might have sounded like if they got back together, and even recent bands like Green Day have albums like Cigarettes and Valentines that many fans wonder if they will ever see the light of day. But when it comes to Guns N’ Roses, everything has to be gone over with a fine-toothed comb before it even passes the demo stages.
Despite being one of the nastiest bands to ever come out of California, Axl Rose has been incredibly meticulous about everything that the ‘World’s Most Dangerous Band’ puts out since the 1990s. He had already made sure he had complete control over everything the band had done after the Use Your Illusion records came out, and when he started to miss shows because he couldn’t sing, it didn’t take long for some of his band members to check out.
Izzy Stradlin may have been the first to leave of his own accord, but the real kicker was when Slash and Duff McKagan left the fold. They were always the glue that kept the band together, and despite their covers album “The Spaghetti Incident?” sounding like a good time, there was no way that the rest of them wanted anything to do with Rose once he started to work on Chinese Democracy.
When listening to their specific styles, it was clear Rose wanted to move in a different direction. ‘My World’ may have been a strange head trip that no one wanted to go on at the end of Use Your Illusion, but when people finally got to hear Chinese Democracy, no one expected that brand of industrial rock to be a recurring theme, complete with Buckethead tapping out pristine licks behind everything.
“What people don’t know is, the Snakepit album is the Guns N’ Roses album. I just wouldn’t do it… I didn’t believe in it.”
Axl Rose
What the fans wanted was some rock and roll, and It’s Five O’Clock Somewhere was the only place that Slash could go to get his ideas out. The album was technically released while he was still in Guns N’ Roses, but it was clear that he was using it as an excuse to give the people what they wanted, with some tunes sounding like they could have come off an alternate version of Appetite for Destruction.
That seems to be what Rose thought as well, saying, “What people don’t know is, the Snakepit album is the Guns N’ Roses album. I just wouldn’t do it… I didn’t believe in it. I thought that there were riffs and parts and some ideas that needed to be developed. I think I’m with the public on that one.” So is Rose correct in the public opinion? Well, yes and no.
It’s true that the public didn’t want to hear the band going back to their roots so quickly, but at the same time, this was the only chance we would get to hear Slash playing guitar solos. And while the album is overloaded with songs and a bit messy in places, tunes like ‘Beggars and Hangers-On’ are close to done and would have been fantastic had Rose bothered to sing on some of them.
Rose’s refusal to get anything together is probably why Slash’s Snakepit ended up getting folded into Velvet Revolver later on. The frontman may have been sitting on his hands waiting for the right songs to come to him, but it seemed like his bandmates were doing fine with Scott Weiland behind the microphone. The public wasn’t on board for the first Slash solo outing, but to his credit, he knew how to give the people what they wanted with Velvet Revolver rather than spending time waiting around.
