The Most Expensive Album Never Made (Lengthy)
Posted: March 7, 2005 11:27 am
The Most Expensive Album Never Made
By JEFF LEEDS - March 6, 2005
WEST HOLLYWOOD, Calif.
IN the faint red light of the Rainbow Bar and Grill, Tom Zutaut sips
at his drink and spills a bit of regret. It's been 19 years since he
signed the then-unknown rock band Guns N' Roses to a contract with
Geffen Records, where they turned into multiplatinum superstars.
Back in those days, the Rainbow was their hangout of choice.
Years after he left the label, he returned in 2001 to try to coax
Axl Rose, the band's magnetic leader and by then its only original
member, into completing one of the most highly anticipated albums in
the industry: an opus tentatively titled "Chinese Democacy." The
deadline for turning in the album had passed two years earlier.
"I really thought I could get him to deliver the record," said Mr.
Zutaut, who spent nine months trying. "And we got close."
He is speaking in relative terms. Mr. Zutaut is but one of a long
series of executives and producers brought in over the years to try
to conjure up the maddeningly elusive album - to cajole the
reclusive rock star into composing, singing, recording, even just
showing up. Like everyone else who had tried, or has tried since,
Mr. Zutaut came away empty-handed.
Mr. Rose began work on the album in 1994, recording in fits and
starts with an ever-changing roster of musicians, marching through
at least three recording studios, four producers and a decade of
music business turmoil. The singer, whose management said he could
not be reached for comment for this article, went through turmoil of
his own during that period, battling lawsuits and personal demons,
retreating from the limelight only to be followed by gossip about
his rumored interest in plastic surgery and "past-life regression"
therapy.
Along the way, he has racked up more than $13 million in production
costs, according to Geffen documents, ranking his unfinished
masterpiece as probably the most expensive recording never released.
As the production has dragged on, it has revealed one of the music
industry's basic weaknesses: the more record companies rely on
proven stars like Mr. Rose, the less it can control them.
It's a story that applies to the creation of almost every major
album. But in the case of "Chinese Democracy," it has a stark
ending: the singer who cast himself as a master of predatory
Hollywood in the hit song "Welcome to the Jungle" has come to be
known instead as the keeper of the industry's most notorious white
elephant.
AT THE STROKE of midnight on Sept. 17, 1991, Guns N' Roses was the
biggest band in the world. Hundreds of record stores had stayed open
late or re-opened in order to cash in on the first sales that night
of "Use Your Illusion," Vols. 1 and 2, the band's new twin albums.
On the strength of that promotion - and the coattails of the band's
blockbuster 1987 debut - the band set a record: for the first time
in rock history, two albums from one act opened at Nos. 1 and 2 on
Billboards national album sales chart. But by 1994 their fortunes
had changed. After years of drug addiction, lyric controversies,
onstage tantrums and occasional fan riots, their members had started
to drift away, their lead singer had become bogged down in personal
lawsuits, and "The Spaghetti Incident?," their collection of cover
versions of classic punk songs, had been released to mixed reviews
and disappointing sales.
The members of the band - what was left of it - reconvened at the
Complex, a Los Angeles studio, in a massive soundstage with a pool
table and a Guns N' Roses-themed pinball machine, to prepare for
their next album, which Geffen executives expected to release some
time the following year. But they quickly began suffering from an
ailment that has proved fatal to bands from time immemorial: boredom.
"They had enough money that they didn't have to do anything," said a
longtime observer of the band, one of the 30 people involved with
the album who spoke for this article. He spoke on the condition of
anonymity, as did many others who had signed a confidentiality
agreement while working with Mr. Rose. "You couldn't get everyone in
the room at the same time."
Mr. Rose had appointed himself the leader of the project, but he
didn't seem to know where to lead. As Slash, the band's longtime
guitarist, said recently, in reference to the singer's songwriting
style: "It seemed like a dictatorship. We didn't spend a lot of time
collaborating. He'd sit back in the chair, watching. There'd be a
riff here, a riff there. But I didn't know where it was going."
Geffen was riding toward an uncertain destiny as well: its founder,
David Geffen, retired, and its corporate parent, MCA Inc., was sold
to the liquor giant Seagram, led by Edgar Bronfman Jr. With all
those changes swirling, and with old Guns N' Roses material still
ringing up millions in new sales, executives decided to leave the
band alone to write and record.
A cover of the Rolling Stones' "Sympathy for the Devil," however,
which was released as part of a movie soundtrack, would be the last
addition to the original band's catalog. Slash quit the band in
1996; the drummer Matt Sorum and the bassist Duff McKagan were the
next to go. Of the founding members, that left just Mr. Rose. But
instead of starting something new, he chose to keep the band's name
and repopulate it with new musicians. Geffen wasn't in much of a
position to deny him. The label was on a cold streak and wagered
that fans would still flock to the singer, even if a band had to be
rebuilt around him.
Geffen wasn't in much of a position to prod him forward, either. In
1997 Todd Sullivan, who was then a talent executive for the company,
sent Mr. Rose a sampling of CD's produced by different people, and
encouraged him to choose one to work on "Chinese Democracy." Mr.
Sullivan says he received a call informing him that Mr. Rose had run
over the albums with a car.
The singer had encouraged everyone in the band's camp to record
their ideas for riffs and jams, hours and hours of song fragments
that he hoped to process into full compositions. "Most of the stuff
he had played me was just sketches," Mr. Sullivan recalled. "I
said, 'Look, Axl, this is some really great, promising stuff here.
Why don't you consider just bearing down and completing some of
these songs?' He goes, 'Hmm, bear down and complete some of these
songs?' Next day I get a call from Eddie" - Eddie Rosenblatt, the
Geffen chairman - "saying I was off the project."
Around the start of 1998 Mr. Rose moved the band that he had
assembled to Rumbo Recorders, a three-room studio deep in the San
Fernando Valley where Guns N' Roses had recorded parts for its
blockbuster debut, "Appetite for Destruction." The crew turned the
studio into a rock star's playground: tapestries, green and yellow
lights, state-of-the-art computer equipment and as many as 60
guitars at the ready, according to people involved in the
production. But Mr. Rose wasn't there for fun and games. "What Axl
wanted to do," one recording expert who was there recalls, "was to
make the best record that had ever been made. It's an impossible
task. You could go on infinitely, which is what they've done."
As time and dollars flew by, pressure mounted at Geffen. The label's
dry spell lingered, making them more dependent than ever on new
music from their heavy hitters. "The Hail Mary that's going to save
the game," the recording expert who spoke on the condition of
anonymity explained, "is a Guns N' Roses record. It keeps not coming
and not coming." The label paid Mr. Rose $1 million to press on with
the album, with the unusual promise of another $1 million if he
delivered "Chinese Democracy" by March 1 of the following year.
Geffen also offered one of the producers Mr. Rose had recently hired
extra royalties if the recording came in before that.
He never collected. The producer, who goes by the name Youth (his
real name is Martin Glover), started visiting the singer in the pool
room of his secluded Malibu estate, to try to help him focus on
composing. But that collaboration didn't go any better than his
predecessors' had. "He kind of pulled out, said 'I'm not ready,' "
Youth said. "He was quite isolated. There weren't very many people I
think he could trust. It was very difficult to penetrate the walls
he'd built up."
Youth's replacement was Sean Beavan - a producer who had previously
worked with industrial-rock acts like Marilyn Manson and Nine Inch
Nails - and under his care the riffs and song fragments that the
band had recorded slowly began to take shape. But costs were
spiraling out of control. The crew rented one piece of specialized
equipment, for example, for more than two years - at a cost well
into six figures - and used it for perhaps 30 days, according to one
person involved with the production.
Mr. Rose appeared sporadically, some weeks just one or two days,
some weeks not at all. "It was unorganized chaos," the same person
said. "There was never a system to this. And in between, there were
always parties to go to, different computers Axl was trying out or
buying. There were times when we didn't record things for weeks."
So the studio technicians burned as many as five CD's per week with
various mixes of different songs, which were driven to Malibu for
Mr. Rose to study. The band's archive of recorded material swelled
to include more than 1,000 digital audio tapes and other media,
according to people who were there at the time, all elaborately
labeled to chart the progress of songs. "It was like the Library of
Congress in there," said one production expert who spent time on the
album there.
By one count, the band kept roughly 20 songs it considered on the A
list and another 40 or so in various stages of completion on the B
list.
All that material, however, didn't do much to reassure the band's
label. "In 1998 and 1999 you start getting a little bit nervous,"
Mr. Rosenblatt, the executive who led the outfit after David
Geffen's departure, said delicately. "Edgar Bronfman picks up the
phone more than once. He wanted to know what was going on. You
unfortunately have got to give him the answer, you don't know.
Because you don't." To take the pressure off, Mr. Rose's manager at
the time presented the idea of releasing a live album from the
original band, which. Mr. Rose's crew began to assemble.
In January 1999 Seagram orchestrated a massive restructuring of its
music division, firing 110 Geffen employees, including Mr.
Rosenblatt, and folding the unit into the corporation's bigger
Interscope Records division. The unfinished album was placed in the
hands of Interscope's chairman, Jimmy Iovine. Mr. Iovine declined to
comment for this article.
Mr. Rose was said to be crushed by the departure of his Geffen
contacts - just as "White Trash Wins Lotto," a musical satire that
sent the singer up as a star-eyed hayseed forced to learn the harsh
lessons of the music industry, was developing a cult following in
Los Angeles. When he missed his March deadline, however, he set a
pattern that would repeat itself for years to come: a flurry of
energetic activity, followed by creative chaos and a withdrawal from
the studio.
That June he allowed a version of the old Guns N' Roses hit "Sweet
Child O' Mine" that begins with the original band playing but almost
seamlessly shifts into the new band to appear on the soundtrack of
the film "Big Daddy." Later that summer he agreed to release his
first original song in eight years, the industrial-flavored "Oh My
God," for another soundtrack and introduced it in a commercial on
MTV. (Mr. Rose fussed over the song so much that he, Mr. Iovine and
studio technicians stayed up until nearly dawn adjusting the final
mix, according to people involved.) News of its release stoked
speculation that an album might follow. But it was panned by many
critics and quickly forgotten.
In late 1999 he invited Rolling Stone to preview about a dozen
tracks. The magazine reported the album appeared "loosely scheduled"
for release in the summer of 2000. In fact, Mr. Rose's visits to the
studio had become so irregular, according to several executives and
musicians involved with the band, that an engineer working with him,
Billy Howerdel, and the band's drummer, Josh Freese, found time
during that period to start their own project, the band A Perfect
Circle, and to begin recording an album, "Mer de Noms," which went
on to sell 1.7 million copies.
Label executives still clung to the idea that if they could just
bring in the right producer, he could find a way to finish the album
and finally bring a return on their ever-growing investment. They
summoned Roy Thomas Baker, famed for his work with the art-rock band
Queen. (Mr. Beavan, who was said to have tired of the project, soon
bowed out.) But instead of wrapping things up, Mr. Baker decided
that much of what the band had needed to be re-recorded - and
painstakingly so, as he sometimes spent as long as eight hours on a
few bars of music.
The process was drawn out even further after Mr. Rose hired two new
musicians - the guitarist Buckethead, a virtuoso who wore a
mannequin-like face mask and a KFC bucket on his head, and the
drummer Brian "Brain" Mantia - whom the singer directed to re-record
all the music that their predecessors had spent months performing.
Still, Mr. Rose seemed to be emerging from his sullen shell. In mid-
2000, for what was thought to be the first time since
the "Illusions" tour ended in 1993, he performed in public, with the
Thursday night bar band at the Cat Club on the Sunset Strip. "He was
psyched," recalled one person who worked with the band at Rumbo. "It
seemed like it boosted him again, people still want to hear him."
At about 4 a.m on New Year's Day 2001, at the House of Blues in Las
Vegas, he and the new lineup of the band finally unveiled some of
their new material. "I have traversed a treacherous sea of horrors
to be with you here tonight," Mr. Rose told the crowd, which
received him with roars of approval. Warm reviews followed. Making
the most of the moment, he took his band on the road, going to
Brazil to play in the Rock in Rio festival.
With the band's return, Mr. Rose's machinery cranked up again. One
internal cost analysis from the period pegs the operation's monthly
tab at a staggering $244,000. It included more than $50,000 in
studio time at the Village, a more modern studio where Mr. Baker had
moved the band. It also included a combined payroll for seven band
members that exceeded $62,000, with the star players earning roughly
$11,000 each. Guitar technicians earned about $6,000 per month,
while the album's main engineer was paid $14,000 per month and a
recording software engineer was paid $25,000 a month, the document
stated.
Label executives were losing patience. Interscope turned to Mr.
Zutaut, the original band's talent scout. Could an old friend
succeed where so many others had failed? He was offered a roughly 30
percent bonus, he said, if he could usher the project to completion
within a year.
But Mr. Rose's renewed energies were not being directed toward the
finish line. He had the crew send him CD's almost daily, sometimes
with 16 or more takes of a musician performing his part of a single
song. He accompanied Buckethead on a jaunt to Disneyland when the
guitarist was drifting toward quitting, several people involved
recalled; then Buckethead announced he would be more comfortable
working inside a chicken coop, so one was built for him in the
studio, from wood planks and chicken wire.
Mr. Rose was far less indulgent of his producers and label. Around
Christmas, he ousted both Mr. Baker and Mr. Zutaut (who said there
had been a miscommunication). It would be weeks before the singer
would even allow an Interscope executive to visit him in the studio,
according to people involved with the production. Interscope
dispatched a senior talent executive, Mark Williams, to oversee the
project. Mr. Williams declined to comment for this article.
If Mr. Rose appeared more remote, his vision of the project became
more grandiose, people involved with the band said. He directed that
music produced by Mr. Baker be redone again, those people said. He
now spoke of releasing not merely one album but a trilogy. And he
planned one very big surprise.
At MTV's annual awards show in 2002, publicists buzzed through the
audience whispering about a big finale. And with just minutes to go
in the broadcast, a screen lifted away to reveal the band and Mr.
Rose, in cornrows and a sports jersey, looking strikingly young. The
musicians burst into "Welcome to the Jungle," one of the original
band's biggest hits, and the crowd went wild. But on television Mr.
Rose quickly seemed out of breath and out of tune. He ended the
performance, which included the new song "Madagascar" and the
original band's hit "Paradise City" in a messianic stance, raising
his arms and closing his eyes. He left the audience with a cryptic
but tantalizing message: "Round one."
Round two never came. The band went on a successful tour, but in the
hours after their triumphant Madison Square Garden appearance, Mr.
Rose was reportedly refused entry to the Manhattan nightclub Spa
because he was wearing fur, which the club does not allow. That
killed the mood. He didn't show up for the band's next performance,
and the promoter canceled the rest of the tour.
Months dragged on as the band waited for Mr. Rose to record more
vocals. In August 2003 when label executives announced their
intention to release a Guns N' Roses greatest-hits CD for the
holidays, the band's representatives managed to hold them off with
yet another promise to deliver "Chinese Democracy" by the end of the
year. But the album, of course, did not materialize. And then the
game was over.
"HAVING EXCEEDED ALL budgeted and approved recording costs by
millions of dollars," the label wrote in a letter dated Feb. 2 ,
2004, "it is Mr. Rose's obligation to fund and complete the album,
not Geffen's." The tab at Village studio was closed out, and Mr.
Rose tried a brief stint recording at the label's in-house studio
before that too was ended. The band's computer gear, guitars and
keyboards were packed away. Over a legal challenge by Mr. Rose, the
label issued a greatest-hits compilation, in search of even a modest
return on their eight-figure investment.
Released in March of 2004, it turned out to be a surprisingly strong
seller, racking up sales of more than 1.8 million copies even
without any new music or promotional efforts by the original band.
The original band's debut, "Appetite for Destruction," which has
sold 15 million copies, remains popular and racked up sales of
another 192,000 copies last year, according to Nielsen SoundScan. It
is a sign that Mr. Rose's audience still waits.
Mr. Rose is reportedly working on the album even now in a San
Fernando Valley studio. "The 'Chinese Democracy' album is very close
to being completed," Merck Mercuriadis, the chief executive officer
of Sanctuary Group, which manages Mr. Rose, wrote in a recent
statement. He added that other artists including Peter Gabriel and
Stevie Wonder "have throughout their careers consistently taken
similar periods of time without undeserved scrutiny as the world
respects that this is what it can sometimes take to make great art."
There's certainly more than enough material; as Mr. Zutaut says,
even years ago "people felt like the record had been made four or
five times already." But of course, rumors of the album's imminent
release have circulated since almost the very beginning of the tale,
more than a decade ago.
And at the center of that tale, now as then, is the confounding
figure of Axl Rose himself. A magnetic talent, a moody unpredictable
artist, a man of enormous ideas and confused follow-through, he has
proven himself to be an uncontrollable variable in any business plan.
His involvement on "Chinese Democracy" has outlasted countless
executives, producers and fellow musicians - even the corporate
structure that first brought the band to worldwide celebrity. Even,
in fact, the recognizable configuration of the recording industry as
a whole, which since the band first went into the studio in 1994 has
consolidated to four major corporations from six, and staggered amid
an epidemic of piracy, leaving it more focused than ever on the
bottom line, and on reliable musicians with a proven track record of
consistent performance. The sort of rock stars that the original
members of Guns N' Roses, who recently submitted a claim seeking $6
million in what were called unpaid royalties from its catalog, used
to be. But which Mr. Rose, with his mood swings, erratic work habits
and long dark stretches, no longer is.
He hasn't disappeared entirely. His voice can be heard on the latest
edition in the "Grand Theft Auto" video game series, in the
character of a grizzled 70's-style rock D.J. "Remember," he advises
the radio station's audience, "we're not outdated and neither is our
music."
Interscope has taken "Chinese Democracy" off its schedule. Mr. Rose
hasn't been seen there since last year, when he was spotted leaving
the parking area beneath Interscope's offices, where witnesses
reported that a small traffic jam had congealed when attendants
halted other cars to clear a path for his silver Ferrari. Mr. Rose
punched the gas and cruised into the day.
By JEFF LEEDS - March 6, 2005
WEST HOLLYWOOD, Calif.
IN the faint red light of the Rainbow Bar and Grill, Tom Zutaut sips
at his drink and spills a bit of regret. It's been 19 years since he
signed the then-unknown rock band Guns N' Roses to a contract with
Geffen Records, where they turned into multiplatinum superstars.
Back in those days, the Rainbow was their hangout of choice.
Years after he left the label, he returned in 2001 to try to coax
Axl Rose, the band's magnetic leader and by then its only original
member, into completing one of the most highly anticipated albums in
the industry: an opus tentatively titled "Chinese Democacy." The
deadline for turning in the album had passed two years earlier.
"I really thought I could get him to deliver the record," said Mr.
Zutaut, who spent nine months trying. "And we got close."
He is speaking in relative terms. Mr. Zutaut is but one of a long
series of executives and producers brought in over the years to try
to conjure up the maddeningly elusive album - to cajole the
reclusive rock star into composing, singing, recording, even just
showing up. Like everyone else who had tried, or has tried since,
Mr. Zutaut came away empty-handed.
Mr. Rose began work on the album in 1994, recording in fits and
starts with an ever-changing roster of musicians, marching through
at least three recording studios, four producers and a decade of
music business turmoil. The singer, whose management said he could
not be reached for comment for this article, went through turmoil of
his own during that period, battling lawsuits and personal demons,
retreating from the limelight only to be followed by gossip about
his rumored interest in plastic surgery and "past-life regression"
therapy.
Along the way, he has racked up more than $13 million in production
costs, according to Geffen documents, ranking his unfinished
masterpiece as probably the most expensive recording never released.
As the production has dragged on, it has revealed one of the music
industry's basic weaknesses: the more record companies rely on
proven stars like Mr. Rose, the less it can control them.
It's a story that applies to the creation of almost every major
album. But in the case of "Chinese Democracy," it has a stark
ending: the singer who cast himself as a master of predatory
Hollywood in the hit song "Welcome to the Jungle" has come to be
known instead as the keeper of the industry's most notorious white
elephant.
AT THE STROKE of midnight on Sept. 17, 1991, Guns N' Roses was the
biggest band in the world. Hundreds of record stores had stayed open
late or re-opened in order to cash in on the first sales that night
of "Use Your Illusion," Vols. 1 and 2, the band's new twin albums.
On the strength of that promotion - and the coattails of the band's
blockbuster 1987 debut - the band set a record: for the first time
in rock history, two albums from one act opened at Nos. 1 and 2 on
Billboards national album sales chart. But by 1994 their fortunes
had changed. After years of drug addiction, lyric controversies,
onstage tantrums and occasional fan riots, their members had started
to drift away, their lead singer had become bogged down in personal
lawsuits, and "The Spaghetti Incident?," their collection of cover
versions of classic punk songs, had been released to mixed reviews
and disappointing sales.
The members of the band - what was left of it - reconvened at the
Complex, a Los Angeles studio, in a massive soundstage with a pool
table and a Guns N' Roses-themed pinball machine, to prepare for
their next album, which Geffen executives expected to release some
time the following year. But they quickly began suffering from an
ailment that has proved fatal to bands from time immemorial: boredom.
"They had enough money that they didn't have to do anything," said a
longtime observer of the band, one of the 30 people involved with
the album who spoke for this article. He spoke on the condition of
anonymity, as did many others who had signed a confidentiality
agreement while working with Mr. Rose. "You couldn't get everyone in
the room at the same time."
Mr. Rose had appointed himself the leader of the project, but he
didn't seem to know where to lead. As Slash, the band's longtime
guitarist, said recently, in reference to the singer's songwriting
style: "It seemed like a dictatorship. We didn't spend a lot of time
collaborating. He'd sit back in the chair, watching. There'd be a
riff here, a riff there. But I didn't know where it was going."
Geffen was riding toward an uncertain destiny as well: its founder,
David Geffen, retired, and its corporate parent, MCA Inc., was sold
to the liquor giant Seagram, led by Edgar Bronfman Jr. With all
those changes swirling, and with old Guns N' Roses material still
ringing up millions in new sales, executives decided to leave the
band alone to write and record.
A cover of the Rolling Stones' "Sympathy for the Devil," however,
which was released as part of a movie soundtrack, would be the last
addition to the original band's catalog. Slash quit the band in
1996; the drummer Matt Sorum and the bassist Duff McKagan were the
next to go. Of the founding members, that left just Mr. Rose. But
instead of starting something new, he chose to keep the band's name
and repopulate it with new musicians. Geffen wasn't in much of a
position to deny him. The label was on a cold streak and wagered
that fans would still flock to the singer, even if a band had to be
rebuilt around him.
Geffen wasn't in much of a position to prod him forward, either. In
1997 Todd Sullivan, who was then a talent executive for the company,
sent Mr. Rose a sampling of CD's produced by different people, and
encouraged him to choose one to work on "Chinese Democracy." Mr.
Sullivan says he received a call informing him that Mr. Rose had run
over the albums with a car.
The singer had encouraged everyone in the band's camp to record
their ideas for riffs and jams, hours and hours of song fragments
that he hoped to process into full compositions. "Most of the stuff
he had played me was just sketches," Mr. Sullivan recalled. "I
said, 'Look, Axl, this is some really great, promising stuff here.
Why don't you consider just bearing down and completing some of
these songs?' He goes, 'Hmm, bear down and complete some of these
songs?' Next day I get a call from Eddie" - Eddie Rosenblatt, the
Geffen chairman - "saying I was off the project."
Around the start of 1998 Mr. Rose moved the band that he had
assembled to Rumbo Recorders, a three-room studio deep in the San
Fernando Valley where Guns N' Roses had recorded parts for its
blockbuster debut, "Appetite for Destruction." The crew turned the
studio into a rock star's playground: tapestries, green and yellow
lights, state-of-the-art computer equipment and as many as 60
guitars at the ready, according to people involved in the
production. But Mr. Rose wasn't there for fun and games. "What Axl
wanted to do," one recording expert who was there recalls, "was to
make the best record that had ever been made. It's an impossible
task. You could go on infinitely, which is what they've done."
As time and dollars flew by, pressure mounted at Geffen. The label's
dry spell lingered, making them more dependent than ever on new
music from their heavy hitters. "The Hail Mary that's going to save
the game," the recording expert who spoke on the condition of
anonymity explained, "is a Guns N' Roses record. It keeps not coming
and not coming." The label paid Mr. Rose $1 million to press on with
the album, with the unusual promise of another $1 million if he
delivered "Chinese Democracy" by March 1 of the following year.
Geffen also offered one of the producers Mr. Rose had recently hired
extra royalties if the recording came in before that.
He never collected. The producer, who goes by the name Youth (his
real name is Martin Glover), started visiting the singer in the pool
room of his secluded Malibu estate, to try to help him focus on
composing. But that collaboration didn't go any better than his
predecessors' had. "He kind of pulled out, said 'I'm not ready,' "
Youth said. "He was quite isolated. There weren't very many people I
think he could trust. It was very difficult to penetrate the walls
he'd built up."
Youth's replacement was Sean Beavan - a producer who had previously
worked with industrial-rock acts like Marilyn Manson and Nine Inch
Nails - and under his care the riffs and song fragments that the
band had recorded slowly began to take shape. But costs were
spiraling out of control. The crew rented one piece of specialized
equipment, for example, for more than two years - at a cost well
into six figures - and used it for perhaps 30 days, according to one
person involved with the production.
Mr. Rose appeared sporadically, some weeks just one or two days,
some weeks not at all. "It was unorganized chaos," the same person
said. "There was never a system to this. And in between, there were
always parties to go to, different computers Axl was trying out or
buying. There were times when we didn't record things for weeks."
So the studio technicians burned as many as five CD's per week with
various mixes of different songs, which were driven to Malibu for
Mr. Rose to study. The band's archive of recorded material swelled
to include more than 1,000 digital audio tapes and other media,
according to people who were there at the time, all elaborately
labeled to chart the progress of songs. "It was like the Library of
Congress in there," said one production expert who spent time on the
album there.
By one count, the band kept roughly 20 songs it considered on the A
list and another 40 or so in various stages of completion on the B
list.
All that material, however, didn't do much to reassure the band's
label. "In 1998 and 1999 you start getting a little bit nervous,"
Mr. Rosenblatt, the executive who led the outfit after David
Geffen's departure, said delicately. "Edgar Bronfman picks up the
phone more than once. He wanted to know what was going on. You
unfortunately have got to give him the answer, you don't know.
Because you don't." To take the pressure off, Mr. Rose's manager at
the time presented the idea of releasing a live album from the
original band, which. Mr. Rose's crew began to assemble.
In January 1999 Seagram orchestrated a massive restructuring of its
music division, firing 110 Geffen employees, including Mr.
Rosenblatt, and folding the unit into the corporation's bigger
Interscope Records division. The unfinished album was placed in the
hands of Interscope's chairman, Jimmy Iovine. Mr. Iovine declined to
comment for this article.
Mr. Rose was said to be crushed by the departure of his Geffen
contacts - just as "White Trash Wins Lotto," a musical satire that
sent the singer up as a star-eyed hayseed forced to learn the harsh
lessons of the music industry, was developing a cult following in
Los Angeles. When he missed his March deadline, however, he set a
pattern that would repeat itself for years to come: a flurry of
energetic activity, followed by creative chaos and a withdrawal from
the studio.
That June he allowed a version of the old Guns N' Roses hit "Sweet
Child O' Mine" that begins with the original band playing but almost
seamlessly shifts into the new band to appear on the soundtrack of
the film "Big Daddy." Later that summer he agreed to release his
first original song in eight years, the industrial-flavored "Oh My
God," for another soundtrack and introduced it in a commercial on
MTV. (Mr. Rose fussed over the song so much that he, Mr. Iovine and
studio technicians stayed up until nearly dawn adjusting the final
mix, according to people involved.) News of its release stoked
speculation that an album might follow. But it was panned by many
critics and quickly forgotten.
In late 1999 he invited Rolling Stone to preview about a dozen
tracks. The magazine reported the album appeared "loosely scheduled"
for release in the summer of 2000. In fact, Mr. Rose's visits to the
studio had become so irregular, according to several executives and
musicians involved with the band, that an engineer working with him,
Billy Howerdel, and the band's drummer, Josh Freese, found time
during that period to start their own project, the band A Perfect
Circle, and to begin recording an album, "Mer de Noms," which went
on to sell 1.7 million copies.
Label executives still clung to the idea that if they could just
bring in the right producer, he could find a way to finish the album
and finally bring a return on their ever-growing investment. They
summoned Roy Thomas Baker, famed for his work with the art-rock band
Queen. (Mr. Beavan, who was said to have tired of the project, soon
bowed out.) But instead of wrapping things up, Mr. Baker decided
that much of what the band had needed to be re-recorded - and
painstakingly so, as he sometimes spent as long as eight hours on a
few bars of music.
The process was drawn out even further after Mr. Rose hired two new
musicians - the guitarist Buckethead, a virtuoso who wore a
mannequin-like face mask and a KFC bucket on his head, and the
drummer Brian "Brain" Mantia - whom the singer directed to re-record
all the music that their predecessors had spent months performing.
Still, Mr. Rose seemed to be emerging from his sullen shell. In mid-
2000, for what was thought to be the first time since
the "Illusions" tour ended in 1993, he performed in public, with the
Thursday night bar band at the Cat Club on the Sunset Strip. "He was
psyched," recalled one person who worked with the band at Rumbo. "It
seemed like it boosted him again, people still want to hear him."
At about 4 a.m on New Year's Day 2001, at the House of Blues in Las
Vegas, he and the new lineup of the band finally unveiled some of
their new material. "I have traversed a treacherous sea of horrors
to be with you here tonight," Mr. Rose told the crowd, which
received him with roars of approval. Warm reviews followed. Making
the most of the moment, he took his band on the road, going to
Brazil to play in the Rock in Rio festival.
With the band's return, Mr. Rose's machinery cranked up again. One
internal cost analysis from the period pegs the operation's monthly
tab at a staggering $244,000. It included more than $50,000 in
studio time at the Village, a more modern studio where Mr. Baker had
moved the band. It also included a combined payroll for seven band
members that exceeded $62,000, with the star players earning roughly
$11,000 each. Guitar technicians earned about $6,000 per month,
while the album's main engineer was paid $14,000 per month and a
recording software engineer was paid $25,000 a month, the document
stated.
Label executives were losing patience. Interscope turned to Mr.
Zutaut, the original band's talent scout. Could an old friend
succeed where so many others had failed? He was offered a roughly 30
percent bonus, he said, if he could usher the project to completion
within a year.
But Mr. Rose's renewed energies were not being directed toward the
finish line. He had the crew send him CD's almost daily, sometimes
with 16 or more takes of a musician performing his part of a single
song. He accompanied Buckethead on a jaunt to Disneyland when the
guitarist was drifting toward quitting, several people involved
recalled; then Buckethead announced he would be more comfortable
working inside a chicken coop, so one was built for him in the
studio, from wood planks and chicken wire.
Mr. Rose was far less indulgent of his producers and label. Around
Christmas, he ousted both Mr. Baker and Mr. Zutaut (who said there
had been a miscommunication). It would be weeks before the singer
would even allow an Interscope executive to visit him in the studio,
according to people involved with the production. Interscope
dispatched a senior talent executive, Mark Williams, to oversee the
project. Mr. Williams declined to comment for this article.
If Mr. Rose appeared more remote, his vision of the project became
more grandiose, people involved with the band said. He directed that
music produced by Mr. Baker be redone again, those people said. He
now spoke of releasing not merely one album but a trilogy. And he
planned one very big surprise.
At MTV's annual awards show in 2002, publicists buzzed through the
audience whispering about a big finale. And with just minutes to go
in the broadcast, a screen lifted away to reveal the band and Mr.
Rose, in cornrows and a sports jersey, looking strikingly young. The
musicians burst into "Welcome to the Jungle," one of the original
band's biggest hits, and the crowd went wild. But on television Mr.
Rose quickly seemed out of breath and out of tune. He ended the
performance, which included the new song "Madagascar" and the
original band's hit "Paradise City" in a messianic stance, raising
his arms and closing his eyes. He left the audience with a cryptic
but tantalizing message: "Round one."
Round two never came. The band went on a successful tour, but in the
hours after their triumphant Madison Square Garden appearance, Mr.
Rose was reportedly refused entry to the Manhattan nightclub Spa
because he was wearing fur, which the club does not allow. That
killed the mood. He didn't show up for the band's next performance,
and the promoter canceled the rest of the tour.
Months dragged on as the band waited for Mr. Rose to record more
vocals. In August 2003 when label executives announced their
intention to release a Guns N' Roses greatest-hits CD for the
holidays, the band's representatives managed to hold them off with
yet another promise to deliver "Chinese Democracy" by the end of the
year. But the album, of course, did not materialize. And then the
game was over.
"HAVING EXCEEDED ALL budgeted and approved recording costs by
millions of dollars," the label wrote in a letter dated Feb. 2 ,
2004, "it is Mr. Rose's obligation to fund and complete the album,
not Geffen's." The tab at Village studio was closed out, and Mr.
Rose tried a brief stint recording at the label's in-house studio
before that too was ended. The band's computer gear, guitars and
keyboards were packed away. Over a legal challenge by Mr. Rose, the
label issued a greatest-hits compilation, in search of even a modest
return on their eight-figure investment.
Released in March of 2004, it turned out to be a surprisingly strong
seller, racking up sales of more than 1.8 million copies even
without any new music or promotional efforts by the original band.
The original band's debut, "Appetite for Destruction," which has
sold 15 million copies, remains popular and racked up sales of
another 192,000 copies last year, according to Nielsen SoundScan. It
is a sign that Mr. Rose's audience still waits.
Mr. Rose is reportedly working on the album even now in a San
Fernando Valley studio. "The 'Chinese Democracy' album is very close
to being completed," Merck Mercuriadis, the chief executive officer
of Sanctuary Group, which manages Mr. Rose, wrote in a recent
statement. He added that other artists including Peter Gabriel and
Stevie Wonder "have throughout their careers consistently taken
similar periods of time without undeserved scrutiny as the world
respects that this is what it can sometimes take to make great art."
There's certainly more than enough material; as Mr. Zutaut says,
even years ago "people felt like the record had been made four or
five times already." But of course, rumors of the album's imminent
release have circulated since almost the very beginning of the tale,
more than a decade ago.
And at the center of that tale, now as then, is the confounding
figure of Axl Rose himself. A magnetic talent, a moody unpredictable
artist, a man of enormous ideas and confused follow-through, he has
proven himself to be an uncontrollable variable in any business plan.
His involvement on "Chinese Democracy" has outlasted countless
executives, producers and fellow musicians - even the corporate
structure that first brought the band to worldwide celebrity. Even,
in fact, the recognizable configuration of the recording industry as
a whole, which since the band first went into the studio in 1994 has
consolidated to four major corporations from six, and staggered amid
an epidemic of piracy, leaving it more focused than ever on the
bottom line, and on reliable musicians with a proven track record of
consistent performance. The sort of rock stars that the original
members of Guns N' Roses, who recently submitted a claim seeking $6
million in what were called unpaid royalties from its catalog, used
to be. But which Mr. Rose, with his mood swings, erratic work habits
and long dark stretches, no longer is.
He hasn't disappeared entirely. His voice can be heard on the latest
edition in the "Grand Theft Auto" video game series, in the
character of a grizzled 70's-style rock D.J. "Remember," he advises
the radio station's audience, "we're not outdated and neither is our
music."
Interscope has taken "Chinese Democracy" off its schedule. Mr. Rose
hasn't been seen there since last year, when he was spotted leaving
the parking area beneath Interscope's offices, where witnesses
reported that a small traffic jam had congealed when attendants
halted other cars to clear a path for his silver Ferrari. Mr. Rose
punched the gas and cruised into the day.
