Why Axl Rose blamed Dr Pepper for the disaster of ‘Chinese Democracy’
Guns N’ Roses manager Andy Gould once had the barefaced cheek to claim that the band’s record Chinese Democracy taking nearly two decades to make was down to how “Great art sometimes takes time”. Carefully ignoring the fact that The Beatles could have formed and split in the years between the Use Your Illusion duo and the end of the century alone. By the dawn of the 21st Century, the term “Chinese Democracy” had become a running joke, referring to things that were promised but would never, ever happen.
By 2008, even Dr Pepper were getting in on the gag, promising every American one free can of Dr. Pepper if Chinese Democracy was released that year. Cattily enough, the two Americans not allowed a can were Slash and Buckethead, the legendarily be-hatted guitarists who’d been fired by the band. In a weirdly heartwarming statement responding to the special offer, Rose said that, “As some of Buckethead’s performances are on our album, I’ll share my Dr Pepper with him.” Maybe on a deeper level, Axl saw the opportunity to do the funniest thing possible and took it whole-heartedly.
17 human years since their last studio album, Chinese Democracy was set to be released on November 23rd. It was announced in a way that might as well have been Rose’s legal team going “We really, really mean it this time!!!” Dr Pepper suddenly owed 304million people a can of soda. They had a little over a month to work out how this would work and decided on a course of action that, in hindsight, could have only ended in disaster.
Dr Pepper put all its faith in a single website and a toll-free telephone number. On the day of the record’s release, every American in the country could log on to the website and claim a coupon entitling them to a free drink. The website crashed almost immediately, and the toll-free number put out in that eventuality was swamped, and no one could get through.
The promotion was nearly as much of a disaster as the record’s critical reception, and bizarrely, Rose’s team of lawyers (by this time a more important member of the band than Duff McKagen ever was) were absolutely scandalised by this. In a statement from Alan Gutman that reads more like an unhinged Reddit post, he said, “The redemption scheme your company clumsily implemented for this offer was an unmitigated disaster which defrauded consumers and, in the eyes of vocal fans, ruined Chinese Democracy’s release.”
In their mind, a soft drink company did that. Not the fact that the record was a tired, tuneless mess of warmed-over nu-metal and industrial rock tropes that would have sounded on the pulse of pop culture in 1998.
Dr Pepper’s response seemed to be to treat the whole thing with the gravitas the situation deserved—none whatsoever. Loathe though I am to give the legal team of a billion-dollar corporation credit, there’s something amusingly brazen in how Dr Pepper just ignored the whole point Rose’s legal team was trying to make.
Team Rose were saying the giveaway had failed and were, credit where it’s due, completely right. Team Pepper responded by just acting like they were being accused of going forward with the campaign without the band’s permission. Their statement read, “We simply commented on the delayed release of Chinese Democracy and openly encouraged the band to release it before the end of the year. Axl even expressed support for our efforts earlier in the year. We are disappointed that GNR’s lawyers are turning a fun giveaway into a legal dispute.
There was no response from the GNR team, and no further charges were made or existing ones pressed probably because a bunch of incredibly high-powered and high-paid lawyers had just tried to take a soft drink company to court and get full-page apologies printed in the country’s major newspapers over an album roll-out. Presumably, it’s not what they got into law to do. Ming-bogglingly, the one person who spoke any sense about the whole situation was Axl Rose himself.
In an online fan interview in December that year, he said that “The actions taken so far had nothing to do with me, and I was taken off guard as I had specifically told our team: Who fucking cares right now – we have a record to deal with.” The man who chose his nickname because it was an anagram of oral sex, suddenly became the voice of reason in the whole situation.
