The songs that broke up Guns N’ Roses, according to Slash
Guns N’ Roses were always a musical powder keg waiting to go off.
They had the potential to be the hard rock version of The Rolling Stones had they kept at it, but no one was coming to an album like Appetite for Destruction and expecting them to be the most sensible rock and roll band in the world. They knew what they wanted to sound like right out of the gate, but it only took a couple of years before the tides started turning in the opposite direction for them once they hit the studio.
But beyond being their own worst enemies at times, Guns didn’t exactly get their start at the best time. They were never going to be kept down by the other rock and roll stars coming out of Los Angeles, but even if they stood out as a breath of fresh air from hair metal, the grunge revolution was only going to make life harder for them once they started putting together their more street-level rock and roll.
The alt-rock purists hated what bands like them stood for, but it turned out Axl Rose wasn’t too crazy about their debut as well. He wanted to make sure that he wasn’t defined by just one album, and while the band did start working up some new tunes with a more mellow groove to them on GNR Lies, their future was all going to depend on how well Use Your Illusion sold once it hit the stores.
Then again, it was bold for them to even attempt making a double record of all new material as their next proper studio album. They had the tunes to back it up, but even for an era where people were starting to focus more on the singles, the fact that they got some of the best tunes from the records like ‘You Could Be Mine’ and their cover of ‘Live and Let Die’ on the radio was practically a miracle in the age when stadium rock was about to go kaput.
But a song like ‘November Rain’ ended up being one of the greatest mixed blessings of their career. First off, this is one of the finest songs that they have ever made, and every single member of the band gets a chance to shine, from Rose’s fantastic vocal performance to the gorgeous piano parts to Slash’s solo bringing everything back to reality in the final section of the tune. They had captured magic, but the fact that the song even existed was already a major sticking point.
Slash had an aversion to making piano ballads, and once the band broke up, the guitar legend pointed the finger at the ballads as the reason why everything fractured, saying, “Can you imagine how sick we were, suddenly having to play ballad-sets with songs like ‘Estranged’, ‘November Rain’, or ‘Don’t Cry’? Duff was the first of us who didn’t feel like doing that anymore and the whole thing became an essential problem for the band. At a certain point it was just a war, because Axl didn’t like anything anymore that came from us, the others”.
While the piano shouldn’t necessarily be a dealbreaker in any band, it did feel like the band were trying to grow up way too fast. You can’t blame Rose for wanting to make the best album that he possibly could under those circumstances, but when someone is given that much free rein, a lot of the songs on the record were bound to be unrecognisable when fans went back to hear ‘Paradise City’ and ‘Welcome to the Jungle’.
The tour may have been the final killing blow to the band once they got back home to Los Angeles, but it was about more than the road that drove them apart. There had been a group named Guns N’ Roses that was a united front, but Slash was willing to stick around and watch it become the Axl Rose Experience.
