Rick Dunsford leaked a trove of unreleased Guns N’ Roses music. Now he’s exiled for life

• How Rick Dunsford of Blue Mountain, Miss., went from a trusted fan to enemy of the band when he leaked 19 discs of unreleased music in 2019.

The striking, red-white-and-blue signs greeting visitors to Mississippi where interstates and major highways cross its border advertise the state’s musical legacy with a slogan welcoming them to “the birthplace of America’s music.”

Lately, though, the corner of the state that produced Hill Country blues legends like R.L. Burnside, “first lady of country music” Tammy Wynette, and Elvis Presley has become home to one of rock and roll’s most bizarre chapters in recent memory — one that pitted Blue Mountain resident Rick Dunsford against the biggest American rock band of the past four decades, Guns N’ Roses.

Dunsford, now 38 but a Guns N’ Roses fan since childhood, was living a fan’s dream throughout the 2010s. As a member of a core group of fans who haunted online GNR forums, obsessing over the band’s music, its revolving-door personnel changes, and the secretive machinations of its frontman, Axl Rose, he had worked his way into the inner circle of his favorite band by befriending crew members at concerts where he arrived early and staked his spot as close to the stage as he could.

“I was sitting in a pretty good position as a fan,” Dunsford tells Magnolia Tribune over a recent video call. “I had access to Axl Rose. I’d sit in Axl Rose’s dressing room while he’s in the shower, a door from him. If you’re liked by [management], that’s how you meet [him].”

Dunsford was also part of a smaller subset of super fans particularly fascinated with Chinese Democracy, the long-awaited follow-up to the band’s massive 1991 albums Use Your Illusion I and II. The saga of Chinese Democracy contains too many twists, turns and sidebars to adequately summarize this side of a hardcover book. But suffice to say the album, after nearly 15 years of starts and stops, and with a budget that eventually ballooned to $13 million, was finally released as a 14-song, single-disc affair in 2008.

By many reports, though, those 14 songs represented only a fraction of the tunes written and recorded during its long gestation. As producers, handlers and musicians came and went, countless numbers of demos and mixes of songs at various stages of development left with them. For example, it was common for the band to work on a song and burn a few reference copies for the musicians to take home at the conclusion of a recording session. By early 2001, former Geffen Records A&R man Tom Zutaut, who signed the band in 1986 and was briefly back in the band’s orbit, estimated more than 60 songs had been recorded.

Zutaut eventually stashed his collection of Gold and Platinum records and a trove of other ephemera from his music-biz days in a storage unit in Virginia, including 19 compact discs containing Guns N’ Roses songs that were recorded during the Chinese Democracy era but remained unreleased. And in March 2019, that unit went on the auction block after Zutaut failed to keep up rental payments.

Journalist David Peisner reported in exhaustive, fascinating detail what happened next for Rolling Stone, which published the story under the headline “The Search for Guns N’ Roses’ Lost Masterpiece” in December 2022. The short version is that Dunsford arranged a deal with the person who bought the unit’s contents to purchase the CDs for $15,000, an amount he cobbled together from friends, family and other GNR fans. Then, through a series of events Peisner unraveled in the article, Dunsford began leaking the songs online through a third party.

At this point, the story begins to reveal a cast of characters and enough subplots to fill a novel. Dunsford says he felt the leak was inevitable after discovering the person who sold him the CDs also sold copies to four other people. He also felt his actions were justified, as fans had waited 15 years for just 14 songs, while at least dozens more sat in a vault, and while fans like him continued to support the band by buying merchandise and concert tickets. For his trouble, he became persona non grata in the GNR camp, and his VIP passes were replaced with cease-and-desist letters from the band’s lawyers. 

“Whenever this first happened, I was kind of lost, because from 1999, I was fully invested in everything GNR,” he says. “I know everybody says they’re the biggest fan, but I took that one to heart,” he adds, echoing Rose’s parting shot on the Appetite For Destruction song “Out Ta Get Me” — ironically, a song written about being railroaded and falsely accused of wrongdoing.

As friends, family and neighbors were learning about Dunsford’s misadventures from TMZ in January 2020, the GNR fan community were siding with “management,” he says, and abandoning him. “I can’t go on the message boards anymore without being attacked. So, those message boards that have been a part of my life for 20 years, I no longer post on ’em or even log in.”

Although the band has forbidden him from attending future concerts — a stipulation he’s out-maneuvered at least once, he says, by attending the band’s August 2023 performance at Geodis Park in Nashville, his 36th GNR gig overall — and he is exiled from what he calls a “toxic fanbase and community,” Dunsford still keeps a torch lit for his favorite band.

“The fire that I have for this band is still not gone,” he says, as a recently purchased Funko Pop! figurine of Rose sits on a mantle above his right shoulder. “I still love this band. And if there’s a way I can get some more unreleased Chinese Democracy stuff, dude, I’m going to put together a team and I’m going to get it. If I find out who has it, I’ll get it.”