The heroin bender that inspired a classic Guns N’ Roses song
The story of Guns N’ Roses has always felt like a band slightly out of time. Throughout their time playing on the Sunset Strip, the ongoing hair metal movement saw them thrown in with some lesser bands from the era, like Poison and Warrant. Although they may have liked to bring glam into their music now and again, they knew how to party much harder than their contemporaries.
By the time the band started out, they were only a few days away from homelessness. Practising in whatever squalor they could find, the origins of most of their greatest licks actually came from them aimlessly jamming in their rehearsal space, with Slash coming up with the riff to ‘Sweet Child O’ Mine’ as a fluke when warming up his fingers.
When they weren’t practising and playing gigs, both Izzy Stradlin and Slash had picked up a bad heroin habit. Most of their time at the bottom was spent trying to chase their next high, with almost all of their money going into getting a fix. Instead of looking at their situation objectively, they poured their sorrows into one of their first hits.
Looking to document their use, ‘Mr Brownstone’ was the pet name they gave to their drug of choice. Using a Bo Diddley-style beat to tell the story, Slash and Stradlin started composing a song about how strung out they could get. Though both claim to try and get better than they once were, they can’t let go of the monkey on their back that will never leave them alone.
The rest of the band’s debut album, Appetite for Destruction, reflects the same hedonistic lifestyle that the song describes, from sponging off of girlfriends to introducing most hard rock fans to the terrors of Los Angeles. By the time the band started to see more acclaim, Slash began to go too far down the rabbit hole.
Getting strung out nearly every day, Slash would come close to death numerous times during the tours, occasionally being so dope sick that he would throw up behind his amplifier halfway through the gig. As they prepared to open for The Rolling Stones, frontman Axl Rose had had enough of the guitarist’s habits.
On one of their first nights opening for the rock legends, Rose alluded to Slash’s narcotic streak from the stage. According to Behind the Music, Rose had stated: “If certain members don’t stop dancing with Mr Brownstone, then the band was over”. Although the band proceeded with the rest of the gig as planned, the remark didn’t sit well with Slash.
Though not calling him out by name, the guitarist knew the context of the remark, recalling, “I knew it was directed at me because I was messed up at the time. It made me resent Axl for that. It’s something that I’ve still never forgiven him for.” Then again, this incident was just the beginning of the madness.
Throughout the rest of the band’s glory years, Rose would become a dictator in the group, making sure things went his way until the rest of the band walked out on him in the mid-1990s. No one in Guns N’ Roses was a saint, but this was the beginning of things going haywire.
