Whenever an artist walks out of the studio with their new song, they really don’t own it anymore. They may have put in the hours to help bring it to life, but once everyone else hears it, they’re going to have a much different take on your music than anything they could’ve imagined. However, whereas some people create an entirely new meaning for what their favourite artists are singing about, Axl Rose was aware that his music was never safe from the radio programmers of the world.
But for any band starting their careers around when Guns N’ Roses was blowing up, the radio was everyone’s best friend in the business. They were the ones spreading the word and getting music out to any potential listeners, so it was much easier to be a shmoozer with a radio programmer if you knew there was a good chance of them getting one of your songs on the air.
Then again, Guns N’ Roses had already become notorious before they became rock legends. MTV was already playing the music videos for songs like ‘Welcome to the Jungle’, and despite it being far more graphic than anything the channel had seen at the time, Rose’s demeanour and Slash’s fantastic guitar riffs were the first warning shot that the glam-rock movement in Los Angeles was coming to an end.
What they were doing was hard rock by way of punk and classic rock, but there was still room for some sensitive moments as well. The band had already been hesitant about including songs like ‘Sweet Child O’ Mine’ because of how catchy it sounded, but if any guitar riff was able to lodge itself in someone’s brain like Slash’s did, it would have been impossible to ignore it when they were looking for singles.
There was only one problem, though: it was too long. The idea of a six-minute single wasn’t going to fly for an up-and-coming band, but as far as Rose could tell, it sucked all the appeal out of the tune, saying, “I hate the edit of ‘Sweet Child O’ Mine’. Radio stations said, ‘Well, your vocals aren’t cut’. My favourite part of the song is Slash’s slow solo; it’s the heaviest part for me. There’s no reason for it to be missing except to create more space for commercials, so the radio station owners can get more advertising dollars.”
Other artists may have had longer songs at that point, but most of them were operating from a position of strength. Eagles already had countless hits under their belt before releasing ‘Hotel California’, and it was a lot better to have something as spotless as ‘Bohemian Rhapsody’ on the radio when Queen had songs like ‘Seven Seas of Rhye’ and ‘Killer Queen’ to fall back on half the time.
In the case of ‘Sweet Child O’ Mine’, though, editing out Slash’s guitar solo is one of the biggest musical crimes anyone could have committed. Slash was already a phenomenal player, but given how lyrical his playing was, hearing it be cut out would be listening to Phil Collins’s ‘In The Air Tonight’ without the drum fill or completely skipping over Roger Daltrey’s scream in ‘Won’t Get Fooled Again’.
It’s almost expected for any up-and-coming band to listen to what the label and the radio want, but given where Rose went afterwards, ‘November Rain’ may as well have been a spit in the face to everyone who said they needed to strip things down. They were big enough to take on nine-minute epics if they wanted to, and if the radio didn’t like them, that wasn’t all that important to them.
