The Chinese Democracy Years – 2001: A Spaced Odyssey

Starting at 3.35am on 01/01/01 at the House of Blues, Las Vegas, Guns N’Roses played their first official live show since July 1993. New songs included Chinese Democracy, The Blues, and Silk Worms, alongside the ’99 single, Oh My God.

“I have traversed a treacherous sea of horrors to be with you here tonight,” Axl told the crowd. Two weeks later they played a 140-minute set to 190,000 in Rock in Rio 3 in Brazil, unveiling another new track, Madagascar.

Triumphant, there was talk of summer dates and album releases. As revealed in detail in Classic Rock 116, Tom Zutaut, the man who had originally signed GN’R and the only A&R at that point to have gotten an album out of them, was drafted back in to the fold.

As Zutaut told CR: “We replaced a lot of drums: because of Axl’s belief that the record is supposed to be the energy of the people involved in creating it, we had to replace Josh Freese’s drumming… and his drumming was really spectacular.”

“I would not have wanted to be in Brain’s shoes. Basically we were saying to him, ‘We have got a brilliant performance of this and now we need you to recreate it.’”

Brain: “I was like, ‘OK, so I’ll learn these songs and go in and re-play ’em’ and [Axl] was like ‘No, I really liked what Josh played but I want your feel.’ And I’m like, ‘Well, what does that mean?’ and Roy was the producer at that time and he’s like, ‘Well, basically what you are gonna have to do is play exactly what Josh played. Exactly note for note…”

Mantia got all of Freese’s drum parts transcribed. “So about a month later [the transcriber] calls me and… – it must have been like that thick [holds hands about a foot apart] of sheet music and it was every song written out note for note and these were some seven-minute songs. With like, at the end, Josh doing soloing… And I learned every song for like, I dunno, maybe two weeks… I just practised until I got it. Then I would say ‘Roy…’ while everybody down at the studio, and it’s $2,000-a-day studio, would just be sitting there like watching, cartoons or The Exorcist or something…”

Tasked with getting the perfect drum sound on Chinese Democracy – the sound of Dave Grohl’s drums on Smells Like Teen Spirit – Zutaut bought a copy of Nevermind and got the engineers to copy it. “I’ve only been asking that for, like, six fucking months!” Axl said when he heard it.

Zutaut looked at where all the money was going. (“One area where there was an astronomical amount of money being spent was in rented gear,” he said. “My recollection is that we were able to shave around $75,000 a month off the budget…”)

And he lured Buckethead – who had left, frustrated by what he saw as the band’s inactivity and creative tension with Roy Thomas Baker – back with a promise of his own chicken coop in the studio. (“If I could have my own chicken coop in the studio, I could play a lot better,” Bucket head tolf him.) Two days later, they built the coop and Bucket brought in all his props and toys and put straw on the floor.

“You could almost smell the chickens!” said Tom Zutaut.

Work continued.”[Axl]’d come to the studio once or twice a week,” said Zutaut. The rest of the time the team would send him a stack of tracks that they’d worked on during the day for him to listen to during the night.
One song causing problems was Madagascar, which samples Martin Luther King’s famous ‘I Have A Dream’ speech – a sample for which they didn’t have clearance during Zutaut’s time on the album. “Axl feels that particular speech is at the core of the message that he is putting across at that song,” said Zutaut, “and he told me that if the Martin Luther King estate would not give permission for that to come out on the final record, that track would not be on it without it.”

Worked continued at a decent pace. Towards the end of the year, the producers of Black Hawk Down approached the GN’R camp for the inclusion of Welcome To The Jungle on the film’s soundtrack. At a screening of the film – in what Zutaut claims was a misunderstanding and a deliberate attempt by someone in the Axl camp to get him fired – Axl arrived hours late, flew off the handle at the presence of other people and the fact that the screening had started, and sacked Zutaut.

Like other A&R men before him, Zutaut had lasted a year.  Today, he thinks he got close to finishing the album: “By the time I left, I felt there were probably 11 or 12 tracks that just needed final mixes. I would’ve given it another three months for a few more overdubs and three for mixing. We could have had a record out for September 2002 – worst case scenario, out spring of ’03.”

In December, the band regrouped in a live setting, announcing two New Years shows in Las Vegas. In town on vacation, Slash made some calls and got on the guest list for the December 29 show. Later, a representative from the band’s management company, accompanied by hotel security officers, came to his room and told him to stay away from the show, “to spare me the embarrassment of being turned away at the door.”

Click here for The Chinese Democracy Years – 2002: The Queen Is Dead