Monique Lewis: The Guns N’ Roses muse the band became obsessed with
There’s no set formula for how artists write their best stuff. It usually comes from deep within their soul more often than not, and sometimes inspiration can come from anything from the tragedies being shown on the news to what the writer had for breakfast that morning. Although Guns N’ Roses usually wrote songs that felt like the ramblings of some street urchin in downtown LA, Monique Lewis became the muse behind two of their greatest love songs.
When looking at the group for the first time, they seem like the last band to ever attempt to write a love song. There had been a lot of groups coming off of Sunset Strip interested in making something a little more innocent, but the minute that Slash kicked into ‘Welcome to the Jungle’, this was far from hair metal. This was old-school rock and roll mixed with a punk ethos, which didn’t usually equate to sentimental territory.
Even when they scored their first major hit ballad, ‘Sweet Child O’ Mine’, the whole thing was written as a joke. Slash may have come up with the now-iconic opening guitar hook, but there’s a good chance that he would have rather played along with ‘It’s So Easy’ or ‘Rocket Queen’ instead.
In the background of everything, though, Lewis had become friendly with every group member. While she had dated nearly every member at some point, she was romantically linked to Izzy Stradlin when they were writing material for Appetite for Destruction, with the guitarist later penning ‘Think About You’ about her.
Although the idea of making interband love hexagon should have spelt disaster for everyone, Axl Rose could let everything be when she ended up calling things off with him. Since she had already been linked to Stradlin, things would never work out between her and the frontman, but her parting words, “Don’t cry”, became a happy by-product of their breakup.
Whereas ‘Think About You’ is about as earnest a love song as you can get, ‘Don’t Cry’ is one of the most bombastic tunes that the group ever made. If Appetite for Destruction was the diary of them at ground level, hearing them take ‘Don’t Cry’ to arena size is a sweet gesture on the part of Rose but also more than a little bit overdone, especially when the song should logically be over, and he keeps holding out the note at the very end of the tune.
Still, we should just be thankful that Rose did have a cooler demeanour about separating from her. Considering some of their other falling-outs with women resulted in him writing tunes like ‘My Michelle’, hearing him actually be level-headed about a relationship falling apart was bound to be a rare sighting as the tour for Use Your Illusion kicked off.
In the grand tradition of hard rock ballads, though, ‘Think About You’ and ‘Don’t Cry’ cover both of the bases of a rocker’s heart. There are moments when things are looking up, but even when everything falls apart, Rose still finds a way not to cry a single tear. Mick Jagger and Keith Richards would have been proud.
