Hopefully, you’ve read my take on Guns N’ Roses’ album Use Your Illusion I, released on September 17, 1991. In this post, I’ll look at the simultaneously-released Use Your Illusion II.
Though it was my favorite Guns record when it came out, I have to admit, upon coming back to the album 30 years later, that it is the weaker of the two. While it has some awesome songs, including one that I think is the best GNR has ever done, it has a lot of misfires. Let’s go through it.
The album opens with “Civil War,” originally released in 1990 as part of a charity album. An instant fan-favorite, “Civil War” touches on the 1861-1865 conflict, as well as then-current hostilities. As it thunders along beneath Rose’s wails, the song seems much more relevant today than it ever had:
Look at the doubt we’ve wallowed
Look at the leaders we’ve followed
Look at the lies we’ve swallowed
And I don’t want to hear no more
“14 Years,” written by Rose and soon-to-be-gone guitarist Izzy Stradlin, refocuses conflict from the global to the personal. Set to a jaunty tune, the singer is ending a relationship that, if it hasn’t actually lasted 14 years, certainly seems like it.
But it’s been 14 years of silence
It’s been 14 years of pain
It’s been 14 years that are gone forever
And I’ll never have again
While Rose and Slash get all the attention, it seems to me that Stradlin was Guns’ overlooked Little Engine That Could, who kept chugging along until he couldn’t anymore. Stadlin left the band shortly before the albums were released.
And then we get to “Yesterdays,” whose sound is hard to pin down. Part country-western, part rocker, part…something, “Yesterdays” isn’t a bad song, per se—it has its moments—but it’s not particularly good. It just sort of takes up space until one gets to a stronger song, such as….
“Knockin’ On Heaven’s Door.” My view on covers is that they ought not to be done unless they can improve on the original: Joan Jett and early Van Halen were masters at spinning straw into gold. GNR takes Bob Dylan’s tune and makes it their own.
Just when you’re thinking that Illusions II is hitting its stride, along come two back-to-back stinkers. Thirty years before cringe entered the popular lexicon, “Get in the Ring” and “Shotgun Blues” are exactly that.
The former is Rose’s rant against the band’s media critics; the latter is supposedly beef Rose had with Vince Neil of Motley Crue. If the only fault with the songs was that they are, 30 years later, as relevant as beepers and Zubaz, they could be overlooked, but they’re nigh-unlistenable chest-thumping that never should have been on the record in the first place.
Skipping past them, we move on to something better, which is “Breakdown.” One of the albums’ longer songs (at just over 7 minutes), it has a honky-tonk vibe, heavy on the piano. It features Rose at some of his most vulnerable, ruminating on the end of a relationship:
To think the one you love
Could hurt you now
Is a little hard to believe
But everybody darlin’ sometimes
Bites the hand that feeds
The song culminates with Rose reciting, in blaccent, lines from Vanishing Point, an obscure 1971 movie. “Breakdown” is weird, but somehow, it works…I guess.
“Pretty Tied Up” is more standard fare, with Rose opining on the decadence and debauchery of the rock ‘n’ roll lifestyle. The analogy to an woman who only gets off on BDSM is a little weak—there are better songs about addiction on the albums—but the music redeems this one.
And then there’s “Locomotive,” and as you might imagine, its rhythm evokes a train. This song starts off fast and keeps rolling along, as Rose spins a play on words (“loco” as in crazy, and “motive”) into a tirade against his former love. It’s this song that provides the name for the albums:
You can use your illusion
Let it take you where it may
We live and learn
And then sometimes it’s best to walk away
Me, I’m just here hangin’ on
It’s my only place to stay at least
For now anyway
I’ve worked too hard for my illusions
Just to throw them all away
A woman scorned hath no fury like Axl Rose given a microphone, 8+ minutes, and full rein to vent, but just as it starts getting tiresome, he realizes that, “you’re such a stupid woman and I’m such a stupid man.” He and the song wind down with the admission that “love’s so strange.”
“So Fine” offers a much softer take on love, with bassist Doug McKagan sharing vocals with Rose. But even a jaunty piano riff and another of Slash’s virtuoso solos can’t add much juice. “So Fine,” like “Yesterdays,” isn’t not bad, it’s just…there.
Of all the longer pieces on the two albums, “Estranged” is probably my favorite, just edging out “Coma.” A moody, meandering, and mostly mid-tempo breakup song, “Estranged” is an earnest lament on what was and what will never be:
I don’t know how you’re s’posed to find me lately
An’ what more could you ask from me
How could you say that I never needed you
When you took everything
Said you took everything from me?
Guitars wail, pianos pound, and drums thunder as Rose resigns himself to the turbulent end of the relationship:
When I find all of the reasons
Maybe I’ll find another way
Find another day
With all the changing seasons of my life
Maybe I’ll get it right next time
The song made—and still makes—such an impression on me, that I used its title for the name of a later chapter in my novel This Wasted Land. Without giving away too much, it’s where two young lovers confront each other on what’s gone wrong between them—and neither thinks it can be fixed.
After “Estranged” comes what I believe is the best song Guns ‘N’ Roses has ever done. That’s right: better than “Welcome to the Jungle,” better than “Sweet Child O’ Mine,” better than “Paradise City,” or “Patience” or any cut on any other album. This hill that I’m willing to die on is “You Could Be Mine.”
If you’ve only ever thought of “You Could Be Mine” as the theme from Terminator 2, you’ve overlooked its genius. Once the drums and bass and guitar get fired up in the minute-long intro, this Rose/Stradlin collaboration is off like a rocket, never letting up for an instant. Rose’s vocals are particularly impressive, especially when he goes off in an extended rant:
Don’t forget to call my lawyers
With ridiculous demands
An’ you can take the pity so far
But it’s more than I can stand
‘Cause this couchtrip’s gettin’ older
Tell me how long has it been
‘Cause 5 years is forever
An’ you haven’t grown up yet
The theme of the song—that once there was a thriving, loving relationship, but now it’s withered away—inspired me to name the first chapter of This Wasted Land after the song. I also make a play on words out of the phrase “you could be mine,” when the witch Freydis abducts Sam, the boyfriend of the book’s protagonist, Alyx.
There are two versions of “Don’t Cry” on the Illusion albums, and though the music is the same in each, this one, with the alternate lyrics, is my favorite by a mile. Mostly because of the final verse:
I thought I could live in your world
As years all went by
With all the voices I’ve heard
Something has died
And when you’re in need of someone
My heart won’t deny you
So many seem so lonely
With no one left to cry to, baby
Alas, the song ends, as the original version does, with that drawn-out warble of the final lyric. It’s self-indulgent and grating, but not nearly so as “My World,” the psychotic foaming that closes out the album. I read somewhere that the other band members didn’t find out about it being on the album until the record was released, and I can see how that happened. If “You Could Be Mine” is the best song Guns ‘N’ Roses ever made, “My World” is easily the worst.
For a long time, I’ve thought that there is about an album and a half of great material between the two Illusion records. If I had been producer Mike Clink, or president David Geffen of Geffen Records, I would have cut released the albums like so:
Use Your Illusion I:
Right Next Door to Hell
Dust n’ Bones
Perfect Crime
Bad Obsession
Double Talkin’ Jive
November Rain
The Garden
Don’t Damn Me
Bad Apples
Dead Horse
Coma
Use Your Illusion II:
Civil War
14 Years
Knockin’ On Heavens’ Door
Breakdown
Pretty Tied Up
Locomotive
Estranged
You Could Be Mine
Don’t Cry (alt lyrics)
Despite my version of I having 11 songs and II having 9 songs, both would come in at about the same play length of 58 minutes each. And both would be much, much stronger albums.
Do you agree with this retrospective? Are there songs I’ve unfairly dumped on, or overestimated? What, if anything, would you get rid of? Let me know in the comments, and rock on!
Kenton Kilgore writes killer SF/F for young adults and adults who are still young.
In his latest novel, This Wasted Land, high-school senior Alyx is lost and alone on a desolate world of monsters never before imagined. And if they don’t kill her, the witch who has her boyfriend will.
Kenton is the author of Lost Dogs, the story of the end of the world as seen, heard, and smelled by a dog. Stray Cats, the sequel, is coming soon: sign up here to get a free excerpt. He also wrote Dragontamer’s Daughters, like Little House on the Prairie…with dragons!
With Patrick Eibel, he created Our Wild Place, a children’s book about the joy to be found in exploring Nature. Kenton also published Hand-Selling Books to help authors better their sales.
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