The 1991 song Slash called his greatest moment: “A song I’m still proud of”
Anyone in Guns N’ Roses could have realised that the band was always moving a little bit too fast.
Even though they were known for living on the edge, becoming one of the biggest bands overnight with Appetite for Destruction was bound to do a number on all of them once the money started rolling in. But even if Slash was quickly turning into one of the best guitarists that Los Angeles had ever seen, he knew that there was a lot more work to be done when they got to work on their next record.
Then again, Slash probably didn’t foresee the and turning into one of the biggest bands in the world overnight. Appetite for Destruction took a long time to get made, but when people heard a band that actually had some life to them compared to the Poisons and the Warrants of the world, they were bound to sink their teeth into them the minute that songs like ‘Welcome to the Jungle’ came out. So when you’ve made one of the most impressive debut records of all time, where exactly are you supposed to go next?
The band sure as hell didn’t know, and when you listen to Use Your Illusion, you can hear them trying to do absolutely everything you’d expect from one of the biggest bands in the world. Their double record opus isn’t necessarily bad by any stretch, but when you hear all of their styles clashing against each other, it does make for a tiring listen going from street-level rockers to acoustic ballads to the most extravagant piano-led songs that they have ever created.
Slash had his work cut out for him on a lot of these records, but that didn’t mean that he wasn’t up to the challenge. He was more than willing to experiment with new sounds all the time, and a lot of his contributions saw him working in other styles as well. His electric guitar was the reason most people came to those records, but it wasn’t out of the question for him to pull out the acoustic and do some flamenco runs as well when the time called for it.
Izzy Stradlin was still hard at work writing down-and-dirty rock and roll tunes, but ‘Coma’ does stand out as one of the more experimental tunes on the record. Aside from the nine-minute piano ballads like ‘November Rain’, this was the most ambitious tune they had ever taken on, with half of the song being based around a looping chord sequence that Slash came up with during one of his heroin benders.
It was hard to figure out just where the tune was going half the time, but even when looking back on that record, Slash felt that ‘Coma’ was one of his finest works, saying, “That’s a song that I’m still proud of. There’s not a lot of ‘technique’ – it’s a pretty straight up kinda Slash approach. But the thing that’s really interesting was the vamp-out, which was this circular rotating chord progression that never ended: the same chord progression every time, but it just kept changing key. That was my mathematical musical discovery. I just stumbled on it and it’s very much me doing my thing… but it worked.”
But the fact that there’s no technique to it is what makes the track that much more interesting. There’s no telling where some of the sections were going half the time, and coupled with the fact that they brought in an EMT crew to re-enact the procedure of saving someone from an overdose, the whole song feels like watching a musical short film for 10 minutes before the first disc comes to a close.
No one would have thought that the band had it in them to make something this theatrical, but it’s not like the writing wasn’t on the wall with a song like this, either. This was an example of the band growing up way too quickly, and it was going to take only a matter of months before they grew sick of each other once they hit the road to support the album.
