The Importance of Being Organic

I remember when Guns N Roses released the albums Use Your Illusion 1 & 2 simultaneously. The first song used for promotion was “You Could Be Mine,” and Hollywood teamed up with the mega-group to make sure that single was prominently displayed in the sure-fire blockbuster summer release, Terminator 2. All the powers that be wanted to make sure album promotion was widespread: “You Could Be Mine” was pushed on radio, in movies, on MTV (back when they played music videos); the promotion machine was churning, and it wanted Guns to bank big for everyone involved. It worked; the song went huge, and both albums sold millions. This despite the fact they were each complete crap.

I didn’t like “You Could Be Mine” within seconds of first hearing it, but couldn’t explain why it struck me as so awful so quickly. Something just sounded off. Back then, I knew little of producers, engineers and recording studios. I couldn’t tell you what Mike Clink did to “Appetite for Destruction” that made it sound so amazing, nor could I verbalize what he then did wrong on both Illusion albums.

Many years later, I read the book, “Blink,” by Malcolm Gladwell. It explained, in detail, the phenomena of knowing something without understanding how we knew it. The idea was: we can instinctively feel something is either true or false; sometimes our senses are so in tune with truth, we can just “know” truth.

Not long after reading “Blink,” I read Slash’s self-titled autobiography. In tedious detail, he described his multi-year struggle with heroin addiction, but in between the lengthy and dull addiction diatribes were gems of stories involving Guns & Roses. Slash spoke of their inception, early success, and most importantly to me, their songwriting process and how it changed over the years. For example: the song “Paradise City” was grown out of a road trip. The group was in a van, having just played one of their first gigs ever, was driving back to Los Angeles and the song just sort of… appeared. They were shouting lyrics and melodies, and when time came to hit the studio, they already had a foundation for what would morph into one of their biggest hits. “Sweet Child O’ Mine,” another enormous success, came about while they jammed one day, everyone noting that something Slash was playing would make for a great opening riff to a song.

I enjoy reading about musicians, because I was in a band for several years. After high school, I first attended the Berklee College of Music, in Boston, Massachusetts, and then transferred to the University of Wisconsin, Milwaukee. It was in Milwaukee I joined with two other students, a singer/guitarist and a drummer, and went about the business of seeing what it would like to make music for a living. We never achieved a great deal of success, but were able to record several songs for a compilation CD, and I promoted those songs as hard as I could. We ended up getting played on several college radio stations across the U.S, charting in many of them.

Our best songs, in my opinion, were written while jamming. We may not have come up with a “Paradise City,” but when messing around at rehearsal, we came up with some pretty fun little progressions that the singer would then write melodies and lyrics around. I enjoyed this method of songwriting, and thought that’s what being in a band was all about. The singer/guitarist disagreed, and quietly yet forcefully eventually stated the case that he was interested in having the drummer and I play songs he had written. He liked the idea of being a singer-songwriter; he wanted to be the Sting or Curt Cobain of the group and teach his songs to the drummer and I, that we may play our parts. The problem in my mind was, and I will argue this until the day I die, is: though Sting may have the writing credit for “Every Breath You Take,” without the iconic Andy Summers guitar line, in no way would it have been a hit. I view music as a collaborative, and the idea of being dictated to did not sit well with me. After several months of frustration, I quit when presented with a song containing the lyric, “You don’t know about divorce; you’d rather ride a foundered horse.”

The singer explained, “A horse that founders has to be put down, so my analogy is that of two people who stay together even though it’s not a good relationship, plodding onward when they shouldn’t be.” I argued in response: “Great, but you still rhymed “divorce” with ‘horse.’”

Returning to Slash’s book: as is well documented today, as the band grew in fame, Axl became more recalcitrant. He was a self-admitted isolationist, and was so as much from the band as the outside world. During the recording sessions for the Use Your Illusion albums, Axl was rarely around; he would show up when the band wasn’t there, listen to what had been recorded and make changes and leave notes as to where the songs should go. In essence, Axl was dictating from afar, controlling the songs without being an active participant in the group process. With but the reading of a few sentences, I flashed back to the first time I heard “You Could Be Mine,” and finally understood why the song sounded wrong from the start; it wasn’t a creative creation, it was a studio construction. Therein lies the difference.

While some people might argue they like certain songs on either Illusion record, no one can say that any song on them matches “Appetite for Destruction.” Plus, everyone knows what happened next; every band member eventually quit, and Axl went off the deep end, spending over fifteen years nitpicking away at the album eventually released as “Chinese Democracy.” That record, as anyone will tell you, is absolutely unlistenable. It is an overproduced, over-thought mess.

Because Axl refused to allow things to simply flow.

And in art, flow is everything.