Guns N' Roses - Gn'R - 1986

With the release of Guns N' Roses debut album Appetite for Destruction We saw the decline of Hair Metal and the brief rise of Sleaze Rock and a brief two year period when hard rock was stripped of the glam and returned to its roots. In 1989 that all collapsed with the emergence of Grunge and the Seattle invasion.

Before the release of Appetite, Gn'R released a four song EP made up of two original songs and two covers with crowd noise dubbed in to make it sound like a live recording. Released on a vanity label backed by Geffen Records to maintain interest in the band while they recorded their debut album.

But could they have released a full independent first album?

Side One
01 Shadow Of Your Love
02 Nice Boys
03 Don't Cry
04 New Work Tune
05 Move To The City

Side Two
01 Reckless Life
02 Mama Kin
03 Back Off Bitch
04 Ain't Goin' Down No More
05 The Plague

Reality Notes

Another installment of my alternate debut album series. Gn'R's record label Geffen spent two years polishing the band and songs for Appetite. During this time they recorded a lot of demos. Four of these songs were released on Live ?!*@ Like a Suicide, the EP mentioned above. With the recent release of the Super Deluxe Edition of Appetite we have three discs of outtakes from those two years of development. I had most of these on a cassette bootleg back in the late 80s. While most of those outtakes are alternate versions of album tracks there is a small handful of unused songs alongside those songs used for the EP but without the crowd noise of the faux live EP.

So, are there enough songs to flesh out the EP to album length? Almost. And how does this affect Lies? I'll address that in a moment. I ended up with a ten song LP of mixed quality songs. Fortunately most of those songs are pretty darn good. Unfortunately, two of those, New Work Tune and Ain't Goin' Down No More are instrumentals. Another song, The Plague, is only 47 seconds long and all together the LP clocks in at 33 minutes and 16 seconds. Not exactly a full album which is probably why they released an EP instead of a LP.

Because this is an independent release we have some leeway in quality control. If I took out the instrumentals the album becomes barley 26 minutes long so I had to keep them in. I buried one on each side of the album and removed the gaps between the songs before and after to make them feel a part of them so they don't stand out. I also took a few of the spoken intros from a few songs and attached them to other songs. Overall the flow is pretty good.

The four songs from the EP but without the crowd noise comes from a bootleg. I preferred the sound of the tracks from there, the versions on the deluxe discs sounded a bit too polished. The last song to address is Back Off Bitch. While it sounds like a fun song to play in the clubs, its quality is questionable, obviously an off the cuff throw away type song. But hey, this is an indy release so it works here in a way.

There are two more songs I could have used in place of the instrumentals but they are crappy obvious covers of Heartbreak Hotel and Jumping Jack Flash. As much as I would have liked to remove the instrumentals, I also wanted to avoid an album that is almost half covers. If they were better song choices I might have included them but how many versions of Heartbreak Hotel do we need? I could have also used versions of Knocking on Heaven's Door and Whole Lotta Rosie but I would have had to resort to live versions which I didn't want to do and again, too many covers.

For the cover I utilized the logo found on the EP against a black background. Now what can we do about Lies?

There are a few acoustic tracks we can use to expand side two of Lies to a 30 minute mini LP. there are two versions of November Rain, a 9 minute piano version and a 5 minute acoustic version. I went with the acoustic version. Move to the City comes from 1988 and was most likely in the running to be included on Lies. An acoustic run though of Jumping Jack Flash rounds it all out.

Lies
01 One In A Million
02 November Rain
03 You're Crazy
04 Patience
05 Used To Love Her
06 Jumpin' Jack Flash
07 Move To The City

The last change in future albums is I see no need to include two versions of Don't Cry on Use Your Illusions. We can drop the "Original Lyrics" version. November Rain can stay, this version is different enough for both to exist.

Sources
Appetite For Destruction (Super Deluxe Edition)
Lies
Suicide Demos '86 (Bootleg)