Rob Janas and Kevin Fleming are 2 writers/actors best known for their work on “The New Looney Tunes”. On a recent edition of Appetite for Distortion, the duo discussed their involvement in getting Guns N’ Roses frontman, Axl Rose to appear in an episode of The New Looney Tunes. Axl not only had dialogue but sang “Rock the Rock,” his first new song since Chinese Democracy. A story is also discussed how iconic Aerosmith frontman Steven Tyler almost replaced Rose to perform the song in the episode. Alternative Nation transcribed their comments.
Fleming: I’ll say this, I didn’t think we ever believed it would actually happen and even after we got a “yep, Axl’s coming” and “yep we are setting the dates” and even when we showed up at their recording studio we were like: “there is no way Axl is showing up”. So no, I don’t think we ever thought that it would ever happen. As you said, Axl Rose had never done anything, Axl had never done any kind of press or had any new songs in years. We had a woman who worked on the show, she was a producer, she was pretty tenacious and Matt Craig, the producer of the show, he knew we really wanted to do this and thought it would be fun. I think he saw the value in it because he liked Guns N’ Roses and Axl Rose, not as much as Rob and I. I mean, we’re adult men and have posters of Axl up for inspiration.
[Rob laughs]
Brando: Me too, I don’t know what to say.
Fleming: Exactly! So, I think it was just a matter of we just kept wanting it and kind of, not fighting for it in a real fighting for it way but everyone was just like: “Let’s just keep going” and we found a manager of some sort that was not involved with the music part but the thing about it is, what helped is, he was a Looney Tunes fan, he liked Looney Tunes and he had a personal manager that was also a big fan of it and they were kinda like: “Let’s try and find some time to do this.”
Fleming continues:
Fleming: Now with that being said, two things had to happen. One – we had to push back that record a lot because Guns N’ Roses were on tour, it didn’t look like he was going to be able to do it and we had already written it. Rob wrote that song, he wrote every lyric to Rock The Rock, we had this guy Josh Funk who plays music and he wrote the arrangements. We had all this, the scripts written and we were ready to roll and we kept thinking: “Yeah, it’s gonna happen but it’s gonna be pushed back.” It kept getting pushed back, pushed back, pushed back. We were talking about getting somebody else which would of been a bummer – at one point we thought maybe Steven Tyler was gonna do it
Brando: Huh.
Fleming: We were like: “Oh great, he would be amazing but we still wanted Axl we were like: “Oh if he could do it, let’s just see what happens with Axl, let’s give him some more time because he’s coming back from Europe soon.” Like we knew the tour schedule so we knew when he would be back in the states, and for how long. It just kept moving up, kept getting further, seemed like he was gonna do it, seemed like a reality. We got e-mails from people saying: “okay, but we have to see what it looks like, can you show us an animated version of him.” and we did and they were like: “yeah that’s great but more like how Axl looks now [the anamation]” They were really detailed, really specific. They wanted certain bandanas on his legs a certain way, his dog collars for the dogs that he’s had in his life that are [seen] on his other foot, and he wanted those to be on there. As it became more specific with the song and he signed off on it and we got the okays on the animations, then the full okay, then it slowly sank, but the whole time it’s almost like a little nibble, you go: “woah great, you jump a little further, a littler bit further, and then you’re like: “holy crap we’re at the finish line, we’re here – you’re at the record and Axl just walked in.
Listen to “Rob Janas and Kevin Fleming talk Axl Rose in Looney Tunes | Ep. 126” on Spreaker.
