The Guns N’ Roses song Slash thought was too lightweight: “I was never a big fan of it”
Guns N’ Roses were never meant to be the family-friendly version of rock and roll by any stretch. You could probably bring one of the members of Bon Jovi home to meet your parents and even get Mom’s approval, but if you were to bring any member of the LA legends into a sophisticated setting in their prime, chaos could break out at any moment. Although they climbed to turn things up to 11 in terms of intensity, Slash initially took issue when putting together the song ‘Think About You’.
When you look at how the entire Appetite for Destruction album shapes up, there’s hardly a sensitive note amongst the pile. Sure, ‘Sweet Child O’ Mine’ slows things down a little bit by being a standard love song, but even that piece has a heavy middle section that turns the track completely on its head.
That was all by design as well. No part of the band’s music was intended to be compromised by the MTV suits or the glam metal aesthetic, so when you saw ‘Welcome to the Jungle’ being played on the same stations that once housed acts like Poison and Winger, the rest of the Sunset Strip glam scene had their days numbered.
As the group worked away on their songs, there was also a handful of tracks they had been working on in separate projects. Despite the common consensus that Axl Rose and Slash wrote the majority of the material, Izzy Stradlin is really the unsung hero when it comes to the group’s vulnerable side.
While his name was on questionable songs like ‘Used to Love Her’, a lot of Stradlin’s style is indebted to the classic Rolling Stones method, including sticking to open chords and singing with a little bit of gravel in your throat. ‘Patience’ was the first time one of his pieces hogged the spotlight, but ‘Think About You’ was the precursor.
If Rose wrote ‘Sweet Child O’Mine’ as his pseudo-love song, this is Stradlin giving a kind of junkie’s lament to an old flame. Every rock band needs this kind of ballad to balance out their record, but Slash thought that the tune was far too soft for anything they should be associated with.
Speaking with Guitar Edge, Slash remembered actually not liking the piece and thinking that they should ditch it, saying, “That’s a song Izzy had in its entirety when we first started. I was never a big fan of it because it was just too lightweight… I enjoyed recording it, though. I managed to get some ideas down and could walk away feeling satisfied with the way the song sounded.”
It’s easy to picture that kind of tender love song, but the rest of the band really upends Stradlin’s original take. There are definitely some traces of that soft piece with the singer-songwriter style picking part on the chorus, but it’s hard to take it seriously when you have the rest of them thundering away in the background. Hearing them take everything into darker territory makes it feel like a junkie crying out in pain for his lover, even though he knows that it’s probably over. Then again, there’s nothing in this world that a Keith Richards-style smile can’t fix.
