Monthly Archives: November 2014

The floodgates finally opened: Thirty songs spaced over two packed-to-the-gills compact discs. Use Your Illusion I’s cover used the red-and-yellow motif of the original Mark Kostabi painting. Use Your Illusion II changed the color scheme to a cool blue-and-purple. The CD booklets were stuffed with photos, the vitriolic lyrics in microscopic sans-serif type, and detailed production and songwriting credits. Here’s the track list for the albums:

USE YOUR ILLUSION I

1. Right Next Door To Hell
2. Dust N’ Bones
3. Live And Let Die
4. Don’t Cry
5. Perfect Crime
6. You Ain’t The First
7. Bad Obsession
8. Back Off Bitch
9. Double Talkin’ Jive
10. November Rain
11. The Garden
12. Garden Of Eden
13. Don’t Damn Me
14. Bad Apples
15. Dead Horse
16. Coma

USE YOUR ILLUSION II

1. Civil War
2. 14 Years
3. Yesterdays
4. Knockin’ On Heaven’s Door
5. Get In The Ring
6. Shotgun Blues
7. Breakdown
8. Pretty Tied Up
9. Locomotive
10. So Fine
11. Estranged
12. You Could Be Mine
13. Don’t Cry (Alt. Lyrics)
14. My World

Thirty tracks of equal parts seething fury and overwrought sentiment hit the streets in the waning days of summer ‘91…(Five or six songs remained mysterious outtakes. “Ain’t Going Down” was the only original that has ever surfaced…on the official Guns N’ Roses pinball machine, if you please. Evidently some other songs were covers that came out on “The Spaghetti Incident?” in 1993.)

The albums shot immediately to #1 and #2 on the Billboard charts. Use Your Illusion II sold slightly better, which I still find hard to believe even though the evidence was right in front of my eyes on Release Day at the Wherehouse. Customers buying only one of the albums almost inevitably chose II. Perhaps because it contained the massive “You Could Be Mine” single, plus the previously released “Civil War” and “Knockin’ On Heaven’s Door” (both of which got some radio airplay over the last year), so maybe the material was more of a known quantity. But it was also saddled with the odious “My World,” the embarrassing “Get In The Ring,” the inferior “alternate lyrics” version of “Don’t Cry,” the mawkish Duff McKagan-penned ballad “So Fine”…but I suppose people going to the cash register didn’t know that at the time.

The narrowing down began almost immediately. What are the “necessary” songs from the Use Your Illusions? Like almost everyone I knew, I only had a cassette player in my car. I put the entirety of I and II onto two separate tapes…then I did what everyone who has ever owned these albums did: I made a compilation of what I thought was the best stuff, and it was this third cassette that rarely left my player through the last part of ‘91 and most of ‘92.

[Years later, there actually was an “official” single-disc Use Your Illusion, supposedly compiled by Axl himself, consisting of profanity-free songs for the big box stores like Walmart and Kmart. Unfortunately, it’s a great example of how NOT to make a single-disc Illusion, including both versions of “Don’t Cry” at the expense of better (still profanity-free) songs.]

So…the 33⅓ author did it, several blogs have already done it, I remember most of my friends from that era doing it…

They all got it entirely wrong, botching the whole thing. The Holy Bee will now do it right.

Many people’s single-disc mixes included only twelve songs, making it a song-for-song match for Appetite For Destruction. Yes, the Use Your Illusions need to be cut down, but I don’t want them to be a mere shadow of their former selves. Grandiosity is what makes them fascinating. Therefore, I will cut only fourteen songs, leaving me sixteen, clocking in at about 88 minutes. This still stretches the limits of space available on a commercially released compact disc, but my pared-down Use Your Illusion would make an awesome double album on vinyl (which, remember, the individual Use Your Illusions were anyway), and would fit on a standard 90 minute blank tape. Perfect. (A few minutes too long for recording onto a blank CD, but we’re keeping our heads firmly in 1991…)

The Selection Process: I will be discarding fourteen songs, but it’s not enough to simply cut and let the remainder stay where they are. The running order will need to be completely re-shuffled to create a smooth, balanced and natural flow from one song to the next.

I have chunked the songs on Use Your Illusion I and II down into six general categories, and each category has to lose at least two songs (except where noted.)

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