Patience

It's funny, there's actually two versions of that song. Izzy wrote the verse [humming the verse with help from Steven] and I wrote the part at the end, "A little patience, yeaaaaah" Okay, so that came together like that and we had it. We never really rehearsed it, we kinda just started playing it live. [...] And there's another version that I have of it. I used to have an 8 track recorder. The 'Patience's that's on that is about a girl and it is really sweet and nice. I have another version that is more of a comedy thing, you know, it was when I lived in this apartment with three people and and were doing drugs and shit, we sit there, and it's kinda comedic, it's like you sit there, and you just need a little patience. Your roommate takes a shit and forgets to flush it. All you need is a little patience. [...] Yeah, that song just came together and the only way we rehearsed it was, actually, "Whoop! Let's play it live!" We wrote it, uh, Slash, Steven, Izzy, myself in the rehearsal studio but we only rehearsed it like once. And then, the next time we played it was live in front of 20 thousand people, or something.

[...] as we developed songs, we put a lot of emphasis on anything that veered away from the main melody - we all felt that diverging from a good tune was only justifiable if the other part was just as good. That meant we rejected cookie-cutter songwriting that demanded bridges for bridges' sake and strictly delineated between verses and choruses. Instead we only went places we really felt strongly about. There's a reason the codas in songs like 'Rocket Queen,' 'Paradise City,' or 'Patience' sound so distinctive - we didn't feel compelled to add them; we were just so excited about certain ideas that, working together, day after day, we found ways to incorporate them.

[...] Axl had come up with a great idea for 'Patience,' seemingly out of nowhere, that had immediately become the story and melody of that song. The whistle part at the beginning was another ballsy and unusual move by Axl; the song just wouldn't be the same without it. 'Patience' quickly became one of my favourite GN'R songs to play live.

In 1984, Izzy Stradlin lived in an apartment across the street from me in Hollywood, right behind the Chinese Theater off Hollywood Boulevard. The man seemed to ALWAYS have an acoustic guitar in his hands, and was always writing bits and pieces of songs. He still does this today.

There was one especially melodic thing that he had been working on, and every once in a while he would dust it off and work on it some more.

By 1986, our band Guns N' Roses had a record deal. With that money, I put myself on a small stipend that could basically pay my rent--or half-rent, I should say--for about six months.

One of my best friends at the time was looking to move to Hollywood from her parents' house somewhere in Orange County. She and I decided that we could share rent on a one-bedroom apartment on Gardner; she would get the bedroom, and I the floor of the dining room (which I cordoned off into my little den of darkness).

My other good friend then was a guy named Del James, a recent transplant from New York who became an important part of our tightknit little group of friends and ersatz consiglieres.

Del needed a place to crash for a week or so, and back then, what was mine was his. During that first week of couch-surfing at my apartment, Del and my roommate Debby became romantic, and Del moved from the couch to her bedroom.

Del was an avid reader, and turned me onto a book called Slugs by Shaun Hutson. I remember just sitting in my bedroom/dining room with my curtain pulled taught, and reading this book with life sort of swirling around me in our apartment. There were drugs aplenty then, and Valium was the drug-of-the-month at that particular point.

I remembered Izzy's little ditty, which at that point had a working title of "Patience," and I wrote a lyrical verse then that went, '"I sit here doing drugs/Reading a book about slugs/All I need is a little patience."

This horrible lyric never made it past my apartment front door, thank God. Axl came up with a great lyric, seemingly out of nowhere, that of course became the story and melody of that song. The whistle part at the beginning--a ballsy move by Axl--while seeming odd to some of our fans and critics alike when the record Lies was released, became a part of pop culture. The song just wouldn't be the song without it, right? This was always one of my favorite GN'R songs that we did live.

A few years ago, when Loaded was recording something or other (maybe "Wasted Heart"?), I counted in the song. On playback, someone in the room exclaimed that the count-in (me) sounded like the recorded count-in of "Patience," which is also me. For a while, the joke went that if I couldn't get a good table at a restaurant, I could simply say "One-two-one-two-three-four," and the gates would open for me.