The Greatest Songs Ever! Sweet Child o’ Mine

In the mid-’80s, Guns N’ Roses were living the life of any number of rock bands operating around the Sunset Strip in Los Angeles. They drank a lot of cheap booze, did a lot of low-grade drugs and supplemented their pathetic incomes by stealing from the purses of whatever girls were prepared to sleep with them. “We love to take care of women,” said rhythm guitarist Izzy Stradlin at the time. “But right now we don’t have any money, so we treat them like shit.”

They might have been rubbing shoulders with future also-rans Faster Pussycat, but Guns N’ Roses’ venomous punk edge would soon propel them past scene kingpins Mötley Crüe into a stratosphere all their own. They were signed to Geffen Records in March 1986 on the strength of their brutal club shows. Shortly after, singer W. Axl Rose walked into L.A.’s Rainbow Bar and Grill with a photocopy of a check for $37,500, half the band’s advance. “We got our deal,” he said to a friend he met there. “Buy me a drink. I don’t have any money.”Soon enough, Rose would never be short of cash again. Geffen moved the band out of a decaying two-story Hollywood filth pad they had christened “The Hellhouse” and into the more pleasant surroundings of the city’s Griffith Park neighborhood to compose material for their debut album, Appetite for Destruction.

“There was no furniture,” remembers guitarist Slash of his new home. “The other guys would come over, and one time I was fucking around with this stupid little riff. [Guitarist] Izzy [Stradlin] was there, and he was playing chords behind it. Axl said something like, ‘Hold the fucking phones! That’s amazing!’ It turns into this song, ‘Sweet Child o’ Mine,’ and I hated it for years. Even writing and rehearsing to make it a complete song was like pulling teeth. For me, at the time, it was a very sappy ballad.”

“‘Sweet Child o’ Mine’ was written in five minutes,” says GN’R bassist Michael “Duff” McKagan. “It was kind of a joke, because we thought, ‘What is this song? It’s gonna be nothing — it’ll be filler on the record.’”Rose used a poem he had written about his then-girlfriend, Erin Everly, for the lyrics and some inspiration from his record collection for his vocals.

“I sing in five or six different voices, so not one song is like another, even if they’re all hard rock,” Rose explained in 1987. “In the last year, I’ve spent $1,300 on music, everything from Slayer to Wham!, to listen to production, vocals, melodies, this and that. I’m from Indiana, where Lynyrd Skynyrd are considered God to the point that you ended up saying, ‘I hate this fucking band!’ Yet for ‘Sweet Child’ I went out and got some old Skynyrd tapes to make sure that we had got that heartfelt feeling.”

Mike Clink had been hired to produce the record as much for his no-nonsense approach to potentially unruly bands as his proficiency in the studio.

“Clink was critical to the success [of Appetite for Destruction],” confirms Alan Niven, who was GN’R’s manager at the time. “I cannot imagine another human being having the patience to get the record made.”

“How did Mike Clink handle us? With kid gloves,” Slash says. “He kept us at arm’s length. We were all young and excited to be doing our first record. We partied really hard, but when we were in the studio, we were pretty much together. Just a bottle of Jack Daniel’s — no doping and all that stuff.”

Limiting themselves to alcohol — in the studio, anyway — the band started work in August 1986 and made solid headway, with Clink trying to limit tracks to a single take.

“I tried to capture the essence of the band, not beat it into the ground,” he explains. “It’s an instinctive thing. You know when a song is as good as it can be.”

“We were really hard workers,” McKagan adds. “We rehearsed twice a day! When it was time for us to be ‘on,’ we took it very seriously.”

“‘Sweet Child o’ Mine’ was easy to record, but because we were not so professional back in the day, it was the one song where we didn’t count the song in, because it’s a guitar intro,” Slash says. “It took me all afternoon to time it out and be at the right place when the drums came in — this was before ProTools and all of that.”

Drummer Steven “Popcorn” Adler recalls the band playing the song only once (“I think that’s why it did so well,” he says. “It was real”) — though he was ingesting a lot of heroin at the time.

Whatever the song’s genesis, Clink is emphatic when it comes to the effect the finished product had on him: “‘Sweet Child’ made the hairs on my arms stand up. It was magical.”

The final mix — made by Steve Thompson and Michael Barbiero — went off without a hitch, too. “There seemed to be a synergy between the band that, unfortunately, success and time eroded,” Barbiero says. “The ‘Sweet Child’ mix stands out in my mind, because it sounded like a hit to all of us.”

Released on June 3, 1988, “Sweet Child o’ Mine” was Guns N’ Roses’ first — and only — number 1 single. (Unfortunately, the relationship that inspired the song would not fare as well: Rose and Everly wed in 1990, but their marriage was annulled a year later, and in 1994 she filed a multimillion-dollar lawsuit, later settled out of court, charging him with abuse.) Appetite for Destruction had been out since July 21, 1987, but sales skyrocketed in the wake of the crossover appeal engendered by the hit ballad. The record would eventually sell more than 20 million copies worldwide.

And “Sweet Child o’ Mine”? It took a while, but Slash eventually developed a grudging affection for the song he once likened to an unpleasant dental procedure.

“I heard it on the radio last night, actually,” says the guitarist, who now plays in Velvet Revolver alongside McKagan and Matt Sorum, Adler’s replacement in GN’R. “Hearing it now it brings back a flood of memories. Around 1991 it would cause such a reaction that just playing the first stupid notes used to evoke hysteria, so I started to appreciate it. Guns N’ Roses were probably one of the best rock & roll bands, and that was a classic fucking time.”