I remember when Mick Jagger was about to turn fifty, The New York Times did this whole big piece about it, like it was some kind of giant cultural happening. Even having grown up around The Rolling Stones’ music and being a fan, I didn’t really see what the big deal was, but my folks certainly seemed to have a “Hol-ee shit really?” kind of reaction.

Cut ahead almost twenty years, and Axl Rose turns fifty today, and suddenly I understand how my parents felt. Fifty is old. Not old enough to get ready for death or anything, but, y’know, definitely not young. It’s just hard to wrap your head around the fact that the dude who once sang “Old at heart, but I’m only 28″ is now fifty, y’know?

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The Haunted’s rEVOLVEr came out in October of 2004, and the band has released two more albums since then. So, of course, it makes perfect sense that they just released a video for the rEVOLVEr track, “99.”

And while some fans are suggesting that the band did this to remind all the haters of their mostly-loathed Unseen* about happier times, I have been assured by no less an authority than W. Axl Rose that this is not the case. “Waiting seven years to release a video makes perfect sense!” Rose assured me. When I asked him to elaborate, he mumbled something about Lars Ulrich and lack of support from the record label and ran away crying.

rEVOLVEr has been out on Century Media more than two years longer than there’s been a MetalSucks.

-AR

*For the record, I like that album.

“Oh, yeah, let’s definitely have this guy on the jury. No objections, Your Honor.”

I have jury duty later this month, and I’m pretty irritated about it. But I think I have a way out. See, my plan is to wear the ugliest death metal and grind band shirts I own to the court (finalists include merch from Cannibal Corpse, Napalm Death, and The Black Dahlia Murder), my assumption being that no lawyer would ever want a dude wearing a shirt that says “THE TIME TO KILL IS NOW” or has zombies on it or whatever to be on a jury. If the jury has been convened for a violent crime, then having me present in such attire would be totally inappropriate, and it might be deduced that I do, indeed, endorse violence; if the jury has been convened for some lesser-crime, the lawyers will assume I’m an imbecilic degenerate, and I’ll be home in time for The Simpsons. Either way, I win! Foolproof plan, right?

Yeah, I thought so, too. But I’m feeling a little less confidence in my scheme after reading on Classic Rock‘s website that AXL FUCKING ROSE had to be on a jury earlier this week, and if he can get stuck there, none of us are safe:

“The Guns N’ Roses singer has been on the jury for a civil case in Santa Monica. He was there for four days, ending on Tuesday, January 10. Of course some will wonder if he managed to turn up on time each day!”

Cheesy jokes about whether or not he was on time every day, HOLY SHIT DO YOU THINK HE WAS ANYTHING EVEN REMOTELY RESEMBLING BEING ON TIME EVER AT ALL? I can’t imagine the lawyers questioning him to see if he would or would not remain on the jury didn’t know who he was, and I can’t imagine the question “Is this fucker ever going to show up?” never crossed their minds. Other possible concerns I’d have if I were one of the attorneys involved in this case:

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The gates of the Mansion may be shuttered this week, but that doesn’t mean there won’t still be a few bibs and bobs happening in the metal world before the holidays put us all into a food coma. To boot:

• Axl Rose booted a concertgoer out of the GN’R show in Vancouver, just like in the good ol’ days. Watch video of the incident above, in which DJ Slashba stands there and looks on awkwardly. In other GN’R news, Duff McKagan joined the band in Seattle to play “You Could Be Mine” (after his band, Duff McKagan’s Loaded featuring Duff McKagan, opened the show.)
• Attack Attack! are now a djent band. Check out their new tune here. Sergeant D misses the old Attack Attack!.
• Every Time I Die invited fans up on stage for their last song at their annual Christmas song in Buffalo, NY, but the venue’s security team wasn’t having it. Watch video of the bench-clearing brawl that ensued here. Maybe it’s a pre-cursor for what’s to come when all the scene bands open for Every Time I Die at the 2012 New England Metal and Hardcore Fest?
• Ratt singer Stephen Pearcy released an unplugged album of seven Ratt classics under his solo name. I wonder how his bandmates feel about that?
• Jeff Loomis just completed a three-week clinic tour of China, Taiwan and Indonesia. Here’s Jeff permorning “Enemies of Reality” in Jakarta; Gawd, I love this dude.
• Tool have announced a few more live dates as part of their winter U.S. run, and Intronaut might be the opening act.

-VN

In October, Axl Rose told That Metal Show that Duff McKagan’s Loaded featuring Duff McKagan was going to open some shows on GN’R current North American headlining tour. But then we didn’t hear anything else about it for over a month, so I think most people either assumed it wasn’t happening, or forgot about it all together.

But now it’s actually happening, and is happening this week, no less, in Seattle and Vancouver.

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So the young ‘uns might not remember this, but back in 1995, following the release of Ozzmosis, Zakk Wylde actually had to bow out of Ozzy Osbourne’s touring group. The reason? ‘Cause Mr. Wylde was busy waiting to see if he got the second guitarist spot in the then-biggest band in the world, Guns N’ Roses. GN’R's original rhythm guitarist, Izzy Stradlin, had quit in ’91, and his replacement, Gilby Clarke, was fired in ’94; the band was having a hard time filling the slot (an issue which apparently ended up being a major factor in Slash’s eventual decision to leave the group), and Axl Rose got it into his head that having a second lead guitarist would be a great idea, and would “push” the two axe slingers to challenge themselves in new and interesting ways (a theory Rose continues to test in his current version of Guns). In hindsight, this was probably a terrible idea, but at the time, when word got out that Wylde was jamming with GN’R, everyone was all excited by the possibility.

I’m not quite sure why it didn’t work out between Wylde and GN’R (Rose says that Slash refused to share the spotlight with a second lead guitarist, Slash says that Wylde was too impatient to wait for Rose to get his shit together), but last week fans got a kinda-sorta glimpse of a what a Wylde GN’R might have sounded like when the guitarist, whose Black Label Society was opening for Rose and company, hopped up on stage with the band to perform a cover of AC/DC’s “Whole Lotta Rosie.” Metal Insider has found multiple fan-filmed videos of the event, one of which I’ve re-posted below; it’s actually pretty amazing, ’cause Wylde doesn’t use a single guitar squeal the entire time. I wonder if that was one of Rose’s conditions when allowing him to perform with GN’R?

And since we’re on the topic of Zakk Wylde almost joining Guns N’ Roses in the mid-90s, here’s a video of Wylde and Slash jamming on Jimi Hendrix’s “Voodoo Child” from roughly that same time period. Hearing the way these two trade licks and interact with one another might actually give you a better sense of how GN’R could have sounded had Wylde actually ended up in the band. Enjoy:

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I woke up this morning to a seemingly endless number of headlines announcing that Guns N’ Roses have, indeed, been voted into the Rock N’ Roll Hall of Fame, and I’m as baffled by all the excitement now as I was when the band first became eligible for induction.

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Someone sent us the above via Twitter, but I already forget the guy’s handle. Sorry, dude!

In October, Axl Rose added “Estranged” back into Guns N’ Roses’ regular setlist for the first time since 1993. Even though everyone makes fun of that song’s ridiculous music video, it was a smart move — at the GN’R show in New Jersey I attended last month, the song got a roar of approval from the crowd the moment the band played it. Axl’s Nu-GN’R has mostly ignored the Use Your Illusion era for the past decade, which is foolish, because while the critics may not love those albums, they sold seven million copies each. People wanna hear those songs.

And Rose must get it; that same night I saw him Jersey, he also performed “Don’t Cry,” which he hasn’t done in awhile, and now, this past weekend, he suddenly broke out “Civil War,” too. You can check out video below; the band actually sounds pretty good, even if, Jesus H. Christ, something really does need to be done about Dj Slashba (note the unlit cigarette dangling from his lips).

Interestingly enough, Slash has been doing “Civil War” with his solo band (Myles Kennedy + a bunch of random dudes) since last year. By way of comparison, you can check out his Gun Without Rose version after the jump.

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That Metal Show‘s interview with Axl Rose — the singer’s first on-camera interview in close to a decade – aired this past Friday night, and it was about what I expected. Rose tells some great stories about the good ol’ days, sometimes displays a genuine sense of humor (he sarcastically commands Dj Ashba — who says nothing and is present for no discernible reason — to stop interrupting him), and, naturally, refuses to take responsibility for absolutely anything he has ever done. (To hear him tell it, the infamous rant from “Get in the Ring” was the brainchild of Duff McKagan and A&R guru Tom Zutaut, and when “shit hit the fan,” they both abandoned Rose to deal with the repercussions. Poor, defenseless Axl!)

The complete episode is now available below for your viewing pleasure. Other highlights include a live performance of “Live and Let Die,” and Eddie Trunk looking as though he’s struggling to stay awake through this wee-hours-of-the-morning chat.

-AR

I have honestly never seen That Metal Show, but you’re goddamn right I set my DVR to record it tonight. ‘Cause tonight they’re gonna air the interview they conducted with Axl Rose a couple of weeks ago, and if I’m not mistaken, this is Rose’s first on-camera interview since 2002, and his first in-depth non-email interview since the release of Chinese Democracy three years ago.

“But what do you expect to see, dude?” you’re asking. “Axl is nuts. This won’t be good.”

I agree that Axl is nuts, but that’s precisely WHY I think this will be fun to watch. If the preview clips of the interview which have already been released (below) are any indication, Axl is a) in a good mood, b) paradoxically really upfront (he admits that he felt the pressure to finish Chinese Democracy and make it great, and he seems aware that a portion of his “fans” actually hate him) and not really upfront at all (he still refuses to take the blame for his tardiness), and c) completely paranoid and delusional in the most entertaining way possible (he thinks people see him as a dictator because of a joke Izzy made in an interview back in the 80s, and says he was pressured into touring behind Use Your Illusion). I mean, regardless of what actual, concrete info we actually take away from this interview, there’s no way it’s not gonna be good television.

The interview premieres tonight at 11 PM ET/PT on VH1 Classic, although if you don’t have cable, I assume it will be all over the internet in due time. Meanwhile, like I was sayin’ a second ago, you can check out a bunch of preview clips below and after the jump.

Eyal Levi from Dååth, Levi/Werstler, and Audiohammer Studios has obviously been in this business for some time now, and he’s learned a thing or two about a thing or two. This week, he imparts ten lessons about the music biz — and life in general — to you, our beloved readers, once a day, two installments at a time. You can read the week’s first two lessons here, and the week’s next two lessons here, and the week’s most recent two lessons here; check out lesson numbers seven and eight below!

#7: WEEKENDS? THERE’S NO SUCH THING

If you’re fortunate enough to get to a point in your life where you can actually support yourself from a creative endeavor, then be prepared to throw away all notions of having a normal life. Now ,I know that there’s no such thing as “normal,” and that everyone is an individual, but hear me out on what I mean by that.

Weekends are for resting and partying; weekdays are for working. That’s a normal concept, which fits in with the archetypical 9-5 jobs. It’s perfectly setup for ensuring that you can hold down a social/family life while working at the same time. And, for the majority of the world, it works. There’s a good structure to it. I can see how it would get repetitive and old, but at least you know what to look forward to. And at least you can get things done without too much hassle, because the rest of the world is set up to cater to your schedule.

In the land of creative jobs, good luck with that idea. More often than not, you will find yourself working all hours of the night, for weeks, or even months, on end. If you take breaks like the rest of the world, then you will be left behind.

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In 2006, with a little help from Sebastian Bach, Eddie Trunk actually got Axl Rose to come on his radio show for, like, hours, which is obviously a pretty major coup, given that Rose usually only grants incomprehensible e-mail interviews. And the chat was incredibly entertaining, even if Trunk didn’t ask any of the burning questions Rose refuses to answer (e.g., “So, like, what the fuck, dude?” ), ’cause he did get Rose to lighten up and tell some great stories about David Lee Roth, Jimmy Iovine, and the classic days of Guns N’ Roses. (That’s just one part of the interview above; the rest is easy to find on YouTube.)

And I guess Rose was happy with the way things went, too, ’cause over the weekend he apparently granted Trunk another really long interview, this time for Trunk’s television program, That Metal Show. And while the full episode hasn’t been released yet, Trunk did reveal over Twitter that Rose said that Duff McKagan’s Loaded featuring Duff McKagan will be opening some future GN’R shows. (Actually, Trunk just said “Loaded will open shows,” but presumably he meant GN’R shows. Either that, or he has no sense of how context works.)

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Here’s a fun quote from a recent Sammy Hagar interview with Attention Deficit Delirium. Discussing the possibility of a reunion of the original Guns N’ Roses, Hagar says:

“They’ve proved it again and again and again that it ain’t [about] the money. They just don’t get along because Axl goes out for a lot less money with his version of Guns N’ Roses, and Slash goes out for a lot less money with Velvet Revolver or by himself. The amount of money they could make if they got it all back together, made a great record and toured the world would probably be as much as the Rolling Stones [get], and for them not to do it, it obviously ain’t about the money. Because they could do it. I would manage them. I’d be their manager and make sure they got the right deal from all the promoters. They could be the biggest band in the world if they wanted to.”

There’s three things I find funny about this statement:

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Axl Rose fell down while performing “Knockin’ On Heaven’s Door” at a recent Mexico City concert. And that might funny in and of itself — I mean, who doesn’t love scadenfreude? — but what makes it absolutely hysterical is that Rose was not running or even doing anything especially physical at the time of the fall. He simply walked up to the lip of the stage, attempted to rest his foot on a monitor (or something) as he started singing, and just completely missed the target, consequently flailing his arms around and making old man noises before hitting the ground. At which point Bumblefoot, ever the loyal employee, stopped playing, looked kinda confused for a second, and then finally offered to help Rose up. (Rose declined; he also refused help from a stage hand.)

And while I’m totally speculating here, I’m guessing Bumblefoot’s hesitation was spurred by the following thought process: “If I don’t help him up he’ll yell at me for being an insensitive dick, and if I do help him up, he’ll yell at me for making him look weak in front of his fans… plus I’ll violate his ‘no physical contact’ rule, and that could mean the end of the tour. I’d better just lead the audience in an applause whenever he gets back up.”

Kudos to Rose for waiting until he was off-stage, out of the sight of cameras, to call someone a fucking idiot for allowing this to happen.

-AR

[via Bring Back Glam!]

Here’s a great tip if you wanna get laid: follow around your alcoholic friend who girls actually like , and then, when said friend passes out, pick up his not-quite-sloppy-seconds! That’s what Axl Rose recently told some Paraguayan fans he used to, at least (video below), admitting that Slash (the drunk in question) was good for something besides accidentally writing the riff to “Sweet Child O’ Mine.” And let me be the first to congratulate Axl on proving, once again, that he is not at all creepy or weird or kinda sad. After all, it’s a well known fact that you catch more bees with someone else’s honey! LEGITIMATE SOCIAL SKILLS ARE FOR LOSERS!!!

I guess the good news is, he didn’t yell at anybody this time.

-AR

[via Metal Insider]

Despite not being the kind of grim n’ gritty tune Guns N’ Roses were most famous for, and despite having a ridiculous video in which Axl Rose swims with dolphins for no apparent reason and reminds everyone that he has more money than they do, “Estranged” is my favorite GN’R song. And I always thought it would be cool to see Axl’s Nu-GN’R do the track with Buckethead, ’cause I bet that dude could totally rip it.

So, of course, now that Buckethead has already been out of the band for seven years, Axl did the song at last night’s Rock in Rio performance.

Not a shock that it’s a little anticlimactic, ’cause for every one thing the band got right, there’s something else they got wrong: Axl can still sing the low parts pretty well, but not the high parts, and at one point his voice cracks like he was me at my bar mitzvah; Bumblefoot sounds great, but for some reason looks like Robin Finck now; Dj Ashba sounds so-so, but continues to do a ridiculous Slash impersonation, and there’s a much better guitar player who isn’t just aping someone else, Richard Fortus, standing right there on stage, but for some reason Axl won’t let him play the leads; Matt Sorum wasn’t invited, so the drums actually sound right for a change. So I guess ya take the good ya take the bad ya take them both and you still don’t have Slash in the band.

GN’R apparently really are going to a U.S. tour starting at the end of this month; we’ll see if they break out any other oldies but goodies.

-AR

[via Bumblefoot's Twitter]

So long as Axl Rose, Slash, Izzy Stradlin, and Duff McKagan are all involved, no one would be more excited about a reunion of the original Guns N’ Roses than me. Yeah, I’d prefer if Steven Adler were the drummer instead of Matt Sorum, but that seems unlikely, and I’d be willing to settle. I’d be severely depressed about it, but I’d probably even be willing to settle for Gilby Clarke instead of Izzy if it came down to it. And I know there’s really no chance that the reunion would be great; Axl has turned into Yosemite Sam and Slash has a pacemaker and can’t run around the way he used to, so, at best, it would be a total nostalgia trip. But it would be a lot of fun, and given that Rose has completely failed to maintain a stable line-up of G&R (a.k.a. “Guns N’ Roses 2.0,” a.k.a. “Nu-GN’R”) anyway, might as well, right?

And now Guns N’ Roses are one of the fifteen finalist nominees for induction into the Rock N’ Roll Hall of Fame in 2012. And it seems like they have a pretty decent chance of being one of the five artists who will actually get in, despite the fact that they only made four albums of original material in four years and only toured for an additional two, because, well, those albums sold a gajillion copies, and inducting them would, frankly, be good for business. And so, of course, people are starting to get really excited, because if they get inducted, maybe that reunion we’ve all been dreaming about for almost twenty freakin’ years will finally happen, right?

Only here’s the thing: There is absolutely no chance in hell that the original band will reunite, even if they are inducted into a meaningless museum.

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Dates for a Guns N’ Roses tour of America have been slowly trickling out for the past couple of weeks, but even as the world’s last remaining Axl Apologist, I haven’t felt compelled to write about them, ’cause, well… the itinerary was clearly not at all complete, and I kept thinking that maybe there’d finally be some kind of proper tour announcement and we could put all the info in one post. Silly me.

Now Metal Insider says that the tour is a go, and I trust Metal Insider… but the tour schedule is still lacking in key information, like, oh, I dunno, venues and dates. And it’s worth noting that neither GN’R's official website nor their official MySpace page has any mention of these gigs. Even  fan site Here Today… Gone to Hell! — which is as close to a regularly updated official site as this version of the band may ever get (administrator Jarmo Luukkonen has toured with the band and was even thanked in the liner notes for Chinese Democracy) — only lists a small handful of them. That strikes me as being highly suspicious, because Rose has cancelled entire tours before and claimed he knew nothing about them until he read about the concerts on the internet (hell, he’s cancelled shows even when he did admit to knowing about them), so until there’s a press release with a statement from the man himself, I don’t think anyone should get their hopes up that this is really happening.

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Tomorrow marks the twentieth anniversary of the release of Guns N’ Roses’ double-disc opus, Use Your Illuision. It seems like public perception has soured on these albums over the years — even Axl Rose and Slash have accused them of being bloated and over-produced — but I still love ‘em to death. For one thing, seeing as they ended up being the last proper studio albums of original material from the actual Guns N’ Roses (not Axl Rose’s solo group or whatever),  I’m glad that the band basically included every song they had written up ’til that point here. And for another thing, I love the diversity of the records — that they didn’t just end up being Appetite for More Destruction. Maybe the Illusion albums ended up being a failed experiment, but I still, to this day, find them to be a pretty exciting experiment*.

So. Since we didn’t do a “Question of the Week” this week, and I wanted to do something to commemorate this anniversary, I thought we’d play a fun game that Vince and I (and a lot of our other friends) used to play in the past: whittling these two mammoth albums down to one collection. Geffen Records actually did that themselves in 1998, releasing a twelve-song single volume version of UYI that, if you ask me, had a pretty strange selection of songs on it… but it’s an entertaining time waster to see if you can do better.

There are no rules to the game, other than a) all the songs on your track list have to come from the Illusions albums (duh), and b) it all has to fit on one CD (roughly 80 minutes), despite the fact that CDs are now obsolete. I’ve included my own personal version after the jump… I’ll be more than a little excited to see all of yours as well.

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1) Be nicer to Sebastian Bach
2) Compare penis sizes with Tommy Lee
3) Hire Phil LaBonte as a vocal coach
4) Hire Billy Milano as a personal trainer
5) Hire Tripp Eisen as a baby sitter
6) Sleep with present-day Tawny Kitaen
7) Help Danzig clean up his motherfucking bricks, bitch
8) Listen to Ted Nugent talk about politics
9) Listen to Ted Nugent talk about romance
10) Listen to Ted Nugent talk about Ted Nugent

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