The Guns N’ Roses song Axl Rose thought was painful to write
For any artist, writing a song tends to be different every time you sit down to write. Sometimes, it comes out all in one gulp, and sometimes, you spend years finding the right words that fit before deciding to bring it into the studio. While Axl Rose may be known to take his sweet time when it comes to releasing music these days, it may be because of how burnt out he was when putting together the song ‘Coma’.
Compared to the beginning of Guns N’ Roses, though, the hard rock icons were spitting out classics like it was no trouble at all. Throughout their first handful of rehearsals, the band had been putting together songs almost every day, with Rose spitting out lyrics that served as a dark look into what Los Angeles really looked like.
After exposing fans to the harsh California streets and making every other band look laughably pretentious in the process, Rose thought the next course of action was to bury what he had just started. Since everyone was expecting the band to make a sequel to their debut smash hit, Use Your Illusion was when Rose decided he needed to take full control, electing to release a double album of new material.
While every double album by law is bound to be a little bit of a mess, the first half of the album comes to a rousing finish on ‘Coma’. Standing at over ten minutes, the entire song was taken from a real-life incident when Rose almost died of a drug overdose, eventually needing paramedics to show up at his place to revive him.
As a morbid thank-you to those who helped save his life, Rose would ask various members of the paramedics who helped him recreate the sounds of what they did in the studio for the song’s midsection. Then again, having to relive the moment where you almost died had to have done a number on the one singing it.
When talking about the song after the fact, Slash remembered just how hard Rose worked to get the song sounding absolutely right, saying, “Axl loved it, but at first, it was the one song that he couldn’t come up with the lyrics for. He was very proud of his gift for lyrics, so he was pretty frustrated by it until one night months later when the words just came to him”.
Even though Rose’s lyrics are some of the most revealing words that he had ever laid down, the real power behind the song comes from Slash’s riffing. Whereas ‘Paradise City’ and ‘Welcome to the Jungle’ took fans down the streets right off of Sunset Strip, this felt like being thrown into Hell when you were listening to it, especially since the riff keeps moving in a circular pattern until the end of the song.
Despite the satisfying ending to the first disc, it didn’t save the band from making something way too bloated. Outside of becoming one of the most extravagant releases of 1991, it was also the kind of ambitious rock and roll that didn’t sit well with the alternative rock trend, relegating the band to the bargain bins as soon as Nirvana burst onto the scene with ‘Smells Like Teen Spirit’ Guns N’ Roses may have been able to rise to the occasion on ‘Coma’, but the expectations they set for themselves were too high to sustain for much longer.
