Bob Guccione Jr. at Spin!

[Pedrito]

 

Honestly  I'd sit through the 2 albums easily. Don't see what people are on about with their heart wasn't in it and the likes.

UYI 1 tracklistsing:

Right Next Door to Hell
"Dust N' Bones"
"Live and Let Die
"Don't Cry" (Original)
"Perfect Crime"
"You Ain't the First"
"Bad Obsession"
"Back Off Bitch"
9"Double Talkin' Jive"   
"November Rain
"The Garden (ft. Alice Cooper)"
"Garden of Eden
"Don't Damn Me
"Bad Apples"
"Dead Horse
"Coma"

There might be 'weaker' songs but nothing shit there. When I say weak, I mean they mightn't be the absolute anthems that sold millions of singles. If we'd heard Back off Bitch on Lies we'd have been creaming ourselves for example.

[Pedrito]

UYI2:

1. Civil War"   Axl Rose, Slash, Duff McKagan   7:42
2.   "14 Years"   Rose, Izzy Stradlin   4:21
3.   "Yesterdays"   Rose, West Arkeen, Del James, Billy McCloud   3:14
4.   "Knockin' on Heaven's Door" (Bob Dylan cover)   Bob Dylan   5:36
5.   "Get in the Ring"   Rose, Slash, McKagan   5:42
6.   "Shotgun Blues"   Rose   3:23
7.   "Breakdown"   Rose   7:04
8.   "Pretty Tied Up" ("The Perils of Rock n' Roll Decadence")   Stradlin   4:48
9.   "Locomotive" ("Complicity")   Rose, Slash   8:42
10.   "So Fine"   McKagan   4:08
11.   "Estranged"   Rose   9:23
12.   "You Could Be Mine"   Rose, Stradlin   5:43
13.   "Don't Cry" (Alternate Lyrics)   Rose, Stradlin   4:45
14.   "My World"   Rose   

The alternate Don't Cry , My World(not a song) and piss take Get in the Ring probably the excess here but my god the highlights certainly make up for it. I'd prefer to see the glass mostly empty as opposed to crying over a few spilt drops here.

Civil War, Yesterdays, Knockin, Breakdown, Locomotive, Estranged, You Could be Mine all stone 11/10 rock classics. 

[astfgyl]

 Can't stand Knockin or Don't Cry or November Rain these days and only barely tolerated them as a young pronoun.

Used to have Estranged lumped in with those but I was wrong

[Black Shepherd Carnage]

Locomotive, again, seriously, what a fucking tune. That mental, messed up, off-beat rhythmed section is properly addictive.

[warhead]

The switch to the more personal style of the lyrics could be added to the case as well. I didn't know that about AJFA either so there's another one.

From anyone who was of age at the time, what way were those albums received back then? I know as a young lad I was delighted with the new songs but I was 10 or 11 so not the most discerning critic

I was 14 at the time of UYI release and remember having kind of a lukewarm feelings about it.  I liked it quite a lot, but still not nearly as much as Appetite. Looking at the track listings, I find around 5 songs I absolutely love, a couple I could never stomach, even as a kid, like Knocking On Heavens Door, and the bigger part is quite good, but still not in the pantheon of the greatest songs of all times. Think they got too bloated and egomaniacal for their own good, they are not musical slouches, but Queen they were not.
Appetite remains as my fave album of all times.

[Pedrito]

Locomotive, again, seriously, what a fucking tune. That mental, messed up, off-beat rhythmed section is properly addictive.

It's such an Appetite sounding song when you think about it. The riff and rhythm. I've never heard any other band do whatever 'that' is. Pure class.

[Pedrito]

Been thinking about this whole UYI thing the whole morning. I suppose I just absolutely love them and never saw it as an Appetite vs UYI debate in any way. So Appetite for me is probably in the top 5 greatest albums ever written in the history of music. It is perfection. Nothing comes close.  Everything about Appetite oozes unity. It is the gang in musical form, very much in the vein of something like London Calling. 10/10, 100/100, the alpha, the omega, the shizzle.

What I love about the UYI albums though is that they are everything that Appetite isn't. As opposed to 'the gang', those albums are a character study of one individual, or many individuals, the enigma, the creation or the person Axl Rose. Whoever he is or believed himself to be is splattered all over that record. It is like some manifestation of the psyche, some Jungian psychological journey into the recesses of his mind. If you said everything you ever thought or if people could actually read your mind, nobody would ever talk to you again. And that's what Axl Rose did on those albums I believe. He took all the shite that was inside himself and tried to recreate it on those 2 albums. And the results are beautiful and horrible, uncomfortable, nasty, fragile, romantic, weird, horrendous, sex crazed, yearning blah blah blah.

Is that indulgence? Yes. Do people get turned off by it? Of course they do. Is it ridiculous? Probably plenty of it could be called ridiculous if you choose to see it that way. All that said, there are very few albums in the history of music that have ever achieved that. I think The Wall is the one that springs to mind. Double album, Roger Waters just vomiting his childhood, his insecurities, his pain and love and all that stuff over it. I have a feeling Tommy by the Who might be something similar but I'm not familiar enough with it. Billy Corgan was probably trying to achieve something similar with Melon Collie..again an album that is all him as opposed to previous albums that were 'the band'.

Again, not an argument for or against, but more of a why. The hookers and drugs and mansions, fuck it must have been something else, but it was all falling down around him and these albums are the perfect record of that descent.

[TheRuts]

An interesting take, but not one that completely rings true to me.

A good few songs had been written and demoed around the time the band formed (Slash once said 'Don't Cry' was the first song worked on by the band, the lyrics to 'YCBM' are in the booklet for Appetite...) so it seems more like a compromise between what Axl wanted and what the others wanted.

My tracklisting would be:

Right Next Door to Hell
Dust n Bones
Don't Cry (original)
Bad Obsession
Locomotive
Yesterdays
The Garden
Civil War
Pretty Tied Up
You Could Be Mine
My World

[The Butcher]

My world? MY WORLD!? Don't Cry but yet no Estranged?! I do not want to step into your world

[Pedrito]

An interesting take, but not one that completely rings true to me.

A good few songs had been written and demoed around the time the band formed (Slash once said 'Don't Cry' was the first song worked on by the band, the lyrics to 'YCBM' are in the booklet for Appetite...) so it seems more like a compromise between what Axl wanted and what the others wanted.

My tracklisting would be:

Right Next Door to Hell
Dust n Bones
Don't Cry (original)
Bad Obsession
Locomotive
Yesterdays
The Garden
Civil War
Pretty Tied Up
You Could Be Mine
My World

Yes more than likely a compromise and that's what it actually does sound like. I was flicking through a useless biography I read about Axl years ago and indeed it talks quite a bit about his obsession with the Wall and Pink Floyd. If you think about Estranged with that solo etc, the template is, of course a song like Comfortably Numb. Even the sounds of seagulls and animals at the start, the use of spoken voices in their recordings. Operation Mindcrime by Queensryche is similar. I think the UYIs are an attempt at a Wall, at least by Axl and it comes out in songs like November Rain, Estranged, Coma, Yesterdays, Don't Cry which are all very much first person songs.

Axl was working on November Rain for years, it was around in the time of Lies from what i understand but they never had the budget or ability to pull it off. It's not unusual for a band to not include songs on an album just because they have them in some way written..it wasn't ready yet. Also the band were pulling in different directions and hence they broke up without making a proper album again.

Axl writing credits: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:Songs_written_by_Axl_Rose 

Paints its own picture

[pete]

An interesting take, but not one that completely rings true to me.

A good few songs had been written and demoed around the time the band formed (Slash once said 'Don't Cry' was the first song worked on by the band, the lyrics to 'YCBM' are in the booklet for Appetite...) so it seems more like a compromise between what Axl wanted and what the others wanted.

My tracklisting would be:

Right Next Door to Hell
Dust n Bones
Don't Cry (original)
Bad Obsession
Locomotive
Yesterdays
The Garden
Civil War
Pretty Tied Up
You Could Be Mine
My World

Axl was working on November Rain for years, it was around in the time of Lies from what i understand but they never had the budget or ability to pull it off. It's not unusual for a band to not include songs on an album just because they have them in some way written..it wasn't ready yet. Also the band were pulling in different directions and hence they broke up without making a proper album again.

Around before appetite.

https://youtu.be/iOflIhelV8g

From wiki:

"It is said that the reason for not putting "November Rain" on it was because they had already agreed to put "Sweet Child 'O Mine" on it and thus already had a ballad on the album "

[pete]

An interesting take, but not one that completely rings true to me.

A good few songs had been written and demoed around the time the band formed (Slash once said 'Don't Cry' was the first song worked on by the band, the lyrics to 'YCBM' are in the booklet for Appetite...)

And probably record company input on appetite. The most dangerous band in the world!

https://youtu.be/q_TM10doKG4

[Circlepit]

That's cool to see. He look lean and mean there.
The Paris gig that was on video during the illusions tour was brilliant. Even the Warren Beattie rant before Doubje Talking Jive. That song is like a scalpel .

[Black Shepherd Carnage]

Locomotive, again, seriously, what a fucking tune. That mental, messed up, off-beat rhythmed section is properly addictive.

It's such an Appetite sounding song when you think about it. The riff and rhythm. I've never heard any other band do whatever 'that' is. Pure class.

It's not quite the same thing, but the rhythm changes in Locomotive are somewhat reminiscent of Black Dog:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yBuub4Xe1mw

And speaking of Zeppelin in a thread about double albums, well, as excellent as The Wall and The White Album genuinely are, neither of them hold a candle to Physical Graffiti.

AND speaking of classic rock more generally, I've always considered this stormer to be the ultimate precursor to the G'n'R sound:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=z6MUYPT2JIw

[ldj]

Bit off topic, but there's this interesting video of Fenriz talking about Uriah Heep, there's a bit where he reckons they set the blueprint for the GNR sound, bit long but an entertaining watch, if anything just for the other very non-black metal musicians on stage with him reacting to him.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XCZ4G5mMdk4