The Use Your Illusion albums were huge when they came out. They were like the THE rock releases of the fall of 1991. That said, very shortly afterward Nevermind became super-popular and ushered in an era when anything even remotely associated with glam metal was seen as dumb and irrelevant, which definitely affected the reputation of the UYI albums.

It also didn't help that there was so much band infighting during the '92 tour they did with Metallica. After that, they didn't even bother recording new studio material, and instead released The Spaghetti Incident, a covers album that's barely even remembered. Then most of the original lineup left in the coming years, turning it into the Axl Rose show that it's been for the past twenty years.

It's amazing the artistic and financial goldmine that this band has passed up over the course of the past three decades because they couldn't get along with each other. Just imagine if they managed to work all their problems out and were on their tenth album by now. They could've become like U2, still releasing massively successful albums and embarking on high grossing tours.

Neither getting along nor releasing a real album instead of The Spaghetti Incident? would have mattered. Anything remotely associated with glam metal was as uncool as uncool could be by 1993 and there was no chance that G'n'R would have been able able to repeat past successes or attract new fans.

In that case we should be thankful that Chinese Democracy took so long and that the world was spared up to that point.

Now if only U2 had spent 23 years making Zooropa...

here is how i feel about this reunion..

Axl can't even sing anymore.

Yup. One shot and done.

When's the last time you heard him sing? I heard him 2 years ago in Orlando, at a smaller venue when they did a warm-up gig for the European Tour, and he sounded no better, no worse than when I saw them back in ~1990 in a stadium. I bootlegged the show and it sounds fantastic, Axl's vocals included. Let's face it, Axl was never a premier vocalist to begin with, he had a particular howl that worked with the energy of the songs. There are very, very few rock singers who can still maintain and perform all the same notes they hit in their younger days when they are approaching middle age, and even fewer who can do it when 60 and up. So many people base their comments on Axls voice from one particular bad performance, on the MTV video awards almost a decade ago, where he got a lot of attention because he was out of shape, in dreads and sounded gassed a minute into the song. He didn't sound that way in Orlando, matter of fact, he was spittin' fire the whole night- 3 hours worth. Only time I heard his voice waiver was at the very beginning of November Rain, when he sat down at the piano after two particular heavy songs.

He couldn't sing to begin with, so I imagine that that fact remains.

A lot of people were seduced by the uber screech thing he was doing back then. I always thought him the weakest link in the band but he ended up making it work - for a while.

Now that his voice is shot it'll be interesting to see how it plays out.