CELEBRATE THE 20TH ANNIVERSARY OF GN’R’S USE YOUR ILLUSION BY MAKING YOUR OWN TRACK LIST
Tomorrow marks the twentieth anniversary of the release of Guns N’ Roses’ double-disc opus, Use Your Illuision. It seems like public perception has soured on these albums over the years — even Axl Rose and Slash have accused them of being bloated and over-produced — but I still love ’em to death. For one thing, seeing as they ended up being the last proper studio albums of original material from the actual Guns N’ Roses (not Axl Rose’s solo group or whatever), I’m glad that the band basically included every song they had written up ’til that point here. And for another thing, I love the diversity of the records — that they didn’t just end up being Appetite for More Destruction. Maybe the Illusion albums ended up being a failed experiment, but I still, to this day, find them to be a pretty exciting experiment*.
So. Since we didn’t do a “Question of the Week” this week, and I wanted to do something to commemorate this anniversary, I thought we’d play a fun game that Vince and I (and a lot of our other friends) used to play in the past: whittling these two mammoth albums down to one collection. Geffen Records actually did that themselves in 1998, releasing a twelve-song single volume version of UYI that, if you ask me, had a pretty strange selection of songs on it… but it’s an entertaining time waster to see if you can do better.
There are no rules to the game, other than a) all the songs on your track list have to come from the Illusions albums (duh), and b) it all has to fit on one CD (roughly 80 minutes), despite the fact that CDs are now obsolete. I’ve included my own personal version after the jump… I’ll be more than a little excited to see all of yours as well.
1) Civil War (Only song on the albums Steven Adler plays on, gotta leave it on!)
2) Garden Of Eden
3) You Could Be Mine
4) Bad Obsession
5) Pretty Tied Up
6) Don’t Damn Me
7) Bad Apples (Axl screaming “Alright, that sucked!” at the end might have something to do with this website’s name…)
8) Breakdown
9) Locomotive
10) Don’t Cry (Either version, if you’re being nitpicky.)
11) November Rain
12) Estranged
13) Coma
TOTAL RUNNING TIME: 79:15
Okay, your turn, kids. Post your version in the comments section below.
-AR
*I also enjoy thinking back to what an EVENT the albums were when they were released. This was before the days of the internet or pre-release leaks or even all-night record stores, so Tower Records opened at midnight specifically to put these on sale. It had been more than four years since the release of Appetite — which, in the pre-Chinese Democracy days, seemed like an awfully long amount of time to wait for a new release — and the band’s popularity had skyrocketed during that period. II debuted at #1 on the charts and I debuted at #2, which is still one of the only times in history some crazy shit like that has happened.
