Lives his life like it's a coma and I don't think he wants ta...

Still pondering Guns'n'Roses Axl Rose's lack of productivity.  So I decided to look at how much the Rolling Stones have done.  It obviously wouldn't be fair to compare the two acts and not just because one is full of hard workers, so I've limited it to when the younger band formed, three and a half decades ago.

If you've been paying attention, I've already covered G'n'R's released work, 94 songs total.  That's everything, live covers, "Don't Cry" and "You're Crazy" each count as two songs, backing Alice Cooper on a movie soundtrack, an interview with Axl or Slash on the B-side of a single counts as a song although it's obviously not, the simplest guitar tracks from the re-release of Appetite.  And that gets 94 songs in their entire history.  

The Rolling Stones were basically ready to break up when G'n'R formed in 1985.  They were still able to record Dirty Work, an album of 11 songs but the singles only had album tracks on the B-side.

Three years later, they released Steel Wheels, an album with 12 songs and three B-sides.  This was when they had gotten back together, even getting G'n'R to open for them in a few concerts.  Obviously they had an advantage since they were an established band with a recording contract for several years already.

In 1991, they released a single, "Highwire" which was attached to their live album.  Three years after that, they released Voodoo Lounge, the album I started listening to them at.  I'd heard and liked the singles on the radio before that, but this was my first Stones album and is still my favorite.  I saw them on that tour too.  It had 15 tracks along with four non-album B-sides.  A year later they released a live album which included their cover of "Like a Rolling Stone," a song they still play to this day.  I saw them do it in 2019 and it was awesome.  They also released a live video which had another cover song.

By this point G'n'R had released their last new song with Slash and Duff.  They'd done five of the six albums that exist under the G'n'R name.  69 of the 94 songs they'd ever release had already come out and there would only be fifteen more new songs up through today.  The rest would be live covers or recordings that had already been made by then

The Stones were definitely past their most productive era but at least they occasionally showed up to work.  In 1997, they released Bridges to Babylon, an album with 13 songs and one non-album B-side.  The same year, they did a song with B.B. King on his new album and there was another cover song on a live album.  That's 62 songs so far from a band who didn't need to make music.  Mick and Keith both turned 54 years old in 1997, they must have needed to take a rest.  Charlie's even older, he was born two years before them.  Ronnie is the young guy, he was born in 1947 and only turned 50 that year.

The Rolling Stones celebrated their 50th anniversary in 2002, releasing a greatest hits album that included four new studio tracks.  The following year, they released a live video which included four live covers and the year after that they released a live album which included another two live covers.

Then in 2005, they released A Bigger Bang with 16 new songs.  There were no non-album B-sides but two bonus tracks were included on a special edition which I didn't know existed until just now and I want to buy them.  There was a live video with another cover song and they released a new song for charity as part of the Hurricane Katrina fund.

And with that, they'd released 94 separate songs in less than 20 years, the same number as G'n'R.  Well, not Slash and Duff and whoever else has been part of the band, just the guy in charge.  There are times Axl has appeared on someone else's album.  You can basically count them on one hand but they do exist.  However they're not called "Guns'n'Roses" and he's the guy saying that the name matters so whatcha gonna do?

In 2007, the Stones appeared on an AC-DC live album doing a cover with them.  There was also another live video with five more covers and the following year had a live album with a cover.  101 songs released between G'n'R's formation and the release of Chinese Democracy.  You can complain about the covers but they also had a lot more originals from this era and some like "Jumping Jack Flash" are counted in the list of G'n'R songs.  But Axl's the "ARTISTE"???

In the last decade, the Stones haven't released very many songs, original or covers, but obviously they still beat G'n'R because work is work.  In 2011, they did a song for an Ian Stewart tribute.  Their former keyboard player had died in 1985 without ever knowing G'n'R existed.  In 2012, they had another greatest hits album which added two more songs, one of which you might have heard in Avengers:  Endgame.  In 2016 they released their last album so-far, 12 covers they recorded over a couple days.  They've said for years that a new album is being recorded but there's no sign of that happening, except for the one song released last year, "Living In A Ghost Town."

Right there they've reached 117 songs released during G'n'R's existence, even if you ignore everything they did before that.  Actually it's 119 because in the last several years, they've released two live albums which include one cover each and were recorded in 1994-5, back when Slash and Duff were actively working on the next G'n'R album.

But there's still more.  There are bands who are not like G'n'R who record songs that they don't feel like releasing immediately, but they do eventually let the public hear them.  In the last decade, the Rolling Stones have re-released Exile on Main Street, Some Girls and Goats Head Soup with a total of 24 recorded songs that had never been heard before.  You know, sort of what Axl was promising to do with Chinese Democracy for the last twenty years.  The difference is that the Stones are capable of doing something, G'n'R isn't when Axl is in charge and he's always been in charge.  I have no idea why they didn't release the song "Scarlet" with Jimmy Page on the actual album, maybe he wasn't famous enough.  Who would buy a song with Page on it in 1973?  There's also one with Eric Clapton but I haven't counted it because it's just an alternate take of a song we've already heard.

But it's still not all, another six releases have live versions or demo tracks of 15 more covers done in the 1960s or 1970s.  So if we count this old material that the band had never under any circumstances insisted we'd hear, "soon is the word," that brings the total up to 158 songs.  Not counting their solo work.  Not counting their appearances on other people's albums.  Nothing but the Rolling Stones playing a song we haven't already heard from the Rolling Stones and they were very very rich and famous before a group of drug-users in LA ever met.

To the best of my counting, in the years since 1985 when G'n'R formed, the Stones have released six studio albums, six live albums, six compilation albums and fifteen boxed sets which aren't simply updated versions of previous releases.  Then there's another twenty official bootlegs and thirty-seven video releases, alot of which were flat-out made after 1985.  It is iffy to determine which ones those were, but the sheer effort required maintains the band's legacy far more than anything Axl pretends to do.  Where would the Rolling Stones be today if they had his work ethic?