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An Axl interview from the radio:

 

Big news! Axl recently did an radio interview with WRIF 101 radio
station.

Q: It was definitely a shocker to see you there on the MTV Video
Music Awards. How long did it take to get that whole thing rolling?

Axl: "Well, they were in negotiations about trying to figure out how
long we could do something and where it would be at the show for,
actually, somewhere near the beginning of that little mini-tour we
did. And then we didn't have what we were doing on stage worked out
until the day of the show."

Q: So that whole Guns 'N' Roses medley – is that what you had worked
out or just the whole…?

Axl: "Yeah, that thing. 'Cause it wasn't for sure that we were
playing until the day before the show."

Q: Now, tell me about the reaction from people. They must have been
blown away there, huh?

Axl: "People were pretty shocked. Yeah, definitely (chuckle)."

Q: You must have been pretty fired up. How did you feel going back
out there on stage, live TV and all that stuff? You must have been a
nervous wreck all that day.

Axl: "Well, no, I wasn't bad, but everything tends to go wrong in my
world. Like, even going to soundcheck, the people wouldn't let me
down the street to go to the building. And then, the day of the show,
they didn't let us go down that street. I had to get out of the car,
run past the police, and they're telling me I have to stop, and I'm
like,' I've gotta sing.' And the best part was, as I'm running down
the street, I had to run past all the people lined up to get into the
building, and they're going, [puts on dumb rock fan voice] 'Hey,
there goes Kid Rock.' I thought that was pretty funny."

Q: Why wouldn't the police let you [walk down the street to get into
the building]? I'm kind of lost on that.

Axl: "Because they're lost. Just confusion, lost, don't know what's
going on, people not having people's names on the list, not knowing
what passes to check, all that kind of crap. So, just usual stuff
going wrong for no reason."

Q: So what you're telling me is, Axl Rose had to sneak into the MTV
Video Music Awards?

Axl: "Yeah, basically. I had, like, police chasing me down the
street, and then our security and MTV had to clear it with them, but…
It was very interesting.

Q: I guess the big question is, where have you been? Where has Axl
Rose been for the last 10 years? What have you been doing? Just
mellowing out, getting stuff ready to go, or…?

Axl: "Nah. Basically, I just don't go looking to promote myself on
every little thing until there's some kind of product, or something
to put out that I think is worth it. And we've been working on this
band and trying to get things right for a long time. If I go to,
like, do interviews or anything like that, it just gets turned around
by so many people around the world who don't have anything better to
do than to try to shoot anything down, and that was just too draining
to deal with everybody else. It's interesting… In L.A., there's
places that I go to all the time, but since I did the MTV thing, I go
to the same place, and suddenly there's paparazzi, and it's
like 'Axl's out.' Well, I was here last weekend, and you guys didn't
care. I used to live behind the Tower Records on Sunset, and I lived
right behind Spago, and if you wanted to, you could go down and stand
there and all the paparazzi would take your pictures and stuff — it's
just dependent on if you wanted to. I mean, I never did that, but you
drove by it every day. There's other people there that would
purposely go there to get their photos taken and stuff. It's not my
world."

Q: You've played a couple of gigs here and there – you played some
huge ones down in South America, and you've done some small ones here
in the States in Vegas, right?

Axl: "Yeah. Well, this band did not come together by a bunch of guys
meeting each other in a bar or down on a corner in their old
neighborhood, so it's taken a long time to pull these guys together
and then have them develop a chemistry with themselves. When we did
our first show in Vegas, Robin and Buckethead didn't know each other
at all. You've got two lead guitar players trying to kill each other
with their abilities. It's like when I tried to bring Zakk [Wylde]
and Slash together – that didn't go too well [laughs]."

Q: Oh, really? You tried to bring Zakk and Slash together once?

Axl: "Yeah, it was fun to watch. It was like watching a giant snake
with a Tyrannosaurus Rex. So it was pretty exciting – I mean, we had
a good time, I don't if they did."

Q: When was this?

Axl: "That was '95."

Q: Are they talking at all now, or you don't know?

Axl: "I think they can be cordial to each other, that whole kind of
thing, but when they're actually playing, it gets that kind of alpha
male thing going, like 'Who's the real lead guitar player?'

Q: Another question I have for you… Do you think Guns 'N' Roses are
still relevant after a long layoff? Obviously, you're selling tickets
for the shows, people are really jonesing for Guns 'N' Roses still,
and you haven't done anything in, like, at last seven or eight years.

Axl: "Yeah, I think the relevancy, really… At the end of the day,
it's gonna really depend on… Well, for a bit of the nostalgia thing,
you have the songs… we're playing a lot of the old material. For new
excitement, you have the performance of these particular players. But
at the end of the day, it's also really gonna stand on the new songs
when we put out a new record, and if that's considered relevant or
not, and if that's considered not selling out just to be relevant. So
it'll really all hinge on that, and we feel really confident about
the music that we're working on, and I think that when it does manage
to find its way into the light, the timing will be perfect, 'cause,
like this MTV thing, and the touring right now, that's all working
really well."

Q: The reason I ask you that is because I see younger people in
early '20s, late teens, fired up to see Guns 'N' Roses.

Axl: "Yeah, they are. And also, the new performers… The band and the
show is a really exciting thing. I like the soundchecks and the
rehearsals before the shows watching this thing, because watching
these guys is amazing. I mean, Guns 'N' Roses, I was in that
band 'cause it was my favorite band – I loved watching all the player
in that band. And watching this band is just as exciting, or more,
for me. Plus, having what I feel is a better personal relationship
with the individuals in the band makes it more exciting for me. And
people have been commenting on noticing that on watching the shows a
lot."

Q: You said a couple of minutes ago, "when the new record comes out",
as if you're a little skeptical about that.

Axl: "Nah, I'm not skeptical about, like 'if' [the album will come
out]. I'm just saying the 'when' thing is when we decide that it's
completed. There's a lot of things that… we come up with new ideas
that we're working on as we go, and it is a really, really slow
process, because it's kind of left more to ourselves in trying to
figure it our where… What I've seen in this industry is that, if a
record company… I don't know. There seems to be a lot more support
for getting things done with newer bands, and it's got a lot to do
with contracts being, you know, they don't have to spend as much
money on the band, and they're trying to get it out there, and the
next thing you know, they've sold a couple of albums and then they
don't care about that band anymore and they move on and that band
falls apart. It doesn't seem like there's a lot of support for bands
that have been around. That's my experience. So in putting this thing
together, in a lot of ways, I've had to do way more jobs in it than
I'm supposed to — I've had to be manager, A&R man, producer, sole
lyric writer, and a lot of [other] things, where Guns 'N' Roses, to
me, what I worked really hard at was making it a collaborative
effort, and it was a lot of people involved. This is a collaborative
effort with the players, but the players aren't exactly sure what it
should be to try to win over the world Guns 'N' Roses style. So
that's kind of my responsibility. It took a long time, but now it's
working, and I think we'll have the right record, and when we do drop
the record, the plan is to drop the record, have a bunch of extra
tracks, about a year or so down the road drop another record and drop
a third record. This is a three-stage thing and we'll be touring for
a real long time."

Q: So the time off didn't affect you — you didn't like it too much,
you don't wanna [give yourselves] more time off.

Axl: "We've been collecting lots of songs, so there won't be lots of
time off — we'll just keep touring."

Q: Since we last heard from Guns 'N' Roses, there's been a new
President, reality TV, Kis Rock, Eminem, Linkin Park — I mean, things
have changed so much. Has any of this stuff influenced you at all?

Axl: "Well, basically, life, yeah. [laughs] Yeah, everything that's
going on you think about, and there's a lot of different influences
in music, so we try to move the music forward. There's a lot of
misconceptions, because I wasn't gonna get in a one-on-one war with
the old guys, because I felt that all that would do was gonna promote
their albums and bring attention to that, and I didn't want to help
that at all. The reality was that I was basically going to do most of
Slash's songs in particular, and work on those with him, but
basically, anytime we got anything that would be halfway near
something that was gonna be either successful because it completely
kicked ass or was just strong in any way, then it was backed away
from, and I believe that this has a lot to do with trying to keep the
material down, for his own personal reasons, keep his own material
down. There was a lot of stress… That's basically why Izzy and these
guys, none of them really wanted to do the big shows."

Q: What kind of shows did they wanna do?

Axl: Well, from day one, Izzy always wanted to be about the size of
The Ramones and do, like, 2,000 seaters, so there was always a little
battle there. And then the other guys had to be on so many substances
to really be able to deal with that crowd. And to his credit, Slash
could play great guitar on a lot of drugs, but there was a reason he
would be that whacked out to be on stage. There was a lot of stress
to deal with."

Q: Tell me one of your fondest moments from the Metallica/Guns 'N'
Roses tour, because that was probably one of the biggest tours of the
1990s.

Axl: "I was definitely very excited about how that went — as far as
how it went for us. And we got to see a lot of people backstage, we
threw some really huge parties that were a lot of fun."

Q: I was at one one time and you walked right by me and you went
right into a hot tub with all these chicks. So that ain't too bad,
huh?

Axl: "[laughs] No, that's not too bad."

Q: I remember some of the parties. You guys had a different theme in
every city, if I'm not mistaken, right?

Axl: "Yeah, that was a lot of fun."

Q: I heard in Indianapolis you had, like, cars, and the one I was had
go-go dancers and was, like, psychedelic, or something like that.

Axl: "We had a casino with ice sculptures somewhere."

Q: So what are your plans for this year? You're doing the tour. You
got a New Year's Eve date yet?

Axl: "Yeah, I think we're doing San Jose — San Francisco, basically."

Q: 'Cause I heard something about the Las Vegas thing again.

Axl: "Well, we are doing Mandalay Bay right before then. But
basically, the larger venues in Vegas wanted to stay dark on New
Year's, 'cause they want people in there gaming. So we wanted to play
a larger place in Vegas, so that's why we ended up doing San
Francisco."

Q: I guess it's sort of a generic question, but how's the tour going
so far?

Axl: "It's going great, it's going great. I mean, it got started off
exceptionally weird, but I guess [true to] GN'R style, and then from
that point on… We've been really happy. All the guys are happy, you
can sense that the people in the band are getting excited about what
they see that we could turn this thing into, because we know what the
material is that we are working on. And right now you have people
just kind of stunned and watching, but I'll be excited when there's
newer songs out there so then you've got some of that frenzy
happening."

Q: Are you doing any new stuff on the tour?

Axl: "We do about 4-5 songs that we've done at the various shows, but
we're still holding our big guns back."

Source: blabbermouth.net

 

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