Sweet Child O'Mine

MTV's 30th Anniversary and the Top Five Videos
Jared Feldman

MTV is turning 30.

Remember back in the day when they actually played music videos? MTV launched on Aug. 1 at 12:01 a.m. in 1981. The first video ever aired was the Buggles "Video Killed the Radio Star." MTV plans to commemorate the moment by replaying the first hour in MTV history at 6 a.m.

MTV was a pioneering network for music videos. For me music videos are a nice addition but the music needs to be good. A good video simply enhances an already good song. A bad video finds a way to detract. Here are my top five videos, in no particular order, to air on MTV.

Sweet Child O'Mine, Guns n' Roses, 1988

I really appreciate the simplicity of the Sweet Child O'Mine video. It features a number of great shots of the band performing and I'm glad they focus just on Slash's guitar during the solo. Seeing the speed and precision that he has on the guitar is something you can't get just listening to the song. It's the perfect way to emphasize the level of talent the band has. The video gets a little unnecessarily manic towards the end but it in no way takes away from the song and video as a whole.

Closer, Nine Inch Nails, 1994

Trent Reznor is a crazy person, but he somehow makes it work. The shot of the heart beating the chair is somehow one of the more perfect images for a music video. Despite the video appearing to be something in a drug hallucination, it all fits with the music. If someone asked what the Closer music video should be, the chaos on screen is. It would be impossible to imagine and yet makes total sense.

Smells Like Teen Spirit, Nirvana, 1990

It certainly helps that this my favorite song of the 90's, but the music video does the song justice. Performing in a busted down gym is grunge. The video wouldn't make sense if it resembled present day rap videos. Instead, performing in front of a small crowd on a basketball court is highly appropriate. The video addresses those addressed in the song too. Dejected youth are given a bit of relief in this video.

Walk This Way, Aerosmith with Run DMC, 1986

As this was one of the first Rap/Rock collaborations is perfect that the video begins as both groups complain to each other. Aerosmith and Run DMC found a way mash their two divergent styles together, and the video pairs them appropriately. Performing on opposite sides of the wall and then breaking through and performing together at the end underscores the magnitude of the song.

Thriller, Michael Jackson, 1983

I'd prefer to refer to this as a music film rather than video. The fact that it was released in theaters as an opportunity to garner Oscar support is further proof. It's also nearly fourteen minutes long and a takes a long time to actually get into the song. It's a ground breaking video and the song thriller is only a small piece of the video. The song is fantastic, and there would not be a music video without it. It is arguably the greatest music video of all time.

“Sweet Child O’ Mine” marked a turning point for Guns N’ Roses

In We’re No. 1, The A.V. Club examines a song that went to No. 1 on the Billboard charts to get to the heart of what it means to be popular in pop music, and how that concept has changed over the years. In this installment, we cover Guns N’ Roses’ “Sweet Child O’ Mine,” which went to No. 1 on the Billboard Hot 100 on September 10, 1988.

Guns N’ Roses has reunited. It took singer Axl Rose, guitarist Slash, and bassist Duff McKagan 23 years to set aside their differences and play together again, but thankfully, it happened now, when rock needs the band more than ever. As rock ’n’ roll sinks in favor of stadium-ready pop acts like Taylor Swift, GN’R is a reminder of when metal accounted for 40 percent of rock music sales, and when MTV had the cultural cachet to create rock stars. In 1991, GN’R guitarist Slash described the recording industry as a “big erect monster,” at a time when loveless sex, cocaine mirrors, and flashy guitar solos were rites of passage.

A few years earlier, at the beginning of 1988, Guns N’Roses was fighting for critical respect amid tons of controversy. U.K. rock magazine Kerrang! had recently labeled GN’R “the most dangerous band in the world.” Around the same time, the band had destroyed the set of MTV’s Headbangers Ball, while doped-up guitarist Slash had partied with Mötley Crüe bassist Nikki Sixx the night he overdosed and was declared dead. In an era of MTV-friendly bad boys selling the gimmick, GN’R was no act: The band was the real deal, like a prizefighter with nothing to lose.

GN’R’s debut Appetite For Destruction eventually broke into the Billboard Top 10 that April. But GN’R’s dangerous appeal made the band hard to sell to the mainstream, where shiny pop stars like Michael Jackson and Prince were the flavor of the day. MTV refused to play the video for the single “Welcome To The Jungle,” which depicted Axl Rose in a straitjacket, shaking uncontrollably to footage of war and bikini-clad bombshells. After a phone call from label head David Geffen, MTV finally agreed to play the video. “Welcome To The Jungle” then lit up MTV’s call-in boards, making GN’R popular overnight. But the video’s violent imagery, along with Axl Rose’s eyeliner and blow-dried hair, didn’t have the crossover appeal necessary to transport GN’R from its hair-metal roots into the mainstream.

A different track off Appetite For Destruction had the romantic overtones to soften GN’R’s image, and expand its audience from metalheads to mainstream America. With GN’R on tour with Iron Maiden in the summer of ’88, Geffen released “Sweet Child O’ Mine,” a ballad that everyone in the band thought was too sappy, except for Rose. He orchestrated its evolution from Slash’s calliope-like intro—which the guitarist described as a “stupid little riff,” a way of loosening up his fingers—into GN’R’s magnum opus.

Geffen saw dollar signs in “Sweet Child.” It was the uptempo ballad the label needed to promote GN’R’s new image to MTV’s gun-shy executives, and secure heavy radio rotation. Rock bands through the decades have tapped into the mainstream with ballads, like Journey with “Open Arms,” and KISS with the orchestral “Beth.” GN’R was no different, except that “Sweet Child” was never written to bridge the gap, or to attract a female following like Poison’s “Every Rose Has Its Thorn.” Had it not been for a half-finished poem Axl was writing for then-girlfriend Erin Everly, and his own shaman-like sense of destiny, “Sweet Child” may never have developed into a hit. “I had written this poem, reached a dead end with it and put it on the shelf,” Axl stated in a press release at the time. “Then Slash and Izzy got working together on songs and I came in, Izzy hit a rhythm, and all of a sudden this poem popped into my head.”

Rose saw something in “Sweet Child,” so to give it that “heartfelt” feeling missing from so many rock ballads in those days, he went back to his collection of Lynyrd Skynyrd tapes and studied them for their Southern soul. Those roots would be the song’s secret weapon. To chords constructed by guitarist Izzy Stradlin, and bassist Duff McKagan’s hummable bassline on the intro, Slash added four guitar solos (including the intro) and the song’s most melancholic minute of tension. Slash’s final solo slithers into a coda where Rose says, “Where do we go? / Where do we go now?” a memorable section added during the recording process, when the singer asked producer Spencer Proffer: “Where do we go?”

The label cut the six-minute ballad down to four minutes and released it as a radio-friendly single in August 1988. Rose was infuriated when he heard the radio version, as was Slash, who saw his masterful guitar work edited down. Following a music video that showed the band practicing in a ballroom surrounded by their girlfriends, “Sweet Child” began to climb Billboard’s Hot 100. By August 6, Appetite For Destruction had made it to No. 1 on the Billboard 200 after 50 weeks of working the charts.

“You should have seen the fucking difference [in crowd reaction] before, and after, that single came out” bassist Duff McKagan stated in Stephen Davis’ Watch You Bleed: The Saga Of Guns N’ Roses. “Before, only the people in front even knew who we were. They came to see us because they were our fans, all two dozen of them. Afterward, when [we played “Sweet Child”] everybody was on their feet with their cigarette lighters switched on. It was amazing, night and day. It happened that quickly.”

Because of its balance of sweet sentiment with hard rock, “Sweet Child” became GN’R’s most accessible song, the breakout single, whereas “Welcome To The Jungle” was its primal entrance song. On September 10, 1988, “Sweet Child” became No. 1 on the Billboard Hot 100, only days after the 1988 MTV VMAs and heavy rotation of the video on the network. At the VMAs that year, Rose ended the band’s performance of “Welcome To The Jungle” with his eyes closed, raising his arms to the sky like a pastor and staring into the lights as if he’d had a religious experience.

“Sweet Child” transformed Axl Rose into the hard-rock Frank Sinatra: A moody showman crooner driven by paranoia, a mafia-like need for control, and an unwillingness to comprise. It also made it clear that Rose wasn’t playing the part of a romantic, as it showcased his attempt to write what he described as his only “positive love song.” It hinted at childhood trauma Rose experienced growing up in Lafayette, Indiana. He references his mother in the duality of the song’s second verse: “Her hair reminds me of a warm safe place, where as a child I’d hide. And pray for the thunder and the rain, to quietly pass me by.” It made the rock monster in him seem more human and less Dionysus. Due to its poetry and touch of Southern boogie, “Sweet Child” attracted a following that kept it on the Hot 100 for 24 weeks, and spent two weeks at No. 1 looking down at the ridiculous bombast of Huey Lewis, George Michael, and Van Halen. It would be GN’R’s first (and last) time at No. 1.

In the years to come, Slash’s guitar intro would go on to become one of the most recognized riffs in rock. For the rest of the band, August 1988 was Guns N’ Roses’ apex. In 1989, “Sweet Child” garnered GN’R the VMA for “Best Rock Video,” and “Favorite Pop/Rock Single” at the AMAs. “The most important band of 1988 was Guns N’ Roses,” said Kurt Loder in an MTV News 1989 broadcast. “Their songs actually had something to say. Poetically in some cases.”

“Sweet Child” would reappear over the years in covers by Sheryl Crow and Carrie Underwood, movies like The Wrestler, and countless rock ’n’ roll wedding receptions. Its resonance stems from a period when metal and hard-rock ballads were often overly epic, slow-motion anthems that lacked the soul to connect with non-metalheads. But it’s a song that you’re not likely to find on a Monster Ballads comp, because it’s not the schlocky byproduct of a professional songwriting crew. So “Sweet Child” shows Axl Rose at the height of his songwriting powers, resulting in a song that changed the destiny of the band forever.

Dick also remembers that Axl's Sunset Strip-style bling nearly encumbered an otherwise classic performance. "[Rose] did this thing halfway through the song where he took his leather jacket off. He said, 'Is this cool?' and I said, 'Yeah, as long as you try and remember and do it the same way every time.' Well, we never got beyond halfway through the song for the first five, six takes, because he had so much metalwork around his wrists that the jacket kept getting caught on the metal stuff, and I remember this one shot of him like a windmill, just flailing his arm, and I'm thinking, 'Oh my God, he's going to get pissed off, he's going to leave the set,' which he didn't, thank God."

The Story Behind The Song - Guns N' Roses "Sweet Child O' Mine"

ROCK'N'ROLL HAS sucked a big fucking dick since the Sex Pistols," sneered Guns N' Roses guitarist Izzy Stradlin in March 1987. Luckily, his band were there to save it. Touted as rock's next big thing, their snotty debut EP 1986's Live ?! *@ Like A Suicide, had served notice of their antagonistic intent. But it would be the following year's riotous debut album, Appetite For Destruction, that turned them into superstars. At the heart of it was their secret weapon: an unexpectedly touching ballad called Sweet Child O' Mine that revealed a sensitive side to the band's volatile singer, Axl Rose, and gave Guns N' Roses their first-and only US Number 1 single.

WRITING

In early 1986, Guns N' Roses were the most notorious upstarts on Los Angeles' rock scene, based around the city's notoriously sleazy Sunset Strip. Their lives revolved around drink, hard drugs and bedding as many groupies as possible. The centre of operations: a crumbling two-storey Hollywood condo nicknamed "The Hellhouse".

'A lot of crabs were transferred in that place," recalls guitarist Slash. "It was a place where the whole sleaziness of the band could fester."

Impressed by their explosive live shows, Geffen signed GN'R in March 1986. The first thing the band's new paymasters did was move them out at The Hellhouse and into an unfurnished house in the upmarket Griffith Park neighbourhood to focus on writing and rehearsing songs for their debut album. It was here, in the summer of 1986, that the seeds of Sweet Child O' Mine were planted.

"I was fucking around with this stupid little riff," says Slash. 'Axl said, Hold the fucking phones! That's amazing!"

Within five minutes, the band had worked Slash's cyclical riff into the bare bones of a song. Fleshing it out wasn't so easy.

"Writing and rehearsing it to make it a complete song was like pulling teeth," says Slash. "For me, at the time, it was a very sappy ballad."

Axl Rose felt differently. He supplied uncharacteristically intimate lyrics based on a poem he had written for his then girlfriend, Erin Everly, daughter of '60s pop icon Don Everly. To get the right sound, he went back to an unlikely source: unfashionable '70s longhairs Lynyrd Skynyrd, the hard-drinking Southern redneck rockers decimated by a plane crash in 1977 that killed singer Ronnie Van Zant and two other band members.

"I'm from Indiana, where Lynyrd Skynyrd are considered God to the point that you ended up saying, I hate this fucking band!" said Rose in 1987. "And yet for Sweet Child... I went out and got some old Skynyrd tapes to make sure that we'd got that heartfelt feeling."

While Rose was adamant about the song's potential, his bandmates were less convinced.

"It was like a joke," says bassist Duff McKagan. "We thought, What is this song? Its gonna be nothing."

RECORDING

Guns N' Roses entered Rumbo Studios in Los Angeles in August 1986 to begin work on Appetite For Destruction. The man picked to produce the album was Mike Clink, a veteran studio hand whose most famous credit was Survivor's 1982 soft-rock classic Eye Of The Tiger. Clink was undaunted by the band's reputation for debauchery.

"I went to their house," he recalls. "It looked like somebody had decided to do some remodelling and had knocked down the walls."

A firm taskmaster, Clink introduced a rule: no drugs in the studio.

"He kept us at arm's length," confirms Slash. "We partied really hard, but when we were in the studio, we were pretty much together. There was no doping and all that stuff."

Fuelled by nothing stronger than cigarettes and Jack Daniel's, the band knuckled down to work on the album. With Clink determined to "capture the band's essence, not beat it into the ground", most tracks were recorded in just a few takes.

"Sweet Child O' Mine was easy to record, apart from the guitar intro," says Slash. "It took me all afternoon to time it out and be at the right place when the drums came in."

When the track was finished, Mike Clink was certain they had something special.

"That song made the hairs on my arms stand up," he says. "It was magical."

A few weeks later, the album was mixed by pop producers Steve Thompson and Michael Barbiero, who had previously worked with Whitney Houston and Simply Red.

"Sweet Child O' Mine sounded like a hit to all of us," recalls Barbiero. "So much so that I remember Axl asking me when we were finished if I thought the album would actually sell. I told him that, despite the fact that it was nothing like what was on the radio, I thought it would go gold. I was only off by 20 million records."

EPILOGUE

Sweet Child O' Mine was released as a single in August 1988. It reached Number 1 in the US Billboard charts the following month, sparking interest in Appetite For Destruction. By the end of the year, the album had sold three million copies worldwide, transforming Guns N' Roses from a cult rock band to a mainstream phenomenon. It has sold more than 20 million copies to date.

Axl Rose married Erin Everly in April 1990 at Cupid's Wedding Chapel in Las Vegas. The volatile marriage was annulled less than a year later, though the song Rose wrote for Everly was built to last. Even Slash came round to liking t in the end.

"I hated it for years," he says. "But it would cause such a reaction - just playing the first stupid notes used to evoke this hysteria - so I've finally gotten to appreciate it."

SLEEVE NOTES

Written by: Axl Rose, Slash, Izzy Stradlin, Duff McKagan, Steven Adler
Performers: Rose (vocals), Slash (guitar), Stradlin (guitar), McKagan (bass), Adler (drums)
Recorded at: Rumbo Studios, Los Angeles, August 1986
Producer: Mike Clink
Released: August 1988 and June 1989
Highest UK chart placing: 6 (in 1989)
Available on: Appetite For Destruction (Geffen, 1987)

GUNS N' ROSES
SWEET CHILD O' MINE

Everyone has their favourite Guns N' Roses story. How about the time the band's manager ordered Izzy to get rid of all his drugs before going through customs? He did, and spent 36 hours in a coma. How about when the band broke down in the desert and had to hitchhike all the way to Seattle to play a gig in front of ten people? Remember the St Louis riot sparked by Axl assaulting a guy in the audience? Or the countless yarns of drug excess and reckless behaviour? If the Gunners are short of something it's not tales of rock ’n’ roll abandon.

Years later and the dust that GN’R so belligerently kicked up still hasn't seemed to have settled. For many critics it remains easier to knock the band for their Spinal Tap-esque calamity prone nature than praise them for their musical achievements. It's unfair, but pop culture is notoriously matricidal; it builds up and creates its heroes then joins in as they’re shot down in flames. But whatever the pundits have to say, Guns N’ Roses’ lasting appeal has seen the album Appetite For Destruction rise above the headlines to become considered a classic rock record, as relevant as Aerosmith’s Toys In The Attic, Metallica’s ‘Black’ album or The Cult’s Electric.

FATAL ATTRACTION

Formed from a background of broken LA bands in 1985, GN’R rapidly became a premier attraction on the Southern California club scene, where they were known as a fiercely uncompromising and aggressive rock band. A contagious concoction of’70s hard rock, punk attitude and ’60s debauchery, they drew their musical influences from Aerosmith, Cheap Trick, the Stones and the Pistols and their visual identity and verve from the New York Dolls. They were way beyond the likes of Poison, Ratt and Warrant - a return to the real wayward style of rock ’n’ roll.

Guns N’ Roses were always larger than life. There was the manic ginger singer, the Keef-fixated rhythm guitar player, the permanently dazed drummer, a lead guitarist who looked like Cousin It and a bass player who openly acknowledged he was Duff.

With their first full-length release, GN’R painted LA life as they saw it; violent, drug-addled, sick, decaying and full of meaningless, empty relationships. That such a tender ballad should have a place on an album of outright paranoia (Out To Get Me), foreboding tales of addiction (Mr Brownstone) and teenage delinquency (My Michelle) in itself seems remarkable. But Sweet Child O’ Mine is a killer track that hinted at Guns N’ Roses potential as radio hit-makers without compromising their hard-rock credentials. An overdriven love-letter to those we left behind, Sweet Child O’ Mine is the brooding calm in the balls-to-the-wall extravaganza that is Appetite For Destruction.

DAZE IN THE GARDEN

The song was written in the early days of GN’ R in the so-called ‘Garden’, a tiny room where the band played, wrote, slept and played some more. “It was this little studio that the whole band kind of moved into,” rhythm guitarist Izzy Stradlin recalled. “We would sit in there for endless nights playing whatever guitar was around.” And that’s pretty much how Sweet Child... came about, stories that have since now mutated into pop folklore recount how Slash was picking out the intro riff, Izzy clanged out some chords and Axl started singing off the top of his head. It was an obvious choice for the album, though ironically Slash was initially concerned at its inclusion. He needn’t have been.

Sweet Child O’ Mine is epic guitar rock, boasting not one, but two memorable guitar hooks, killer rhythm chops and a lead break that stands alongside Eddie Van Halen’s monumental Beat It outing as contender for best rock solo of the ’80s. Building from the clear, belllike pedal-tone intro, Slash and Izzy turn in a command performance of rock guitar culminating in that awesome lead.

Slash adapts his gutsy, driving style into some astonishingly fine melodic and pentatonic soloing, the ripe of playing he later galvanised on the ‘other’ GN'R classic ballad, November Rain.

With his Peter Baranet Les Paul flametop and a vintage Marshall 100W head, Slash’s licks evoke his heroes: Joe Perry, Jimmy Page, Michael Schenker and Jimi Hendrix. “My style is a bit old-fashioned,” he explained. “The only thing I like about my guitar playing is that even though it’s sort of old-fashioned and not complicated, it does have emotion to it.”

And maybe that was why Slash’s back-to-basics approach was so refreshing. While he could blow with the best of them (check out the outro on Paradise City!), he consciously avoided joining the guitar battles of speed and technique being fought out by long-forgotten wonders like Ratt’s Warren DeMartini and White Lion’s Vito Bratta. “I’m not a technical musician at all,” he asserted sometime after Appetite’s release. “I can sit on one note forever. I'm just trying to express myself as well as I can within the context of the song.”

Regardless of his self-effacing comments, Slash’s playing on Sweet Child... has come to epitomise his approach of tone, melody and blazing chops when they’re needed.

And despite the guitarists initial concerns, Sweet Child O' Mine became the song that really made his band, after initial sales of Appetite... had failed to push the record into the Billboard Top 100. When it was finally released as a single (in radio-friendly edited form) in June ’88 it shot straight to Number One in the US, and helped Appetite For Destruction reach the same lofty heights and remain in the charts for three years. To date Appetite... has shifted over 15 million copies and remains one of the biggest selling debuts ever.

So if you can see past the hype and the headlines, then you’ll probably see why Guns N’ Roses were once heralded as ‘The Most Dangerous Rock ’N’ Roll Band In The World’. Because when they were at their best, no-one else even came close.

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Sweet Child O’ Mine
GUNS N’ ROSES

Guns N' Roses's debut, Appetite For Destruction, moulded '80s rock. Armed with a Les Paul, RICHARD BARRETT tabs their hit, Sweet Child O' Mine, while JASON SID WELL talks tech...

Sweet Child Of Mine was originally played in the tuning of Eb. Basically this is standard E tuning (low to high: E A D G B E) dropped a semitone (low to high: Eb Ab Db Gb Bb Eb). Favoured by many rock guitarists, it creates a looser string tension which makes vibrato and string bending easier. It also lowers the high notes for singers! However to make life easier, we’ve opted to use the more conventional (and reader friendly) standard E tuning.

THE INTRO

The intros high single note idea is a popular music shop lick - especially when trying out a Les Paul into a Marshall set up. Although it may look quite tricky (and it did take Slash many attempts before getting the best take in the studio), it’s actually based around the common D major chord shape found in the open position (ie using an open string and several fretted notes).

Using string skips to create large intervals and adding notes around this shape to fit the accompanying chords results in a novice version (as shown in figure 1). The chords in brackets below the notation represent the shapes used -basically they are all D chords with short forays into a G chord (beats ‘2 &’ and ‘3’). Take this up the octave to fret 12 and with a slight re-fingering of the fretting hand you have what Slash plays as shown in the main transcription. Alternatively, a capo fitted on fret 12 will enable you to keep the same fingering as you had for the open position.

Although this famous bit doesn't occur in its 8-bar entirety' again, the choruses do use its first two bars. Elsewhere, the intro’s use of chord arpeggios and wide interval skips forms the essence of the electric guitar accompaniment throughout the verses and first guitar solo. This helps create a smoother transition between chord changes and is a great trick to make an overdriven guitar part sound ‘clean’.

THE TWO SOLOS

Slash is well known for his hard rock approach to blues pentatonic soloing. Using a distorted Marshall amp and his Les Paul’s bridge pickup, his approach switches between lyrical, note sustaining phrases and ‘hell for leather’ playing with loads of string bending, note flurries and attitude! Check out the guitar solo’s opening with its sustained note string bends and smooth vibrato before the scalic wah ascent into familiar blues box pentatonic territory.

Even when he’s blistering, there is a method in Slash’s note choice. For example, the sequential note ascent in bars 12-13 of the second solo suggests modern influences amongst his more traditional blues licks like the pull-off and bend triplet flurries that follow in bars 14-17.

WHAMMY WONDERS

Likewise, the outro features speedy pull-off pentatonics (bars 6-7 of the section) and stinging vibrato bends. The band’s triplet unison rhythm later is a great device to emphasise a section.

If you are wondering how Slash got the low ‘dip’ bend on the the sixth string without a whammy bar, just grab the headstock and push it forward while the picking hand keeps the guitar tight to your chest. This will result in the neck bending forward and lowering the strings pitch. Gibson SG guitars are among the best for this as they have a weaker neck (and have been known to break with extreme bends, so be careful!) but a Les Paul also produces good results. Of course, if yoti have a whammy bar use that instead.

Slash And Axl’s Party Piece Par Excellence...

Guns N’ Roses Sweet Child O’ Mine

With guitarists Slash, Buckethead and Bumblefoot, let’s check out this GN’R anthem before John Wheatcroft thinks of a one-word moniker and dashes off to secure the gig with Axl for himself!

AN EGOTISTICAL MANIAC for a singer, numerous supermodel girlfriends, drug and alcohol induced bust-ups, numerous line-up changes, an album that's taken ten years and as many million dollars and has yet to be completed, the guitarist and bass player's new band selecting a frontman who has to wait for day release from prison to record the vocals for their debut album. Nice boys, those Guns N' Roses lot!

It seems like trouble follows Guns N' Roses around, and the press is never far behind. For all this talk of hell-raising, drugs and debauchery, the one thing that is often overlooked is, in fact, the music. Damn fine it is too.

For a period during the late '80s and early '90s, GN'R gave rock music a much needed kick in the pants, with a stripped down, raw and dirty blues-based style that revitalised classic rock and provided many a fledgling guitarist with a new hero to idolise - Saul Hudson, better know to the world simply as Slash.

This month's transcription comes from the band's stunning debut album Appetite For Destruction when they were on peak form. I saw them at the Monsters Of Rock Festival at Donington just as this album broke in the UK, and even though at that tender age my world surely revolved around Yngwie Malmsteen,

I can clearly remember being mightily impressed by the dude in the top-hat with the very out-of-fashion Gibson Les Paul.

Okay, so everyone can play the intro. But trust me, there's a whole lot more to this song than just the first dozen or so bars. Slash's guitar part has beauty, complexity, sophistication, soul, emotion, excitement and drama, is technically challenging and it's also one of the most popular tunes any covers band could consider to include in their set. What are you waiting for? GT

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Appetite For Destruction, the band's major label debut release in 1987 for Geffen records, rightly rocketed Slash and the boys to worldwide fame and fortune. Every aspiring rocker should have a copy. Velvet Revolver's Contraband (2004) brings us up to date with what Slash is up to these days. As for Axl, now that GT favourite Ron Thal is on board, the guitar world waits with baited breath for the next GN'R release, Chinese Democracy.

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TECHNIQUE FOCUS
WHAT’S A SEMITONE BETWEEN FRIENDS?

You've spent hours mastering this month's transcription, perfected the intro and even got all the solos down, everything sounds great when you play along with the backing track so you decide that you're going to have a go at playing along with the original, purely for educational purposes and not to prance around like a rock star in front of the mirror. We understand.

You're in for a shock when the music comes in, however, and not because your beloved has come home early and caught you in just a top hat and leather trousers, rockin' out like a maniac.

No, it's because GN'R, like numerous other rock artists, such as Van Halen, Stevie Ray Vaughan, Yngwie Malmsteen, Thin Lizzy and even The Beatles when they performed live, tune each string down the equivalent of one fret, the sixth string now tuned to E flat, and that makes you a semitone sharp! "Why do they do that?" I hear you ask. Well, it's easier on the singer for one; many touring bands adopt this method as it makes the high notes just that bit easier to reach. It also thickens the guitar sound up a treat too. The reduced tension now makes string bending easier and the whole guitar feel a bit looser and more vibrant; think of it like going down a gauge in strings, essential if you're going to use Slash's heroic 11s or Stevie Ray's Herculean 13s and still make the bends.

The downside to this is that unless you dedicate a guitar solely for E-flat tuning you'll have to retune every time you want to play along with any of these artists - not always easy on a guitar with a floating or locking vibrato system, as the set-up needs to be altered so, with this in mind, the GT version this month is in standard tuning. Shame though, because it sounds fantastic that one semitone lower!

GET THE TONE

Right from the beginning, Slash's main recording guitar has been a, you've guessed it, Kris Derrig! This custom built replica was commission by GN'R's manager just before Appetite, and is handmade to 1958 specs. Any guitar with a pair of humbuckers should get you in the right ball park however; just make sure you follow the pickup selection indications in the transcription.

EVERY decade has its rock anthem. While the 1970s had Stairway To Heaven and the 90s had Smells Like Teen Spirit, the most memorable riffathon of the 80s has to be the mighty Sweet Child O' Mine. Despite not being your typical Guns N' Roses song, Sweet Child... was released in August 1988, and has since gone on to sell a number of records not that far removed from several hundred gazillion. It continues to evoke bittersweet nostalgia for a generation (or two) of music lovers to this day.

Even people who haven't heard of Guns N' Roses know and love the track all these years later, judging by its near-constant presence on radio and music. Oh, and there's the small matter of its primary composer, Saul 'Slash' Hudson, playing it at half, time during last year's Superbowl in front of a TV audience of millions of beer-slurping American football fans. This a song that will outlive us all.

Its been rumoured for years that Slash regarded the ultra-iconic opening riff as a bit of a laugh, but that's not the whole story, he tells TG. "In passing, I did say that it was sort of a joke or something," he explains, "but initially it was just a cool, neat riff that I'd come up with. It was an interesting pattern and it was really melodic, but I don't think I would have presented it to the band and said, "Hey I've got this idea!" because I just happened to come up with it while we were all hanging around together Izzy. [Stradlin, GN'R's second guitarist at the time] was the first one to start playing behind it, and once that happened Axl Rose, [the band's singer] started making up words, and it took off that way."

At the time, none of GN'R had the slightest inkling that Sweet Child O' Mine would go on to be a planet-busting hit. In fact, Slash found the song irritating. As he explains: "One of the things that always bugged me about Sweet Child... was that it was an uptempo ballad, which didn't fit what Guns N' Roses was about as far as I was concerned. So that song annoyed me every time it came up in the set. It really bugged me!"

Nowadays, Slash is on the wagon, but back in the GN'R era he was an alcoholic (see his 2007 autobiography, Slash, for his account of the grisly details) and that twisty little riff— which is horribly easy to screw up after a few shots of Jack— interfered with his booze consumption. That only made him even more impatient with the song. "It really disturbed my drinking," he chuckles, "because whenever we did a show I'd have a fair amount of whisky beforehand. But when the song came up in the set, that riff was really hard to remember! [Laughs] So all in all it was a very aggravating song, although ironically it turned out to be the biggest song we ever did. Apparently, the Superbowl last year was the biggest audience for a TV show ever."

But while Slash thought Sweet Child... was a bit wussy for, 'the most dangerous band in the world' (@ A. Rose 1985), and despite the fact that it got in the way of his pre-show tipple, he does admit that parts of it floated his boat. "The saving grace for me was the solo section," he says. "That was a vey organic solo that came together simply. When we said, 'Here's the chord changes,' it occurred very spontaneously, and I always looked forward to that part of the song in the set. It was completely different to the rest of the song."

The super-warm tone that Slash wrung out of his Les Paul for the solo came from a Marshall amp, although he went elsewhere for the clean chords in the verses. "The only time that I didn't use a Marshall on Sweet Child... was on the clean bits, and believe it or not, those came through a Roland 120 Jazz Chorus amp, which was hanging around the studio," he says.

As for the guitar Slash played, it could only ever have been a Les Paul — but perhaps not the Les Paul that you'd expect. "I was lucky even to have a guitar for the Appetite album," he explains. "Originally, when I got to the studio, I had somehow in a fit of desperation, pawned most of my guitars, so all I had was a BC Rich Warlock and two Jacksons. I'd been playing those guitars live, and they sounded OK in a room full of people, but when I actually went and heard them in the cans they sounded fucking horrible."

Fortunately, fate intervened in the form of GN'R manager Alan Niven, Slash recalls. "Right before we went in to do guitar overdubs, Alan gave m e a handmade copy of a 1959 Les Paul made by a guy called Kris Derris. He built a run of between 50 and 100 immaculate '59 reissues, and that was the guitar that I used for the whole record. You could never tell that they weren't Gibsons." [Slash has continued to record with this Derrig guitar and acquired another in 1996.]

The irresistible riff is infamous for annoying guitar shop workers the world over. So turn the page and you can learn to irritate the staff at your local Guitars R Us. Go on — it's what Slash would want... (JMe)

Soulmonster wrote:I always assumed they wrote this song while in the Gardner studio, and that Axl was lying on the loft when he heard the guy piece together the music, but it turns out it took place in the DeMille house:

We had this house that this management company had rented for us, they were courting us to be our managers. It was a really nice house in Laughlin Park, California. We had reduced the house to a mere shell of itself in only a few weeks.

One afternoon, when the smoke was still clearing from the night before, Duff, Izzy and I were sitting around on the floor --- we didn’t have any furniture anymore --- and I was dicking around with that riff. In all honestly, I don’t really know where the riff came from but, all of a sudden, it started to sound really cool. Izzy started playing acoustic behind it and the chord changes started coming together. Axl was upstairs in his bedroom and he overheard it. A couple of days after we had put together our simple riff/chord structure, Axl said, “Play that song you guys were playing the other day.” We were like, “What song?” He goes, “That one with that do do dodo do doo do do.” He had written a bunch of lyrics to it without us even knowing about it. It came together relatively quickly. We started rehearsing it and we wrote it from one end to the other that night.

Classic Rock Revisited, September 26, 2010