Slash explains how he wrote the riff for ‘Sweet Child O’ Mine’
In terms of contemporary guitar heroes, it doesn’t get much more iconic than Slash. Even those who are not fans of rock and metal are acutely aware of his exploits, a testament to the heights he has hit across his career. Given the power behind Guns N’ Roses and Velvet Revolver, Slash’s back catalogue is brimming with legendary moments that all budding guitarists have spent time trying to emulate.
Stylistically, his work is placed somewhere between that of another hero of the Gibson Les Paul, Jimmy Page, and that of more visceral thrash players such as Kerry King of Slayer. There’s a swaggering blues current that runs through his work, but concurrently, there’s also high-octane energy and a penchant for electrifying shredding, as displayed on cuts such as ‘Welcome to the Jungle’ or ‘You Could Be Mine’.
From his musical aptitude to the memory of him walking out of the church in the middle of a desert to perform the overblown solos for ‘November Rain’, Slash is a storied musician, and his reputation precedes him. Much of this mythos can be attributed to one track, 1988’s ‘Sweet Child O’ Mine’, one of rock’s greatest crossover hits. It has such a universal appeal that we’ve even seen numerous absurd renditions undertaken on Simon Cowell’s talent shows.
Famously, Slash’s riff is what makes ‘Sweet Child O’ Mine’ so legendary, and luckily for us, during a radio interview made available by Raised On Radio back in 2018, the guitarist revealed how he wrote the riff.
“All of us were living in this one house. It was completely a shell of a house. We parted this house on the ground,” Slash recalled. “We were sitting on the floor in the living room because we didn’t have any furniture. I was playing this riff and Izzy started playing some chord changes behind it and that’s were started. Then Axl was in the house and he was listening from upstair. So a couple days later we had a pre-production rehearsal and we’re playing”.
He continued: “Between song at one point Axl said: ‘Hey, play that thing you guys were playing the other day. All of a sudden we realized he had written a whole thing of lyrics for that basic idea and off it went. Guns N’ Roses was a pretty harcord, gritty rock and roll band.”
“That was an up tempo ballad and in the set. It just didn’t sit well with me, you know. It’s like, here we are doing ‘Welcome To The Jungle’, ‘Paradise City’, ‘It’s So Easy’ and then came this sort of ballad thing. When you know, it turned out to be the biggest song we ever did (laughs),” the guitarist concluded.
