The producer too good for Guns N’ Roses: “We weren’t going to pay”
There was no guessing where Guns N’ Roses were going to end up every single time they went into the studio.
Even though they looked like some of the coolest musicians that the rock and roll world had ever seen, there was no telling whether the band was going to last for only a few months or whether one of the band members would end up going to jail before they hit it big. But even if they looked intimidating, all they needed was the right sound for them to become one of the biggest bands in the world.
Then again, their brand of rock and roll wasn’t always what was popular at the time. They were willing to sound badass every single time they took to the stage, and that’s precisely why they started to put every other hair metal band to shame whenever they made a new record. No one else was pushing it to the limit like they were, but a record like Appetite for Destruction didn’t come together by accident, either.
The whole process was about them rehearsing parts until they were as tight as they could possibly be, and even if they weren’t supposed to be clinically precise or anything, you can hear all the time they put into every song. They were looking to make some of the greatest tunes that anyone had ever heard, but they did run into a few problems when trying to develop some of the tunes in the studio.
They had a fairly good idea of what tunes like ‘Welcome to the Jungle’ and ‘Paradise City’ were supposed to sound like, and even if Slash hated the idea of working on ‘Sweet Child O’ Mine’, there was no question that it was going to be one of the biggest songs that they had ever made. But the first stumbling block was trying to convince Paul Stanley of Kiss that they needed to stay a bit more raw.
The Kiss frontman wanted them to be larger than life, just like his band was, and while Duff McKagan said that he was honoured to have him in the studio, that’s not what they wanted to do. They needed something that hit like a punch in the face, and while Mutt Lange was known for getting that wall of sound every single time he made a record, the band knew that their wallet wasn’t going to be able to take a few minutes with the guy.
Lange was known for making the kind of solid gold pop songs that everyone loved, but McKagan remembered that the producer was too expensive for them, saying, “For a time, we thought we could get Mutt Lange. But Mutt wanted $400,000 to walk into the room, plus a cut of the future earnings of the record. We had to pay for the studio and the producer out of our advance, and we had already taken out $75,000. We weren’t going to borrow money to pay for a producer.”
And while the thought of Lange and Guns together would have been interesting, getting Mike Clink was the best call they could have made. Clink’s recording style was a lot more dry than what Lange was used to, but for a band like this, that’s exactly what you would want. You’re practically in the room for those few minutes when they play ‘It’s So Easy’, and you can actually hear all five of them playing their hearts out on every tune.
So while striking out with one of the biggest producers in the world probably didn’t feel great, that didn’t mean that Guns were down for the count. They had come a long way to become one of the biggest bands in the world, and they weren’t going to throw in the towel until they had one of the best records that anyone had ever made under their belt.
