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It’s no secret that Kurt Cobain was never the biggest Guns N’ Roses fan, but it wasn’t so much GnR’s music that rubbed him the wrong way. It was more what the band, and particularly frontman Axl Rose, represented in American culture.
“[Axl and I] come from small towns,” Cobain once said, “And we’ve been surrounded by a lot of sexism and racism. But our internal struggles are pretty different. I feel like I’ve allowed myself to open my mind to a lot more things than he has. His role has been played for years. Ever since the beginning of rock ‘n’ roll, there’s been an Axl Rose. It’s just totally boring to me.”
The resulting Nirvana vs Guns N’ Roses feud in the early 1990s was not something Axl had been seeking out on his end. He had actually been an early fan of Nirvana and was a bit blindsided by the animosity from Cobain as the pendulum swung toward so-called “alternative” rock and away from the glammier era of hair metal.
By the end of the 1990s, of course, these petty rivalries had become meaningless. Cobain was gone, grunge was over, and Guns N’ Roses were thoroughly adrift, almost comedically unable to get their ship in order to record their long-awaited, almost mythical sixth studio album, Chinese Democracy.
After 15 years of constant personnel changes and internal feuding, Chinese Democracy finally reached the finish line in 2008, but with only Axl Rose still remaining from the classic GnR line-up. It was, unsurprisingly, not quite worth the wait.
It’s also not surprising that, right up to the end of the Chinese Democracy saga, Axl was struggling to get along with his producers and fellow musicians, frustratingly scratching and clawing to bring his vision to life. In one specific case, if you believe the account of former Guns N’ Roses A&R man Tom Zutaut, Axl was at his wits’ end about the percussion sound on the album’s title track, ‘Chinese Democracy’.
Zutaut told Classic Rock that Axl was specifically looking for something akin to Dave Grohl’s drums on ‘Smells Like Teen Spirit’, but the goods weren’t being delivered. “I go to the studio I tell ’em what I want,” Zutaut said, paraphrasing Rose, “And they tell me that they’ve got what I want and then when I listen to it I’m bummed out. Nobody seems to understand my language.”
Zutaut’s solution, according to his own arguably self-serving version of events, was to simply walk to the nearest record store, buy a copy of Nirvana’s Nevermind, and bring it back to the studio to play for the musicians. Presumably, everybody would have been quite familiar with the drums on ‘Teen Spirit’ nearly two decades after its release, but a little refresher apparently did wonders, as the next attempt to mimic the sound finally satisfied Rose.
Zutaut again re-created Axl’s response to Classic Rock magazine, claiming the singer told him: “I’ve only been asking for that for, like, six fucking months! You don’t understand: I’ve been losing my fucking mind! I ask you for something, I get it. I’ve been asking other people and they can’t get it?!”
Tom Zutaut might be the hero of his own anecdote here, but if the basic thread of the tale is true, it’s interesting to know that Axl Rose, despite all the bad blood between GnR and Nirvana during the height of both bands’ success, was still an admirer of what Cobain, Grohl, and Krist Novoselic had achieved on some level.
The immediacy and raw energy of ‘Smells Like Teen Spirit’ was maybe a bit reminiscent of Guns N’ Roses’ early days, before the more bloated production and ego-clashing of the Use Your Illusion era. Plus, asking the drummer to sound like Dave Grohl might have been a bit less embarrassing than telling him to play like Steven Adler.
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