Guns N’ Roses: the day rock came in two volumes

On September 17, 1991, Guns N’ Roses did something that was almost unthinkable in the age of vinyl, cassette tapes and CDs: instead of releasing one album…they released two!

Use Your Illusion I and Use Your Illusion II arrived in record stores on exactly the same day, transforming what should have been a difficult follow-up to Appetite for Destruction into one of the most ambitious releases in rock history.
The decision made sense in a way: Guns N’ Roses had accumulated an enormous amount of material, and the band was no longer simply the dangerous young group that had exploded out of Los Angeles a few years earlier, but they had become a global phenomenon, and Axl Rose, Slash, Duff McKagan, Izzy Stradlin and the rest of the band were working on music that stretched far beyond the raw hard-rock attack of their debut.

The recordings had taken shape during 1990, with sessions running through November at several Los Angeles-area studios.
By then, the group itself was already changing.
Keyboardist Dizzy Reed joined the lineup, while Matt Sorum replaced Steven Adler on drums.
The latter had played on “Civil War”, but the song ultimately became the last Guns N’ Roses recording to feature him.
Matt Sorum’s arrival would become one of the defining changes in the band’s history.
The result was enormous: 30 songs across the two albums, with a combined running time of more than two and a half hours.

And the musical range was just as large.
Use Your Illusion I opened with the aggressive “Right Next Door to Hell” and moved through “Dust N’ Bones”, “Live and Let Die”, “Don’t Cry”, “Perfect Crime”, “Bad Obsession” and “Coma”. At its centre was “November Rain”, Axl Rose’s grand piano-driven epic, complete with one of Slash’s most famous guitar performances.

The second volume was equally diverse. “Civil War”, “14 Years”, “Yesterdays”, “Knockin’ on Heaven’s Door”, “You Could Be Mine”, “Locomotive” and “Estranged” showed a band willing to move between hard rock, blues, balladry and sprawling compositions without worrying too much about radio-friendly formulas.

Some of the material was not even new in origin. Songs such as “Back Off Bitch”, “Dead Horse” and “November Rain” had existed in various forms for years before finally finding their place on the Illusion records.
Slash later recalled that the essential guitar melodies of “November Rain” were already there when he and Axl first worked on the song.
There were also some remarkable collaborations. Alice Cooper appeared on “The Garden”, while the albums included ambitious covers of Paul McCartney and Wings’ “Live and Let Die” and Bob Dylan’s “Knockin’ on Heaven’s Door”.
The latter became one of the most recognisable live staples in the Guns N’ Roses catalogue.

The choice to release two albums simultaneously was not merely a statement of excess. It also reflected the extraordinary amount of material the band had accumulated.
Instead of cutting the project down to a conventional single album, Guns N’ Roses turned the sheer scale of the sessions into part of the event.
The commercial response was immediate.
In the United States, Use Your Illusion II debuted at No. 1 on the Billboard 200, while Use Your Illusion I entered at No. 2. According to contemporary industry figures, the two albums sold approximately 770,000 and 685,000 copies respectively during their first week in the US. They also entered the charts at No. 1 and No. 2 in Britain, Australia and Japan.

But perhaps the most extraordinary part of the story was that the albums were already being promoted on the road before they were released.
The Use Your Illusion Tour had begun in 1991 and would eventually become one of the longest and most notorious tours of the era, running until 1993 and taking Guns N’ Roses across the world. It was a gigantic production, but also an increasingly chaotic one, marked by late starts, cancellations, controversy and the kind of unpredictable behaviour that had become inseparable from the band’s reputation.
The singles and videos turned the albums into an even bigger cultural event. “Don’t Cry”, “November Rain” and “Estranged” were not simply rock songs accompanied by conventional promotional clips: they were elaborate productions that helped establish a cinematic side of Guns N’ Roses.

“November Rain” in particular became a phenomenon.
At nearly nine minutes, it reached No. 3 on the Billboard Hot 100, an extraordinary achievement for such a long and unconventional hard-rock song. It also became one of the defining music videos of the early 1990s.
The timing was also significant.
1991 was the year in which alternative rock was beginning to reshape the musical landscape, while the old glam-metal establishment was losing some of its dominance. Guns N’ Roses stood somewhere between worlds: too raw and confrontational to fit comfortably into polished hair metal, but too enormous to be considered simply an underground hard-rock band.

Use Your Illusion I and II captured that contradiction perfectly.

They were excessive, ambitious, sometimes messy, occasionally theatrical and full of ideas. There were furious three-minute attacks sitting next to eight-minute epics, acoustic pieces beside orchestral arrangements, and songs that sounded as if they belonged to completely different bands.
And perhaps that is precisely why the two albums remain so important.
They were not simply the follow-up to Appetite for Destruction. They were the moment Guns N’ Roses decided that being the biggest rock band in the world was not enough — they wanted to make the biggest possible record, even if it required two of them.

And now, thirty-five years later, September 17, 1991 remains one of those dates when the history of rock can be divided into a before and an after!