10 Perfect Rock Songs That Musicians Hate
6. Sweet Child O Mine - Guns N Roses
One of the hardest jobs any guitar player can have is to make something sound timeless. As easy as it might be to jam with your friends on some of your favorite licks, you sometimes need to delve deep into your soul to come up with something that can stick in people's minds for years on end. What some people might call timeless though Slash would call a little bit annoying.
When Guns N Roses were first starting to congeal back in the late '80s, Slash decided to get rehearsal started by just messing around with a bunch of riffs that he started playing as a joke. Of all of these joke sessions, Axl Rose actually became inspired by this little song fragment, which Slash said started as a way to imitate some sort of circus atmosphere. Writing lyrics about his then girlfriend Erin Everly, Axl came into practice later that day with the skeleton of Sweet Child O Mine.
And from the looks of it...nothing was really changed from the original idea. Outside of the backing track that was added by the rest of the band, Slash basically just plays this like it is a warm up exercise, which was how it was supposed to be in the first place. It may have been just a way to get the fingers moving, but most of us only wish to have our half hearted jam sessions sound like this.