Vinyl Collection - Guns N' Roses Use Your Illusion

The early 90s were pivotal years in the shaping of my musical tastes.  I've talked about the fact that Poison and AC/DC were my introductions to things a little heavier than I was used to.  Those two albums opened a whole new world of music for me.  Another big part of my musical taste development was my friends.  As middle school started transitioning to high school, I found myself listening to a lot of new bands.  Firehouse, Damn Yankees, Cinderella, and Bon Jovi were all my favorites, but two more bands would suddenly eclipse the rest.  Those two bands were Metallica and Guns N' Roses.

As the fall of 1991 was approaching, I was entering eighth grade and rediscovering my love for playing guitar.  That is also when two of the biggest albums of the 90s heavy metal world where just being released.  Guns N' Roses were coming off the massive success of their Appetite for Destruction album and the follow-up Lies EP when they unleashed not one but two albums on the world.  Titled Use Your Illusion I and Use Your Illusion II, Guns N' Roses slapped the music world with thirty tracks all at once.  When the album was initially released I was not yet aware of who Guns N' Roses were apart from "Sweet Child 'O Mine" which was a song almost everyone knew and a massive hit.  They were not even on my radar, and wouldn't be yet for another year or so when I started playing guitar again with my friends.

Use Your Illusion II

It was late 1992 during my first year of high school that I was finally introduced to Guns N' Roses properly when a friend handed me a dubbed tape of Use Your Illusion II.  I brought it home and popped it into my tape deck and took in the sounds.  "Civil Wars" opened the album and I liked it, but it wasn't until the third track, "Yesterdays", started that I knew this was something I wanted to hear more of.  Following that song with "Knocking On Heaven's Door" cemented my desire to listen to everything I could get of Guns N' Roses.  That's when "Get In the Ring" hit and I had to immediately jump out of my bed and turn down the volume as a slew of profanity began to spew out of Axl's mouth.  My jaw dropped as I listened to him rail on every critic the band had.  I immediately rewound the album and listened to that song again, and again, and again.  I was shocked, amused, and entranced by what I was hearing.  Never before had I heard such swearing in one song with the exception of when I heard 2 Live Crew at a friends birthday party when I was a few years younger.  This was rebellious in my head and I loved it!  The next song was "Shotgun Blues" which also used a fair amount of swear words in it.  I didn't know how the heck I could ever listen to this album while my parents were home, so I instead would listen in the brief hour I had after school before my mom would come home from work to listen to those two songs.

After those two tracks, the rest of the album was much easier to listen to whenever I wanted, so I spent a lot of time listening to side two of this masterpiece.  With amazing tracks like "You Could Be Mine", "Estranged", "Breakdown", and the highly underrated "So Fine", Use Your Illusion II was instantly one of my favorite albums.  The only song I never listened to was "My World" which was Axl's foray into industrial music that would show up again some 16 years later when he finally released  Chinese Democracy to the world.  In my opinion, Use Your Illusion II is one of the finest albums ever made.  To this day it remains my favorite of the two Illusion albums.

Use Your Illusion I

It was another few months before I finally bought a copy of Use Your Illusion I on CD.  With the radio success of "November Rain" and "Don't Cry" and my love of Illusion II, I knew I needed to get this one sooner rather than later.  What I love about the first volume in this set was how much different, yet similar, the song selections were.  I think they did a fine job choosing which albums each track should go on.  Also, songs like "Back Off Bitch" and the version of "Don't Cry" that appear on this album were both songs written before the Illusion session even began.  "Back Off Bitch" was written before Appetite For Destruction, and you can find "Don't Cry" in setlists long before the Use Your Illusion albums were even recorded.

Where volume one shines though is in songs like "Dead Horse", "Dust N' Bones", "Bad Obsession" and the epic song "Coma".  I could live without their Paul McCartney and Wings cover of "Live and Let Die"; a song still played in their live sets today.  It just never did anything for me personally.  "The Garden" is a song that when I first heard it I didn't like, but after a while, it grew on me to the point that I do enjoy it now.  I think "Right Next Door to Hell" is a killer opener of a song.  The bass intro really kicks the album off with a bang.

As a whole, Guns N' Roses unleashed thirty songs over two albums and made a statement doing it.  They were here to kick your ass, and they did.  What is even more amazing about it all is that several members of the band were in the throes of alcohol and drug addiction when writing and recording the albums.  It might explain why it took so long to finally come out as a follow up to Appetite for Destruction, or it may just be that it took that long to write and record thirty plus songs.  Either way, the band put out what I believe is their best collection of material to date.  Sure Appetite for Destruction is a classic and filled with great songs, but Use Your Illusion is thirty songs that are almost all strong.  It is my go-to Guns album(s), and I don't think it will ever be matched by anyone trying to put out that many songs at once.

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