Thursday's show is the band's first Michigan appearance since the 2008 release of "Chinese Democracy," the long-delayed, much-mythologized album that aimed to return Guns N' Roses to its creative heights.
Whether it successfully captured the lightning-in-a-bottle magic of "Appetite for Destruction" or epic valor of "Use Your Illusion" remains a topic of fierce fan debate. But Stinson is a believer, and he has been lobbying for even more of the new songs in a 2 1/2-hour set that features several of them already.
"I think people have had time to sit with that music," he says. "Now I want to go out and play it."
Fourteen years in, Stinson is confident he's got a voice in GNR. There's a collaborative dynamic now that didn't exist when he joined, and he describes his relationship with Rose as one of mutual respect.
But when all is said and done, Stinson says, he knows who still calls the shots.
"If I feel something is a really terrible idea, or there's something good we're not getting to, I feel compelled to say something," he says. "But for the most part, Axl tells us what he wants, and it's: 'OK, cool. That's it. Make the dream real.' "
Stinson gets to stretch his artistic legs when he's not on the road with GNR or Soul Asylum, which took him aboard in 2006. Since the Replacements disbanded two decades ago, he's led the bands Perfect and Bash & Pop, and his second solo album -- "One Man Mutiny" -- was released to glowing reviews in August.
The Replacements' scruffy, spiky rock and GNR's ambitious glam-metal may seem to inhabit distinct corners of the pop-culture kingdom. When he joined Guns in '97, Stinson certainly raised a few eyebrows -- and Replacements main man Paul Westerberg publicly criticized his former bandmate.
"It didn't really occur to me to look at it in those terms," Stinson says. "The funny thing is, as I've talked to people over the years, it turns out there's not actually much of that cultural difference. There are a lot of people who are fans of both bands, which was striking, because it's the last thing I would have expected."
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