I thought Merck perfected viral marketing.

We could just stroll into a BestBuy and find it in the bargain bin.

Like Axl surfs into a GNR fansite and finds out he's supposed to be touring.

Personally, I'd hope Azoff/Gould would bring in a little bit of mature leadership into this joke.

I left my spectacles over there.

What is the name of this town?

Axl consciously avoided doing UYI material, restricting himself to only the big soundtrack song, the big music video anthem and the two covers. The first two are probably the most memorable songs on the albums for Joe Q Public, as they were rammed down everyone's throat back in the day. When he mentioned he had 'emotional problems' as to performing the old material, he wasn't kidding. I'd wager all Izzy songs from the UYI's were automatically dropped from the equation due to their strained relationship at the time.

Narrow further down and weed out the songs with contributions by Slash and Duff and you'll end with The Garden, Dead Horse, Yesterdays, Shotgun Blues, Breakdown, Back Off Bitch and Estranged. As none of those songs was thrown in, it leads to the assumption that Axl, ultimately, didn't want to play the UYI material in the first place.

Also, as the live sound gives some idea of the original recordings, it's reasonable to assume that the '98 Think About You for instance has some wicked groovy piano in it, even though it comes without Bucket. We have SCOM (or at least half of it), and Robin's rendition of Slash's parts is fairly faithful, which leads me to think the amount of liberties in expression varied from song to song. The 'important' ones received special attention and were presumably done as if for a tribute album, but the lesser-known ones like TAY allowed the band to try themselves out and experiment more freely within the confines of that specific song.

A lot of reviews mentioned songs like ISO and TAY as the songs during which the band 'lit up' after the mandatory note-by-note WTTJ. And what would be more fun when doing cover versions than the ones you'd feel you'd be throwing in your own little twist?

From another thread:

That could be the master plan to have CD turn profit. If there's more than one album readied, an exclusive deal with Wal-Mart would cover the release and marketing of them all, alleviating pressure from Universal to further push the product in order to recoup their investments. With those numbers (as Universal owns the publishing rights), they'd require over 5 million units to be shipped for the CD sessions to turn profit. If Wal-Mart agrees to take the baton and push forth with the release, all Universal needs to do is to sit back and figure out when they'll turn even.

It's a terribly big deal to be negotiated, as Azoff has previously done it with acts that no longer have responsibilities to their erstwhile labels. The relationship GNR has had with Universal has been a clusterfuck for years, so Azoff needs to convince all involved that they'll get their money back. But I'm not surprised the negotiations have apparently taken a good part of the year as it is.

GNR, like all other bands of that stature, announce their dates around eight weeks in advance in order to properly promote the shows and capitalize on pre-sales. Therefore, I can't see any touring happening at the moment before mid-October at the earliest.

Frankly, I don't think they'll tour at all before the New Year, an album release or not. One-off performances like the VMA's are naturally a completely different ballgame.