“You could relate”: The revolutionary song Guns N’ Roses wrote in a basement in 1985
What were you doing at the age of 22? Most are just finishing university, bumming around, trying to figure out their place in the world. Axl Rose, though, was forming Guns N’ Roses and unknowingly writing rock anthems that would be etched into the annals of history.
Of course, nowadays, the glitz and grandeur of the Los Angeles hard rock scene can easily make someone quite jaded, not least of all Guns N’ Roses themselves, who are far from an innocent party on that front. Yet back when they began, you could hardly say that they were being blinded by the lights of fame just yet.
After all, Rose was just 22 years old and writing from a basement in the home of Slash’s mother – no one could have expected that these would be the conditions in which a rock anthem for the ages would be conceived. And yet, by some sheer virtue of the mixture of their naivety and ingenuity, ‘Welcome to the Jungle’ was born.
In actual fact, the band members’ youth at the time was the real key to making the song as electric as it was, with Rose having arrived in the city of dreams as a wide-eyed 20-year-old two years prior, getting drunk on his first tastes of life outside rural Indiana. And yet it was being removed from that hedonistic landscape, visiting a friend in Seattle, that made him grow to love it even more.
So, the frontman returned to LA with the lyrics of ‘Welcome to the Jungle’ stored in his back pocket: all he had to do was work out how exactly to put them to music. It needed to be something with an appropriate pulse, punch, and electric power, and as it happened, Slash’s mother’s basement was the perfect place for it.
With his guitarist right-hand man by his side, the making of the song may have been the first time Rose realised they were onto something special. It was only 1985 – ‘Welcome to the Jungle’ and Appetite for Destruction were still two years away – but in that basement, when Slash said, “Check this out” and played the riff, everything changed.
Slash played the bones of what he’d come up with to Rose on an acoustic guitar, and seeing the potential even then, they took it to their next rehearsal, along with the lyrics, to form a fully-fledged song. “It was really the first thing we all collaborated on,” the guitarist later recalled, “And it’s really a combination of everybody’s input.”
It was the moment that really got Guns N’ Roses off to the races, with the storming success of the song running far away from the initial hype surrounding the album itself. As Slash put it himself, the mass appeal of the song was “Just the stark honesty of it. If you lived in Los Angeles, and lived in the trenches, so to speak, you could relate to it”. But even still, to have written a song in a basement, going off the vibes of only naivety and dreams, and to be considered as one of the greatest rock songs of all time? It’s an unbelievable feat.
Of course, when Rose and Slash were simply jamming away at home in 1985, they could have never imagined that either. Indeed, it was also something they could have borne remembering, what with the over-indulgent decadence and rock and roll antics of everything that followed. Somehow, being young and new to the world might have been the best place of all.
