Sweet Child O’ Mine: history of the most famous Guns N Roses song

In addition to being the main theme of the recent Marvel tape, Thor: Love and Thunder, yesSweet Child O’ Mine It is one of the most important songs of the band, and one of the pillars in the history of rock and despite this, it was born in a curious way, one could almost say, unwanted.

In the beginning of Guns N’ Rosesapproximately in 1987, shortly before they released their debut album Appetite for Destruction, Slash was playing his guitar with the rest of the band in a rehearsal when suddenly he played the mythical riff that we all knowbeginning a domino effect in the musicians of the group.

The first to tell Slash to write something with that riff was Axl Roseso immediately Izzy Stradlin, who was the other guitarist in the band at the time, sat down next to the musician in the huge top hat to start playing some chords to accompany the riff and in a matter of minutes, Duff McKagan was He would join the bass and Steven Adler, founding drummer, on drums to see what rhythm suited what they were doing best.

The band kept doing this for almost an hour, however the funny thing is that really all the members of the band, with the exception of Axl, considered that what they were doing was just having fun… but have fun straight with Axlas they couldn’t believe he was liking it enough to consider actually putting a song together, but to their surprise after they finished playing, Axl went straight to lock himself in a room to write the lyrics.

The romantic side Axl

Axl already had some parts of the lyrics. At that time, the frontman of Gun’s and Roses was Erin Everly’s boyfriend, a relationship that he maintained for a long time and of which he presumed himself very much in love with her, so much so that Axl wrote poems to him without the band knowing, this because they had the idea that they were not a romantic group and did not compose ballads or love songs. You just have to listen to Appetite by Destruction.

It was so Axl decided to take one of the poems he had written for Erin for the lyrics to Sweet Child O’ Mine. yese took all night to write the lyrics for the song and finally presented it to the band and as expected the Guns N’ Roses hated it outright, and in the words of Slash himself, they did not believe that Axl seriously wanted to do a ballad because he claimed that they were a hard rock band and that song did not represent them at all. In the end Axl had his way and they finally ended up recording the song that would ironically become the most iconic of the band.

AG

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