Every artist is going to have a handful of milestones that they are going to remember for the rest of their lives. Whether it’s that adrenaline rush of plugging in a guitar for the first time or testing the limits of where someone could take their voice, there’s an otherworldly force that seems to push someone towards stardom before they even know it. But for a band like Guns N’ Roses, nothing beats nailing down the kind of chemistry they could establish the minute they locked in on a groove.
Then again, every member of the band was never meant to be together for that long a period of time. Each of them felt like a journeyman of the LA rock scene before they even started, and as much as they loved working off each other every time they performed, their dangerous reputation made everyone feel like any one of them could either wind up left by the wayside or go out in a blaze of glory.
But behind the scenes, everything was carefully choreographed from the very beginning. The roots of a handful of their songs like ‘You’re Crazy’ were already solidified when Slash was working in the band LA Guns, but Hollywood Rose had the real magic behind them with Izzy Stradlin and Axl Rose. The frontman certainly had the voice for rock and roll, but Stradlin really became the glue that held the group together when they joined forces with Duff McKagan and Slash.
And while Steven Adler doesn’t get nearly the same amount of attention as he should, his backbeat on Appetite for Destruction was among the most tasteful playing in the LA rock scene. No one in their right mind was thinking of making anything too technical at the time, but compared to what was coming out of the manufactured bands, Adler was taking cues from people like Kiss to make his drums sound anthemic every time they played.
There was no telling whether they would take off at this point, but the group knew the energy was different when they performed together for the first time, with McKagan saying, “That day was probably the most important day of our lives, as players and musicians. It definitely ranks up there because that’s when we all knew it was solidified. This was the best band that any of us had come close to being in.”
Chemistry might be a great thing to have right off the bat, but it wasn’t going to show itself until they started writing together, and the band managed to craft songs as seamlessly as possible. ‘Welcome to the Jungle’ would get its basic skeleton over an afternoon, and even when they were driving across the US in a tour bus, Rose and Slash were spitballing ideas when ‘Paradise City’ fell out of them.
It doesn’t seem like the hardest thing in the world, but when anyone tries to lock in on those guitar parts, they start to pick up on how complex they are. The string skipping that Slash does on ‘Paradise City’ is always difficult to get under everyone’s fingers, and when he went to take a solo, all bets were off for what he was going to do, whether it was the most lyrical solo you’ve heard or licks that sounded like they could have come off of an LA-punk record.
They seemed like a street gang that happened to be equipped with guitars instead of switchblades, but Guns N’ Roses realised that the only way for them to get the right sound was to have the right people in front of them. It may have been sad to part with some of their friends along the way, but it was all worth it when songs like ‘Sweet Child O’ Mine’ became a new generation’s rock and roll anthem.
