Slash on the song that ended Guns N’ Roses: “That’s the sound of the band breaking up”
Not every band is meant to last forever. The biggest stars end up shining bright for a reason, but there’s only so long that they can make the magic happen before everything starts falling apart. Even though a group like Guns N’ Roses burned themselves out way too quickly, Slash admitted that their cover of The Rolling Stones’ ‘Sympathy for the Devil’ was the moment where everything went to hell.
Then again, if you were working with 1990s-era Axl Rose for an extended period of time, there’s a good chance that you’d want out after a little while. Rose was still one of the greatest frontmen in rock at the time, but his antics onstage and off led to a lot of people not wanting to deal with them, especially when he didn’t bother showing up to some of their massive arena shows and indirectly causing riots after the fact.
After crisscrossing the globe twice, the only thing the band needed was a break. It makes perfect sense. Just some time to recharge everyone’s collective batteries and let the music come naturally so that the next record is even better. But the money machine is often hungrier than that, and they ended up going from the road right back to the studio to work on “The Spaghetti Incident?”.
Although an album that’s nothing but them playing a bunch of covers is far from a bad idea, you can tell that they are burnt the hell out on it. A song like ‘Since I Don’t Have You’ is fine for what it is, but outside of the lacklustre video, it just feels like the band is on autopilot and can’t wait for the red light to go out in the studio.
That wasn’t enough for the band to get off easy, with their label wanting them to record a cover of ‘Sympathy for the Devil’ for the movie Interview with a Vampire. While the song lives in infamy now, it’s easy to see something like this working.
After all, The Stones were one of the most dangerous groups of their time, so giving that track to the band that single-handedly stomped out every other hair metal in existence should have been a slam dunk. Instead, it became the unintended gravesite of what had once been the greatest outfit in the country.
According to Slash, the song had absolutely no vibe in the studio and was the last time that any of the members got along in the studio, telling Behind the Music, “That’s the sound of the band breaking up right there.”
Elaborating further to Q, Slash said that the song is one of the prime examples of everything going wrong, saying, “‘Sympathy’ is worth in my mind of being brought up because that’s when I knew I just couldn’t take it anymore. No matter how hard I tried to talk to him, Axl could never look me in the eye – he had this new guitar player that Axl was sort of forcing on us (Paul Huge). He went and put him on top of my playing so the two were going at the same time”
Their label thought enough of the tune to eventually put it into the band’s greatest hits collection, but when you listen to the song, remember that this is not Guns N’ Roses. There was a group that used to be named that was made up of these members, but this may as well be an autopsy report for them.
