02.28
Note: While this is ostensibly a site for info and appreciation of the music of the Lincoln Bedroom, it will also be a depository for random thoughts. Almost like some sort of “web-log,” or “weblo” for short.
On the Beatles Anthology videos, Paul addresses George Martin’s criticism that the White Album was probably a little bloated, and might have been better off as a single-disc rather than double record. Paul essentially concedes there is some merit to the argument, but concludes that the variety and girth of the album are part of its charm, saying “it’s the bloody Beatles White Album! Shut up!”
This debate applies to nearly every double album. Unless your name is Joe Strummer and you’re working on something named London Calling, you probably don’t have the goods for four sides of music. If you’re even considering a double album, you are probably a young band that found massive early success and your ego has swelled to arena-sized dimensions.
On that note, enter W. Axl Rose.
Guns n’ Roses recorded the greatest hard rock record and one of the greatest debut albums ever. This sent their already-famously-arrogant lead singer into the Ego Hall of Fame, and he decided that rather than refine, but stick with, the dirty rock swagger of Appetite for Destruction, the band had to become the perverted love child of Elton John, Freddie Mercury and Aerosmith. The band, fraught with tension over this musical direction, records Use Your Illusion I and II,and the rest is history.
Not to say it is a complete debacle. Sifting through all the filler reveals a bit of the magic that made the band so exciting in the first place. And with that, I present the definitive Use Your Illusion. The album that should have been, the album that would have kept Izzy and Steve in there, the album that would have made Chinese Democracy arrive 15 years early and not been a shit sandwich. I welcome all thoughts and criticisms.
USE YOUR ILLUSION
1. Civil War
2. Double Talkin’ Jive
3. 14 Years
4. Don’t Cry
5. Perfect Crime
6. You Ain’t the First
7. You Could Be Mine
8.November Rain
9. Garden of Eden
10. So Fine
11. Dead Horse
12. Estranged
(Honorable Mention goes to “Get in the Ring,” since although it is arguably the most ill-advised song in rock history (its breakdown features Axl Rose, at the time the biggest rock star in the world, challenging journalists who gave bad reviews to fights), it is so entertaining for the same reason).
There it is. You have the legitimately awesome “Civil War,” songs that (almost) would be at home on Appetite in “Perfect Crime,” “You Could Be Mine,” and “Double Talkin’ Jive,” expand the sound tastefully with “14 Years” and “You Ain’t the First,” and of course preserve the insane majesty of “November Rain” and “Estranged.
This, by no means, is a perfect record. It still pales in comparison with Appetite. But at the very least, the world is spared lame covers of “Live and Let Die” and “Knockin’ on Heaven’s Door,” and the head-scratchingly retarded “My World.”
Shout out to Izzy Stradlin, still the coolest man on earth.
