For those who thought two albums from Guns N’ Roses in 1991 was too much of a good thing, Alan Niven, the band’s former manager, is in firm agreement with you.
GNR released the material from the Use Your Illusion sessions in two volumes in September of 1991 on purpose. Frontman Axl Rose didn’t want the financial cost of a double album to prevent fans from being able to purchase new music from their favorite band. Still, the idea that the hard rock group would be putting out that much music in one go was worrisome to Niven. “Axl rationalized it to me in this way, ‘I want my double album faster than Led Zeppelin got their double album,'” he tells UCR. “Of course, in my head, I’m going, do we have the material to justify a double album? Is there going to be a consistency of quality here?”
When asked whether the band would have been better served to put out a single album, the manager fires back without hesitation, “F–k yes!” He then got out his legal pad and began to read off the sequence of songs that would have made up his proposed single disc Illusion distillation.
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Alan Niven’s Single Album Version of ‘Use Your Illusion’
1. “Double Talking Jive”
2. “Back Off Bitch”
3. “Dust and Bones”
4. “Yesterdays”
5. “Civil War”
6. “Pretty Tied Up”
7. “You Could Be Mine”
8. “Locomotive”
9. “November Rain”
10. “Dead Horse”
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“The One F–king Thing We Cannot Do is Put Out a Double Album”
Niven dishes plenty of GNR dirt inside the pages of his new book, Sound N’ Fury: Rock N’ Roll Stories. Though the book covers his whole career as a songwriter, producer and manager, those who are interested in details about his time overseeing one of the most chaotic and self-destructive rock bands to ever break big won’t be disappointed. The Illusion period was particularly fraught with drama and struggle. Guitarist Izzy Stradlin was his North Star, a continual beacon of hope in the midst of the mayhem. “When he writes ‘Dust N’ Bones,’ you go, ‘Okay, we’re going to be alright,” he says. But he also reveals that the idea to put it out as two separate parcels came in part from his side of the desk. “The one f–king thing we cannot do is put out a double album. I persuaded Axl that we should put out two single albums simultaneously. No one’s ever done that before. That’ll be exciting. It will be an event. Of course, the honesty is, I was remembering Electric Ladyland [by the Jimi Hendrix Experience] being released in the United Kingdom [that way] as well.”
The Difficult Task of Following Up ‘Appetite for Destruction’
Understandably, the multi-platinum success of the band’s debut album, 1987’s Appetite for Destruction cast an overwhelming shadow when it came time to consider what the sophomore effort would look like. “If we go back to ’89 and ’90, very much, you went through a conscious consideration of [the] eight million records that had been sold. How do we follow that? You have to get that out of your consciousness,” he explains. “Because it would just crush you. Then, you’re starting to not only field expectations from everybody else that are both fiscal and creative, but you’re also second-guessing all of your decisions. We all did our best to say, ‘F–k that! If the song feels good, then we put our faith in it.'”
“But there was an overwhelming sense of demand and expectation to come after AFD. It was really, really difficult to compartmentalize that and put it away,” he continues. “I mean, this is why we lost [Steven Adler], because at that point, it was, ‘We’ve got to get this f–king record done” and Stevie is our impediment to getting it done. He can’t connect to Axl’s long, boring [songs like] “Coma” and “Estranged.” He can’t play them the same way twice. For me, the conversation that mattered was the one I had with Slash about it, because they’re childhood friends. Slash was the pragmatist and he said, ‘We need another drummer.’ It was Slash who picked out Matt Sorum. So getting Illusion out, once we had Sorum, I knew that we could finish the material.”
READ MORE: Guns N’ Roses’ ‘Use Your Illusion’: The Story Behind Every Song
Ultimately, Niven’s tenure as manager of Guns N’ Roses ended before the Illusion albums even hit the shelves. His relationship with Rose unfortunately hit the rocks during the turbulent period when all involved were doing everything they could to get the albums out. By May of 1991, he’d been dismissed. The singer told Rolling Stone in an interview that September that he’d refused to complete and deliver the albums until Niven was gone.
It’s an unfortunate coda to that part of Niven’s story, but his career forged onward and he had plenty of work. Still, as he writes in the pages of Sound N’ Fury, he’s “conflicted” about the band that he oversaw from obscurity to their ongoing status as worldwide superstars with more than 100 million albums sold and counting. What if he’d looked away from the fledgling group? Would they have simply imploded? He offers a brief summary in those pages. “It was Axl’s battle to take complete control and most of the money. The more control he gained, the less they were productive and the worse the material got,” he writes. But several paragraphs later, he pushes it away with one final sentence. “Whatever, it’s all in the rear-view mirror.”
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Gallery Credit: Bryan Rolli
