Alan Niven, who served as Guns N’ Roses manager from 1986 to 1991, recently spoke to Ghost Cult Magazine about the band’s 1991 album “Use Your Illusion.” When it was brought up by the interviewer how frontman Axl Rose had “grandiose visions” for the record with inspiration being taken from “Queen, Led Zeppelin, and The Stones,” Niven took it as an opportunity to share his critical opinion of Queen.
“That was definitely part of it. And, you know, we all have our viewpoints and opinions. I will clearly state to you right now – I think Queen is one of the most overrated bands ever,” he said. “Good god, what were they all about?” he said.
“And I’ll tell you, the very first Queen thing I heard was a single called ‘Keep Yourself Alive.’ And I thought that was great, and I was struggling at the time, and it spoke to me, and I thought, ‘That’s a statement, and an anthem that’s going to make me feel better about what I’m going through right now.’ And it was all downhill from there, as far as I’m concerned. ‘Bohemian Rhapsody?’ Whatever. What the hell is that all about?”
Speaking more specifically about Rose’s “grandiose visions,” Niven continued:
“So anyway, I fully understand [Axl] had grandiose visions of himself – I lived with it. And again, I’m going to say something that’s probably going to make a lot of people crazy. ‘November Rain’ was his masterpiece. To me, it’s a little bit of a paint-by-numbers, but it’s good. It’s not the second coming of ‘Stairway to Heaven’, right? But it’s good.
“So, he has grandiose ideas. And we held ‘November Rain’ [from the ‘Appetite for Destruction’ sessions] over because he hadn’t completed it, and we needed some material to have in the larder for when we came back from the first album, to have something to build on.
“But there’s something else. It wasn’t just grandiose ideas. Can you imagine lying in bed thinking to yourself, ‘F*cking “Appetite,” it sold 3 million, 5 million, 8 million…’ And you’re lying in bed and you’re going, ‘How do we follow that?’ And part of Axl’s thinking, and there was a sound logic that I could comprehend. There’s going to be an absolutely impossible comparison [with] whatever we release [after] ‘Appetite.’ Okay, let’s bury the f*ckers.
“Let’s put out a double album with so much material on it that they can’t figure out a comparison to ‘Appetite’ immediately and be dismissive. Let’s overwhelm the f*ckers. And I understood that. I also understood that [by] putting out a double album, we were going to get trashed by the critics. Excessive and grandiose.”
