(hennemusic) Don't blame Axl Rose for the decade-plus wait for "Chinese Democracy" – blame Interscope Chairman Jimmy Iovine.Guns N' Roses bassist Tommy Stinson comes clean about the 2008 album in a recent interview with A.V. Club. "At first we were in the [studio] a lot. We were working on the writing aspect of it, but it just kept going on," says Stinson. "We had [Interscope Chairman] Jimmy Iovine intervening in a not-so-productive way, and we had other guys coming and going with nutty ideas. My summation of the whole thing is that Interscope, when they took over Geffen, really led Axl to believe that Jimmy Iovine would be involved, and would help get this record done and make it happen. But, basically, what he did was let it completely fall apart. Then he had this great idea to bring in [producer] Roy Thomas Baker to make it sound better. All he did was re-record everything three or four different times, trying to make it sound like something it didn't need to sound like, and spend $10 million in the process. My two cents on the whole thing is that I really think Jimmy Iovine f**ked the whole thing up."
"It was a bummer," adds the bassist. "Most of the songs that are on the record now were done 10 f**king years ago. But all the talking heads in the mix were saying, "Make 'em sound better! Make 'em sound better!" So we kept redoing this and that. And it ended up coming back down to the same f**king songs that they were 10 years ago, except that now they were a super-dense mishmash of a bunch of instrumentation. That whole era pretty much sums up what happened to the record industry. Those kinds of people, making those kinds of decisions and not really helping the artist." more on this story
