Former Guns N’ Roses bassist Tommy Stinson recounted conversations he had with Axl Rose about keeping the band’s name despite losing key members in a new Billboard article about Chinese Democracy.
“When I talked to Axl, his idea was very much punk rock,” says bassist Stinson, who would go on to be the glue to the band’s rhythm section for roughly 18 years. “He owned the name and was like, ‘the other fuckers all quit, and I got the name and I’m going on. I’m going on as Guns N’ Roses.’ Call me kooky, but at the moment, I was like, ‘shit man, I’m with you.'”
“I think there was a safety net with the other bands members,” says Doug Goldstein, one of several managers who landed on Axl’s shit-list during the recording of Chinese Democracy. “Without them around, it [was] an Axl Rose album, so he couldn’t say it was bad song because of Slash or something.”
Doug Goldstein adds his take Axl’s creative instincts during that period: “If it was up to Slash, GNR would have been AC/DC and every album would be Appetite. If it was up to Axl, they’d be the Beatles, and every album would evolve.” Like Beatles fans in 1970, you were forced into either the Slash or Axl camp, and until the two reunited in 2016, a specific demographic of fan felt divorced from GN’R.
