After driving off all his original cohorts (and his second wife) in '93, Rose became a recluse at his mansion in Malibu. Yet, he hung onto the band's name and announced a forthcoming album called Chinese Democracy. Over the years, the fractious comings and goings of musicians he hired to play on it, including Queen's Brian May, and the spiralling studio costs, estimated at over $13 million, became the stuff of legend. When it eventually landed 15 years later, not all of it was terrible: this slice of Prince-y funk-pop hinted at an intriguing modernist ambition, and was catchy to boot.
If there was one thing for which Gun N'Roses could be relied upon, it was a rousing cover version. "Use Your Illusion" had been padded out with some corkers, including Bob Dylan's "Knocking on Heaven's Door". However, as drug problems and internal beefs set in, a full covers album became the original line-up's final bequest. There was, at least, one life-changing inclusion: the band ripped through this vintage punk classic by the Damned, as they'd heard that its author, guitarist Brian James, was on death's door through heroin addiction. The resultant royalties enabled him to go through rehab.
This lead single from the Use Your Illusion blanket-bombing was originally conceived around the time of Appetite for Destruction, which perhaps explains its superior quality. The swingeing lyrics were apparently directed at a departing girlfriend of their rhythm guitarist, Izzy Stradlin. The song was a massive hit, partly thanks to its adoption as a theme tune for the movie Terminator 2: Judgment Day, and an ensuing video, where Arnold Schwarzenegger turned up at a GN'R gig, in full Terminator regalia.
Perhaps not GN'R's very finest composition, but an unmissable display of sweary fury from Rose, set to some of the more urgent, flat-out rock 'n' roll on either volume of Use Your Illusion. As its title implies, Get in the Ring is a challenge to a handful of individually named critics who'd tangled with Rose since he'd joined rock's superleague. These included Mick Wall, a writer for the UK's heavy metal bible, Kerrang! Amongst his threats: crushing one journalist's head in a vice, and setting the dogs on another. Insane, but highly entertaining.
When proper new material finally arrived, it landed as two double-albums - a splurge of songs, amongst which there were precious few out-and-out classics. The old ragged energy had been replaced by pomposity, and nowhere was that self-indulgence more manifest than on November Rain, which, at nine minutes' duration, was twice as long as most power ballads, and thus found time to go through movements of symphonic grandeur, John Lennon-esque piano-based pop, and umpteen guitar solos. Rose had been chipping away at the song since 1983, but was galvanised to complete its melancholy meditation on love's impermanence once his marriage to Erin Everly went off the rails.
Once the band were established, their narrative became as much about the peripheral lifestyle issues (booze, drugs, girlfriends coming and going) as their actual music. In that climate, records weren't quickly forthcoming. Sensing this, their label, Geffen, hastily cobbled together a stop-gap release to capitalize on their success, compiling an earlier live EP from 1986, and an impromptu acoustic session they'd knocked out, mid-tour. Whether by luck or design, Patience at a stroke broadened GN'R's appeal, its whistled intro, finely balanced performance across three acoustic guitars, and lyrical message of biding your time for the greater romantic good, presenting a contrastingly sensitive side to their talents.
Another solid-gold classic from Appetite., this one celebrated another simple pleasure - chugging a cheap local brand of fortified wine, called Night Train Express. Part of the song's genius is that it also evokes the universal thrill of storming into the city with your mates, for a night on the tiles. It has a special place in the GN'R canon as Slash's favourite number, routinely causing him to jump and down as he plays. "When we had our huge stage [in stadiums] later on," he recalled in his autobiography, "I'd run the length of it, jump off the amplifiers, and lose it just about every single time. I'm not sure why."
In theory, "Take me down to the paradise city, where the grass is green and the girls are pretty," was a potentially disastrous chorus line to be coming out with circa 1987, at the dawning of political correctness. With the momentum Gun N'Roses had accrued on the back of Sweet Child o' Mine, their laddishness only seemed to register as a virtue. Slash, again, has told how this world-beating hit was worked up casually, in the back of a van on their way back from a gig in San Francisco. Anyone hoping to visit the conurbation so colourfully depicted in the lyrics will be sorry to hear it was merely a figment of Rose's imagination.
This was the one which sent GN'R supernova, and which remains their signature anthem. Their top-hatted, cigarette-chewing guitarist, Slash, has often told how the band were goofing around in rehearsal at their shared house on LA's Sunset Strip, when he hit upon the track's introductory "string-skipping" guitar figure, as a "circus" soundtrack to his face-pulling at their drummer.
"Within an hour," he noted in his autobiography, "my guitar exercise had become something else." Rose chipped in lyrics about his future first wife, Erin Everly, the band lurched through a few tempo changes, with some trademark Slash fret-fiddling on top - and, hey presto, they'd written the defining rock anthem of the Eighties.
Guns N' Roses were born in 1985, as the dissolute ugly ducklings of Los Angeles's rock club scene. Within three years, they'd overturned the MTV-endorsed dominance of poodle-haired dinosaur bands like Kiss and Van Halen, on the strength of just one album.
Called Appetite for Destruction, it has gone on to sell over 30 million copies around the world. The unruly quintet erupted from the speakers with an urgent, street-wise, punk-influenced sound, opening with this Mephistophelean curtain-raiser, which also served as an overture for the band's ramshackle stage show. Their screechy singer, Axl Rose, wrote its lyrics many years earlier, on arriving in New York City from small-town Lafayette, Indiana.
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