I have avidly and almost tensely read "The Most Expensive Album Never Made" in The New York Times of today. It is, primarily, a passionate and vivid chronicle of how Axl Rose has spent $13 million so far given to him by record companies to deliver his "Chinese Democracy" new album with Guns N' Roses and, after 11 years on the making, there is no music (published).
One can read this article as a story on rock music and its well-known excess and failures (and triumphs, too), or as a typical cautionary tale on the rise and fall of rock stars (and other fields stars). I couldn't help but being drawn to it, having been a great fan of Guns N' Roses in my stupid-and-rebel teens and a follower of those "Whatever Happened to Mr. Once-Famous Now Forgotten", but also for being the article a highly addictive piece on human behavior, personal failure, dry minds and generously-fund patronage. A parallel with the high arts is inevitable.
Hours later, I kept thinking about the piece. 13 million dollars! If James Turrell would have been given that amount of money long ago, we would have Roden Crater now, opened for our amazement and inspiration. That the world is poorly, badly sadly and unfairly distributed, we all know, and this kind of (stupid) waste of precious money in a singer that cannot escape its own mental and physical trap ("I have traversed a treacherous sea of horrors to be with you here tonight", Axl said in his first-in-seven-years gig in Las Vegas 2002) and needs 11 years and counting to produce a bunch of silly hard rock tunes makes me sad. Roden Crater is a much wiser inversion, but you tell that to the Los Angeles industry of entertainment and spiritual vacuity.
Has anybody complain about these dollars being thrown in the culvert? Where are those Christo and Jeanne-Claude bashers shouting "Axl Rose, feed the hungry"?
Nevertheless, the article is fascinating and captivating- a devastating account of how a whole world is watching over an anguished and overwhelmed creative mind that seems to be battling more than the blank paper syndrome. Psychiatric and psychoanalitic types abound in Axl Rose's inner world; the side-stories originated by his virtuoso guitar-player Buckethead are priceless and widely amusing: he wears a "mannequin-like face mask and a KFC bucket on his head". He seems to be the king of rock star eccentricities, or an outright freak- first he was about to quit Guns N' Roses, so Axl Rose accompanied him on an excursion to Disneyland. Then, he thought "he would be more comfortable working inside a chicken coop, so one was built for him in the studio, from wood planks and chicken wire".
Geffen (the Pollock and Jasper Johns collector, the patron of the arts, name-giver to a branch of the Museum of Contemporary Art Los Angeles) investing money in these characters. Amazing how VH1 didn't produce a reality show of off it. It is so very American.
More than one person will dismiss this New York Times article for being a music story on the Guns N' Roses. But, as with almost all in life, it can and should be read beyond the topic- it is a tale with a moral, and an intriguing look inside a tormented creative mind assaulted by ghosts and invisible forces. He has it all and he is unable to give anything. So many have ideas and not a single penny to show them to the world.
