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

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]

Sixx A.M.’s new album This is Gonna Hurt is on track to sell about a billion copies, in today’s relative terms, in its first week of release. Better yet, the album is actually good; like it’s predecessor The Heroin Diaries, the new album is full of big hard rock riffs that don’t evoke Theory of a Nickelsuck mook, catchy hooks throughout and James Michael’s clear, strong tenor. In short: good songs. Sixx has been a master of good songwriting throughout his 30-year career.

What, then, prevents Nikki Sixx from writing new albums this good for his day job with Motley Crue? Does anyone actually believe that perennial GN’R optimist / ex-Beautiful Cratures axeman DJ Ashba is the difference-maker? I’ll leave you to ponder that as you listen to “Lies of the Beautiful People” above.

This is Gonna Hurt is available on CD for $10 and MP3 for just $8 at Amazon.

-VN

One of the many members of the metal elite that our pals at Metal Injection got to interview on the Black Carpet at the Revolver Golden Gods Awards last week was Dj Ashba, current guitar player for both Guns N’ Roses and Sixx A.M. (He’s like the most in-demand musician of 1989!) Ashba was accompanied by actress Nicky Whelan, who, box office receipts tell me, probably none of you remember from her recent role as a bippy who gets naked in the movie Hall Pass (very NSFW video here). Ashba spouts some nonsense about the new Sixx A.M. album, and Whelan spouts some nonsense about the new Sixx A.M. album, and then Ashba says that GN’R might tour the U.S. this year. But this is the same dude who thinks there’s actually gonna be a new Guns N’ Roses record soon, and that he’ll still be in the band by the time that record gets done, so, y’know, it must be nice to be so blindly optimistic.

Metal Injection gots some other good gossip on the Black Carpet, too, including:

• Sebastian Bach told one of the dudes from Asking Alexandria that he’s going to die soon.
• Taylor Momsen’s parents are very supportive of her decision to exploit her barely-legal body in the name of making money for them.
• William Shatner doesn’t know who the band Shat.

Check out all of their coverage here.

-AR

Well, we haven’t done one of these in awhile. Let’s see if any of this shit isn’t shit.

First up is Rotten Sound’s video for “Hollow,” which had its premiere on The Deciblog. Now THIS is a great fucking video. Not only is the song br00tal, but the clip is just… well, I don’t give anything away because I was kinda blindsided by it myself, and I’d like to duplicate that experience for you. So just watch it.

Click to read more…

12 looped seconds of “Checkmate,” one of 70-something songs from the Chinese Democracy sessions that will probably never see the light of day.

A couple of weeks ago Eyal wrote a great installment of “Jumping Darkness Parade” in which he asserted that “the only thing you can trust is for a person to be who they are, not who they tell you they are.” Past behavior is always the best indicator of future behavior.

And the past behavior of Axl Rose tells us that if we ever get a follow-up to Chinese Democracy, it won’t be for a very, very long time. It was four years in-between the release of Appetite for Destruction and Use Your Illusion, nearly two of which were spent just recording the latter albums, and all signs point to Axl being the source of the long wait; then it was SEVENTEEN more years before the release of Democracy. Even if you consider that Axl and all the various incarnations of GN’R didn’t start working on that album until roughly 1995, and the that recording was allegedly (finally) completed circa 2006, that’s STILL eleven years. Based on this information, I have worked out a mathematical formula for how long it will take Axl to record each subsequent Guns N’ Roses album, which is as follows:

TIME IT TOOK TO RECORD THE LAST ALBUM + NINE ADDITIONAL YEARS = TIME IT WILL TAKE TO RECORD THE NEXT ALBUM

According to this precise formula, if Axl Rose’s Rock N’ Roll Circus enters the studio to make a follow-up to Chinese Democracy in 2011, then the album will be released in 2031. By that time, Axl will be almost 70 years old, Dj Ashba will be almost 60 years old, and Slash will theoretically be 66 but, let’s face it, will more likely be dead (or, at least, still searching for a suitable replacement to take Scott Weiland’s spot in Velvet Revolver). There probably won’t be a MetalSucks in 2031, there almost certainly won’t be a record industry, and there definitely won’t be a Best Buy for Axl to con into carrying a record he has no intention of properly promoting. And I can’t for the life of me figure out who would fund such an endeavor anyway.

And yet Dj Ashba has the audacity to “promise” fans that the next album “won’t take as long” to record and release:

Click to read more…

I’ve been getting a lot reader e-mails this week about the various goings-on with GN’R's current South American tour, but I just can’t seem to bring myself to write about them. It’s all the usual bullshit that seems to follow Axl Rose wherever he goes: he doesn’t show up for a gig, and chaos ensues; he does show up, but stops the show and threatens to leave because some attention-starved fan throws a bottle at him; he cancels a show because his precious stage collapses during a storm. Okay, so that last one is actually pretty unusual and obviously not at all Rose’s fault, but the fact remains that this dude is some kind of drama magnet, and for whatever reason, I’m just not feeling it this week. (Good to know that “Rage” is getting plenty of good photos out of the whole thing, though.)

What does interest me about this tour is the series of video diaries that two of its members, bassist Tommy Stinson and guitarist Dj Ashba, have released.

Click to read more…

I didn’t watch the Grammys last night, and judging by Metal Injection’s report on the event, it doesn’t sound like I missed anything. For one thing, the award Best Metal Performance wasn’t even televised, because, well, metal heads know better than to watch this stupid show and the t.v. people want ratings, not goodwill. (Judas Priest won, in case you care; AC/DC won Best Hard Rock Performance.)

Worse, though, was a butchering of the legendary solo from “November Rain” by Slash (real name: Saul Hudson), Jaime Foxx (real name: Eric Marlon Bishop), T-Pain (real name: Faheem Rasheed Najm) and Doug E. Fresh (real name: Douglas E. Davis). Not just because the song needs hip-hop shenanigans like I need nut cancer; not just because some thought they had better put Slash’s name in big letters on the screen behind him when he came on stage, in case anyone was confused by the top hat, Les Paul, curly hair, and people yelling “SLASH!”; but really because Slash only sounds marginally better than Dj Ashba.

The funniest part? If Axl Rose is to be believed, getting Slash to even agree to record “November Rain” was like pulling teeth. I can’t wait to see what kind of shit I’ll do someday in the name of making my mortgage payments.

-AR

As one of the only people in the English-speaking world who will admit to enjoying Chinese Democracy, I was excited for nu-GN’R to get out on the road and finally start playing all the new shit.

But between the Dj Ashba incident and now this… Jesus Christ.

You thought that MTV performance sucked?

Skip to 1:58.

Go ahead. Just do it.

Two words:

Fucking. Disgraceful.

Three more words:

WHY THE DANCING LADY?!?

More of Axl Rose making Vince Neil look good after the jump.

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After I posted footage of Dj Ashba butchering Robin Finck’s solo from “This I Love” last week, I invoked the wrath of certain Ashba supporters, who claimed that Ashba is a better guitarist than I’m giving him credit for. And that’s probably true. That first Beautiful Creatures album was fun, and evidence suggests that Ashba was just having an off-night.

So here’s a video of him doing a much better job as the new guitar player for Axl Rose’s Guns N’ Roses. But before you watch it, know that I still can’t get behind Ashba, for the following reasons:

1. He plays just like Slash.
2. He stands just like Slash
3. JESUS FUCKING CHRIST, is he wearing a top hat?

Ashba is exactly what Guns N’ Roses doesn’t need, and exactly what Robin Finck and Buckethead were not – a Slash clone. If Axl really wants to make some claim that this new band is a legitimate band, having a member with no discernible personality of his own is a mistake.

And here are Finck and Buckethead, in happier times. Hard to believe this was nine years ago already…

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Ladies and gentlemen, Dj (not DJ) Ashba got paid more money to play this solo in front of thousands of screaming fans than you or I will ever make in our entire lives:

Someone please cut off his fingers so he never does that again. Please.

-AR

It’s the kind of thing that happens mostly in dreams and Mark Wahlberg movies, but a random fan actually got to fill-in on vocals with one his favorite bands this past weekend. When Bang Tango (and Beautiful Creatures) frontman Joe LeSte was taken ill prior to their November 25th performance in Chicago, a man by the name of TJ did a respectable job taking LeSte’s place for an abbreviated 5 song set. Bang Tango aren’t quite Judas Priest and Joe LeSte ain’t exactly Rob Halford, but this story is still pretty fucking cool. That guy will remember this night forever.

Here’s some fan-filmed footage of TJ performing “Someone Like You” with Bang Tango.

What’s the current status of Beautiful Creatures, anyway? Which third-rate guitarist is currently filling the slot vacated by second-rate GN’R axeman DJ Ashba? Inquiring metal bloggers would like to know.

-VN

So not only is Rose and whatever four to sixty-two musicians he’s calling “Guns N’ Roses” these days really returning to wreak more havoc upon Canada, but it looks like one of the tour stops will be Montreal.

Anyone remember what happened the last time GN’R played Montreal?

The above news report is completely correct, of course. The rioting was caused by the injuries sustained by James Hatfield (NOT Hetfield), and not because after Hatfield sustained said injuries, Axl Rose failed to play a complete show. Sure sure.

Anyway, dates after the jump. Here Today… Gone to Hell, which is about as close to an official fan site as GN’R has these days, says the band currently consists of guitarists Ron “Bumblefoot” Thal, Dj Ashba, and Richard Fortus, bassist Tommy Stinson, drummer Frank Ferrer, and keyboardists Dizzy Reed and Chris Pitman. Hey, some of those dudes have actually played on a Guns N’ Rose record!

Click to read more…

Directly from the horse’s mouth comes the news that “guitarist n’ songwriter [emphasis added to point out mental retardation] Dj Ashba… officially replaces current NIN guitarist Robin Finck” in Guns N’ Roses. “Once Dj’s name was in the hat, the hat disappeared!!” benevolent dictator Axl Rose exclaims, doing his best impersonation of my Uncle Morty.

Showing that Rose at least has a sense of humor, the statement concludes: “Now, one step closer to the abyss, Ashba joins a band who’s all time roster is nearly as long as it’s [sic] founder Axl Rose’s rap sheet!” Oh, Axl, you scamp.

Click to read more…