Ex- Guns N’ Roses bassist Tommy Stinson discussed the issues with Chinese Democracy in a new Yahoo interview.
“There were a lot of variables with the record company,” Stinson says. “[Interscope chief] Jimmy Iovine really mucked up the works quite a bit in some ways. There’s a certain thing you have to have when you work with Axl, and I don’t think we ever had the right guy. [Producer] Sean Beavan was the closest, and most of the songs on that record pretty much started and ended up with what he did.”
He also discussed Axl Rose and Paul Westerberg.
“They’re more similar than dissimilar,” Stinson muses. “They’re both very much focused on how they see it in their head and how it needs to be, so you have to roll with that a bit. They’re both strangely perfectionists, and there’s nothing wrong with that. It’s just part of genius involved with both of them. Other than the music being completely different in a lot of ways, it’s not derived from all that different of a place. Axl and [original GNR bassist] Duff [McKagan] come from the punk-rock school of things from a big degree, and the same records were probably on the turntables owned by Paul and Axl at one point or another, whether it was the Heartbreakers or the Sex Pistols.”
