Making an album is never easy, but it’s especially difficult when it’s the first release after a major reshuffle in your band, and this is the problem that Axl Rose faced when he started working on Chinese Democracy.
Never before has an album gone so over budget and been pushed back as significantly as Rose’s attempt with this Guns N’ Roses resurgence. The making of the album was announced in 1994, as Axl Rose, one of the last members of the original Guns N’ Roses line-up, announced that he’d be putting together a new record without his other bandmates. He put together a new GNR and set to work.
The record was delayed for over a decade because, despite being announced in 1994, the actual album wasn’t released until November 23rd, 2008, and even then, fans weren’t that into what they heard, and the build-up had been too much, so much so that Axl Rose could have written an absolute masterpiece, but unless it solved world hunger and ended poverty, it wouldn’t have been enough for the hype that had built around it.
The silhouettes of delays began to form as soon as Rose started working on the record, but he remained confident in his vision, and when he appeared on an Argentinian radio station, he said the label kept interfering and asking him to rewrite and re-record certain songs, but he remained confident in what he was trying to make, and assured fans that what he wound up releasing would be a piece of music he could take pride in.
When Duff McKagan was asked about why he thinks his former bandmate was struggling so much to put a new album together, he said it was because the vocalist lacked spontaneity, saying, “Well, you know, spontaneity and rock ‘n’ roll go together, and chemistry, it comes back to the old adage: If it takes you more than five minutes to write a song, then just scrap it… I don’t know. Axl Rose is a very fickle guy, and he changes his mind all the time, so who knows?”
Meanwhile, when one of Rose’s friends, Fernando, spoke about the creation of the album while it was still happening, he said it was all out of Rose’s hands. “It’s like every time he tries to do something, [it] goes wrong,” he said. “Suddenly, the guy who’s responsible for some technical detail makes a mistake, for example. I can say it cos [I’ve been] with him in the studio and it’s unbelievable – it’s like something tries to bring him away from this project.”
The truth is that it was probably a combination of both of these two factors that got in the way of making the album, but Rose didn’t help himself with either, and when it came to working with others, he was so against spontaneity that the moment anyone stepped outside his vision, they were gone, while it was hard for him to hire people because of his obsession with Yoda… yes, Yoda was the name band members gave to Sharon Maynard, Axl Rose’s psychic, and an instrumental part of making the album.
Rose became obsessed with psychics, past lives, and energy, so much so that he brought Maynard in on his creative process. She wouldn’t only tell Rose things about himself, but she also told him who he should and shouldn’t work with. There’s no doubt this obsession got in the way of finalising the record, as it’s hard to make an album when you have a psychic ruling out sound engineers based on poorly taken images.
“You had to be vetted,” recalled producer Tom Zutaut, concluding, “You had to get a black-and-white picture and get it to Axl’s assistant, and then you would be vetted and told whether or not you could work with him. She read auras and stuff. All I know is, she saw my photograph, and she cleared me to work with him.”
