Slash’s favourite Guns N’ Roses song to play live
At the end of the 1980s, the entire rock scene felt selectively neutered. Even though artists may have been making waves underground, most of the stars strutting their stuff on MTV began to look like the boy band version of what a rock band was supposed to sound like. Although Guns N’ Roses may have been born out of the same scene that birthed acts like Poison, Slash wanted to take things in a different direction.
Inspired by the sounds of punk and classic rock, Slash was interested in bringing authenticity back into rock and roll, creating songs that had more to do with the darker side of life. While the band didn’t have a dime to their name when playing rock squalors in their early years, their debut Appetite for Destruction shifted the rock world on its axis.
Instead of killing the hair metal scene, Slash made every other guitar player look tame by comparison, pulling solos out of thin air that were bound to become iconic, like ‘Welcome to the Jungle’ and ‘It’s So Easy’. Although many songs on Appetite For Destruction could be considered a classic, Slash still thinks ‘Paradise City’ is one of their crowning achievements.
Written while the band were on tour, this tune practically tells the story of the entire band as they desperately long to get off the streets and visit the kind of cities that they only dream of. Starting with the glistening sounds of Slash’s guitars, the real engine of the song is the riff in the verse, slithering like a snake through as Axl Rose sings about the virtues of being an urchin living under the street.
While Slash has played more songs from the record than he would care to shred, he still holds a special place in his heart whenever he gets to ‘Paradise City’ on the setlist, saying, “I think that ‘Paradise City’ has always been my favourite rock and roll song just to bust out live. It just works every time, and it’s got the right tempo and the right energy. It’s always been a favourite of mine”.
Despite the song having hooks in every section of the song, the finale of the track is where the band begins to stretch out. Increasing the BPM for the final run-through of the riff, Slash is practically flying off the fretboard during the final solo, playing notes that are going by almost too fast for the human brain to process what he’s doing.
While Slash has always kept a soft spot for ‘Paradise City’, the debut was the calm before the storm for the group’s career. Looking to expand their craft on the next album, Use Your Illusion became one of the biggest album experiences in music history, with the band crisscrossing the globe two separate times before finally settling in LA at the tail end of 1994.
By the time the group had taken a break, though, it wasn’t fun anymore for Slash, with Rose starting to dictate where the band would be going on the next handful of albums and moving further away from the group’s rock and roll roots. While Guns N’ Roses quickly became The Axl Rose Experience, Slash never forgot the power behind ‘Paradise City’, keeping it a staple of his solo live show before returning to GNR in the 2010s.
