The Guns N’ Roses song Slash wrote in a “heroin delirium”
The beginning of the 1990s was a turbulent period for Guns N’ Roses. After the explosive success of their 1987 debut, Appetite for Destruction, the band spiralled further into hard living, solidifying their reputation as the world’s most notorious rock outfit. This chaos was compounded by controversies such as Axl Rose’s inflammatory lyrics in ‘One in a Million’, which sparked widespread criticism and divided fans. Despite holding it together long enough to maintain their position at the top of the rock world, the band’s self-destructive tendencies began to take their toll. Among the oddities from this era was a curious and often overlooked moment involving guitarist Slash, one that epitomised the surreal excess and unpredictability of Guns N’ Roses at their peak.
The wheels began to fall off for Guns N’ Roses following the release of their 1988 second album, G N’ R Lies. While it was a commercial success, sitting in the top five of the Billboard Album Chart alongside their debut, it included the controversial track ‘One in a Million’, which featured racist and homophobic lyrics. This not only made frontman Axl Rose a highly controversial figure but also exacerbated tensions within the band. These issues were compounded by drug use and the fact that Slash’s mother was Black, adding a personal dimension to the growing discord.
Notoriously, after taking a break from recording and touring for a while, in the first of four shows supporting The Rolling Stones at the Los Angeles Coliseum in October 1989, Rose surprisingly told the audience that if members of the band did not stop “dancing with Mr Brownstone”, they would be finished after this run. Slash has never forgiven him for this outburst, as his condition was noticeably decaying at the time due to heroin use.
Drummer Steven Adler’s condition was also in dire straits during this era. When Guns N’ Roses picked up recording again in 1990, he was briefly fired but was reinstated after he signed a contract promising to give up drugs. During these sessions, the quintet were working on an array of tracks for what would become Use Your Illusion I and II. However, recording ‘Civil War’ made it clear that Adler could not go on. He was fired in July, and Matt Sorum of The Cult was hired.
Not only was Adler the rhythmic lynchpin of the band, with his swinging grooves critical to the sound that made them, but his acrimonious departure and the succession of Sorum, who did not gel well, came amid a demanding period for the group. Use Your Illusion saw them move away from the aggressive metal-adjacent music of their debut, expand their stylistic scope to varying success and toy with ridiculously extensive numbers, typified by the piano ballad, ‘November Rain’. Slash would even credit Sorum with stopping their split during this period as their work also started to fragment and reflect what was happening internally.
Although both albums were commercial successes when released in 1991, they marked the moment Guns N’ Roses started coming down the other side of the mountain. While ‘November Rain’ and their comical cover of Paul McCartney and Wings’s ‘Live and Let Die’ are used as examples of this severe drop-off in quality, plunging them into the chasm of egomaniacal rockstardom, ‘Coma’, the closing track of Use Your Illusion I also does.
Rose stated he wrote the song about an overdose of pills, which left him hospitalised, but despite the personal meaning, he called it Slash’s “baby”. Years later, the guitarist revealed that the odd, prolonged track was written in a “heroin delirium”. Weirdly, he even said he was still proud of it.
“I wrote ‘Coma’ in my heroin delirium,” Slash told Total Guitar in 2011. “That’s a song that I’m still proud of. There’s not a lot of ‘technique’ – it’s a pretty straight-up kinda Slash approach.”
He caveated his point by saying there’s more to the song than meets the eye. He recalled that he used a circular rotating chord progression that never ended; it was the same pattern, it just kept changing keys, which was a genius mathematical musical discovery he stumbled upon. To be fair to Slash, coming up with such a move while in the throes of addiction is pretty good going; however, the track’s still terrible. It’s just another sign that the highpoint of Guns N’ Roses was fleeting.
