Matt Sorum Remembers His Last Days With GnR 

He wasn't the original drummer for the band, but Matt Sorum was recording and touring with Axl and the boys for a lot of the height of GnR fame. Sorum joined the crew in 1990 just in time to help put together the Use Your Illusion albums. It was soon after the release of that epic double album that the band began to take a very dysfuntional turn.

"The very, very end of it was us trying to make this record [what would go on to become 'Chinese Democracy'] that came out 15, 16, 17 years later,” began Sorum. “There was a certain style of music that… Axl was always trying to push the envelope. Even with 'Use Your Illusion I' and 'II', we moved forward and people always go back to 'Appetite For Destruction'. But if you look at 'Use Your Illusion', it was more of an epic kind of undertaking. Axl, in his mind, would want it to be this epic, stadium, worldwide-renowned supergroup, and he looked at bands like Queen and Led Zeppelin and The Rolling Stones as, sort of, the benchmark for that. So we created these opuses, these epic numbers like 'November Rain', to really, sort of, become this bigger thing.”

“When we went into the next particular record,” he continued, “Axl really wanted to take it to another level, he wanted to experiment with electronics and stuff like that, and we were like, 'Oooh… Now we're getting into a little bit of a grey area.' He was really into Nine Inch Nails, and we were starting to get a little bit uncomfortable with the musical direction. And at that point, we had written a bunch of songs that were more like 'Appetite For Destruction' — stripped down, raw rock and roll; we almost wanted to go back to our roots. But Axl was really pushing to go someplace else. [He] was so obsessed with where the music was going.”

Watch the interview here to see what other insights Matt shares on a band that helped to shape rock music as we know it today. 

(Source)