Appetite For Destruction
Welcome To The Jungle // It's So Easy // Nightrain // Out Ta Get Me
Mr Brownstone // Paradise City // My Michelle // Think About You
Sweet Child O' Mine // You're Crazy // Anything Goes // Rocket Queen

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GN'R Lies // Use Your Illusion // The Spaghetti Incident? / New GN'R

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Welcome To The Jungle
Axl
"I consider this song to be the most representative of what we're like. /../ I wrote the words in Seattle. It's a big city, but at the same time it's still a small city compared to L.A. and the things that you're gonna learn. It seemed a lot more rural up there. I just wrote how it looked to me. If someone comes to town and they want to find something, they can find whatever they want."

Slash
"It's the perfect introduction to Guns N' Roses. /../ It came across, I think it was, on the third take. We did the whole album that way. Second or third take. That's where spontaneity comes from. If you don't get it by then, you've lost the feel of it."

"I was at my house and I had that riff happening and Axl came over and he got those lyrics together, and then the band sort of arrenged it. We got an arrangement for the whole band, 'cause that's how we work. Someone comes in with an idea and someone else has input and in that way everyone's happy. That came together really quickly too, that was arranged in one day."
""Welcome to the Jungle is the best example of a hands-down, definitive Guns N' Roses song. It was the first song I ever wrote with Axl. There was just that little guitar intro line, then the riff, then the next change, and that was it. We were rehearsing one afternoon and Axl got turned on to it. Then the whole band got involved, and the next thing you know, it became a song. It was written in about 15 minutes. Axl completed the lyrics while in Seattle, in part illustrating how L.A. looked through his own eyes in comparison to the smaller northwest city."

Izzy
"It's about Hollywood streets; true to life."

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It's So Easy
Axl
"I sang in a low voice because that fit the attitude of that song better. Wasn't something I really thought about, I just started doing it. People ask why I don't sing like that on a lot of songs and it's only because I just sing whatever the song deserves. And it deserves being sung different than the other material. It's a hard tight, simple, punk rock song. When I went to England they said punk's been dead for ten years. And I said, "it's really weird because America doesn't know that."

Slash
"There's a lot to say for that period of time when you start to lose the excitement of just chasing chicks. You start going after really bizarre girls, like librarians and stuff. Just to catch 'em; to say I finally went out and caught a girl that wouldn't be my normal kinda date, cause everything else is starting to get...'it's so easy'."

Duff
"A song West (Arkeen) and myself wrote. It's an account of a time me and him, and also the rest of the band, were kinda going through-we didn't have money, but we had a lot of hangers on and girls we could basically live off of...things were just too easy. There's an emptiness; it's so easy."

Steven
"Great rhythm. Just rocks. Personally I like the guitar solo in it. I like that part of the song 'cause me and Duff are rockin'. Has more feel to it than just a machine."

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Nightrain
Slash
"At the grocery store the other night some kid saw me looking for wine and he says, 'hey man, let's get some Nightrain.' Anyway...so Nightrain is just like Jungle, it's very indicative of what the band's all about. I remember when it first came together, we'd hitchhiked to the Rainbow and were walking down to the Troubadour and just started yelling 'Nightrain' 'cause we were drinking it... /../ It's more attitude and describing how you feel when you're on it, rather than necessarily how you may be. You feel invincible."

Duff
"We were living in the Gardener Street studio, where we had one little box of a room. We had no money but we could dig up a buck to go down to this liquor store. It happened to have this great wine called Nightrain that would fuck you up for a dollar. Five dollars and you'd be gone. We lived off this stuff."

Izzy
"We hung out at the Troubadour, but it was dead and we just started fantasizing and walking back up to the Strip just singing along."

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Out Ta Get Me
Axl
"The lyrics are saying 'I've always been in trouble but I'm still handling it.' Like every time you turn around, someone is trying to screw you over financially, or the cops are banging on your door and you didn't do anything. It's just being railroaded into something and trying to get out from underneath it. You know - parents, teachers, preachers... everybody. The last verse Slash and I put together as a joke 'cause we were talking about how we get in fights sometimes, and how some people get pissed off that you're drunk. But they're the ones that bought the bottle of whiskey to get you drunk on. Some people say I got a chip on my shoulder. /../ We had that as one of our opening numbers for a while 'cause we were headed to a Roxy show and got pulled over by four cops. They picked up a bag off the street; said we threw it out the window and there were drugs in it. There were no drugs in it. And they were just trying to hassle us, saying our advance money in our pockets was drug money. They searched everything, pushed us around and we were late for a show."

Slash
"I know a big rock star right now who buys all the fucking booze and then drinks it all up and he gets fucking irate. 'Out Ta Get Me' is Guns N' Roses' big anarchy statement. /../ It's kinda hard to explain this so people can understand it. We were one of the most opposed bands. We had opposition from everywhere, the whole fucking time. Still do. It's not as bad now 'cause we're signed and some people like the shit we do. But we started out with so many people from so many different directions trying to lash out at us. And trying to say don't let them in here, and don't let them do this, and don't let them do that, and watch them, and this and that and the other. "

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Mr. Brownstone
Axl
"When we moved out of our place on Fountain and La Cienga, I was the last one to leave, and found this piece of yellow paper wadded up in the corner where Izzy's and Steven's room was. It had the lyrics to Brownstone on it. I read it and went, "this is great". They said they had music for it and we ended up starting to rehearse this thing."

"And "Mr. Brownstone"... It reminded me of a Stones-ish type funk-thing and so, I just played around with it. And then, you know, we heard our rehearsal tape back and it sounded like it might work. So, I just started practicing that way. /../ We have countless other friends that have spent, you know, upwards to like 50 grand on rehabilitation. They can't get away from drugs. "..." I've lost at least five or six people that I hung out with every day. So Brownstone is just about having a battle with it, and wishing you'd never touched the stuff and trying to get away from it."

Slash
"A lot of people have a misconception about this song. They think it's about drugs. It's not so much a statement about our drug habits; it's a more a statement about other people's drug habits. It's a good little ditty that people can listen to and maybe think about what they're doing. Try and get themselves in perspective. I know one thing, a lot of people who are doing a lot of fucking drugs all the time don't have any kind of..."
  "It's not preaching. Just a statement-you can listen to it or not. You can just listen to the guitars or the drums...whatever you want."

Izzy
"It can mean a million different things to a million different people. It's like when you listen to a Zeppelin song, what do you think? I have all kinds of fucking wild ideas about what "Custard Pie" is about."

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Paradise City
Axl
"The verses are more about being in the jungle; the chorus is like being back in the Midwest or somewhere. It reminds me of when I was a little kid and just looked up at the blue sky and went "Wow, what is all that, it's so big out there." Everything was more innocent. There are parts of the song that have more of a down home feel. And when I started putting the overlayers on the vocals (I put five tracks on there), it seemed that it came out like some Irish or Scottish heritage. One of the weird things is I had a feeling it would go over good in Europe. The kids there sang Brownstone, they sang It's So Easy, Mama Kin, and these other songs that they'd heard on the EP. They also sang Paradise City and they'd never heard it!"

"'Paradise City' is more about me and the streets. Duff wrote the first part of the chorus, Izzy wrote the second part, and Slash wrote the melody of the last half of the chorus..."

Duff
"The chords to that song I wrote when I first moved to L.A., when I didn't know me anybody and was kinda feeling a little down. So that kinda came out, like reaching for something, you know?"

Slash
"We were in the van, coming back from San Fransisco to L.A., and we just started playing the basic chords - it was on accoustic at the time. Then we got into this 'Take me down to the paradise city, where the girls are fat and they got big titties' thing. I think initially it started out with 'the grass is green,' and I thought, 'That's lame!' But we ended up keeping the 'grass is green' thing. The 'big titty' thing was just my own problem."

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My Michelle
Axl
"I know a girl named Michelle and she became a really good friend of the band's, and I was going out with her for a while. It's a true story. Slash and some other members of the band said that's kinda too heavy to say about poor, sweet Michelle; she'll freak out. I'd written this nice sweer song about her, and then I looked at it and thought 'that doesn't really touch any basis of reality,' so I put down an honest thing. It describes her life. This girl leads such a crazy life with doing drugs, or whatever she's doing at the time, you don't know if she's gonna be there tomorrow. Everytime I see Michelle, I'm really relieved and glad. I showed her the lyrics after about three weeks of debating, and she was so happy that someone didn't paint just a pretty picture. She loves it. It was a real song to her, not something hokey."

Izzy
For "Michelle" Axl called up and said he had this melody. I had a riff and it was a slow smooth melody. When we were playing with it, Slash turned his amp up and went into this bashing thing and we said wow. It turned into a hard rock song, but it started as an acoustic song.

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Think About You
Axl
"Izzy wrote that one. There's a few parts of the lyrics that I put in there, and maybe gave it a little more flow, and worded it my way since I was the one singing it. Izzy does a lot of lyric writing. /../ I think it's kinda one of the ones that's a bit hidden. That's also with the way it was recorded. It's also very Hanoi Rocks-influenced, and the production on "Think About You" and the way it's done, is kinda like a tribute to all those old Hanoi Rocks records. It's something that Izzy was really into, and then he got me into it. It's kinda like a Hanoi Rocks song the way we looked at that."

Izzy
"It's a fast lovesong about drugs, sex, Hollywood and money"

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Sweet Child O' Mine
Axl
"That's a true story about my girlfriend at this time. /../ I had written this poem, reached a dead end with it and put it on the shelf. Then Slash and Izzy got working together on songs and I came in, Izzy hit a rhythm, and all of a sudden this poem popped in my head. It just all came together. A lot of rock bands are too fucking wimpy to have any sentiment or any emotion in any of their stuff unless they're in pain. It's the first positive love song I've ever written, but I never had anyone to write anything about before, I guess."

Slash
"If you listen to "Sweet Child of Mine," the tempo on the very beginning is different from when the drums come in, which is a little faster. I had to play the beginning 50 times to get it right with the drums."

""Sweet Child O' Mine" was a joke. It was a fluke. I was sitting around making funny faces and acting like an idiot and played that riff. Izzy started playing the chords that I was playing, strumming them, and all of a sudden Axl really liked it. I hated that song because it was so stupid at first. I hated the guitar part. Now I really like it because I've gotten it to the point where it sounds really good when I play it live, and I'm so used to the song so I like it a lot more. But it definitely wasn't something I hummed out in my head. It was more like me fucking around with the guitar. "

"The band was signed already, and the rest of the band had moved on to greener pastures, living with some girls or something. But where Izzy and I lived, we had no electricity and no hot water. It was a house some manager - with whom we had no intentions of working with - rented us, which we destroyed completely. And on an evening everybody happened to be there, I was sitting in front of the broken down fireplace going [sings opening bars]. It was literally a joke! The next thing you know, Izzy started playing the basic chords, Axl got inspired and started singing."

Duff
"It was probably the hardest song for me and Steve to record, just because you have to keep a steadiness and also keep the emotion in it. /../ The thing about 'Sweet Child,' it was written in five minutes. It was one of those songs, only three chords. You know that guitar lick Slash does at the beginning? It was kinda lika a joke because we thought, 'What is this song? It's gonna be nothin', it'll be filler on the record.' And except that vocal-wise, it's very sweet and sincere, Slash was fuckin' around when he first wrote that lick."

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You're Crazy
Axl
"It's called 'You're Crazy' 'cause I didn't want some asshole picking it up and they go, 'they put fuck on here,' and then they won't even give it a chance. It was written on acoustic, about another girl we know who was crazy."

"The original way 'You're Crazy' was written, was without the curse words. THEY didn't come in until it came on full electric, in front of a crowd with some girl trying to hit me with a beer bottle, and I started directing the words directly at her. That's where the curses happened. I stamped her head with the bottom of my mic stand, and she kept coming at me! I didn't even know her -- nobody in the band knew her. She hit Duff with a beer bottle."

Slash
"When I play that song, I don't even know what I'm playing. It's just such a kick in the ass for me, so I run around. I try to concentrate on the music and keep kinda stationary, except on that song. I don't play the same solo every night 'cause I'm not on the same wavelength as other nights."

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Anything Goes
Axl
"Me and Izzy and this guy Chris Weber wrote it a long time ago. It's had different verses at different times. Every time I'd do it live, people liked it, but it just depressed the shit outta me on stage. /../ We did it real fast. Then we wrote another version about our times at the old studio and we kept that for a while. Then we came down to record it, we decided we didn't want to cut the track. But Tom (Zutaut, Geffen A&R man) was very adamant about having that song recorded, so we figured 'we're gonna have to rewrite it.' In preproduction we came up with something we liked a lot better, but the verses weren't written until the night we recorded the song. Basically, I just wanted that song an 'anything goes in sex' type song."

Duff
"That used to be a 12 1/2 minute song."

Izzy
"Used to be speed metal."

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Rocket Queen
Axl
"It was a sexual song and it was a wild night in the studio. This girl we know was dancing; everyone wasa getting real excited. The night coulda gotten really explosive, lots of trouble for everyone, and I thought wait a minute, how can we make this porductive. And this is what we got."

Izzy
"I wrote this song for this girl who was gonna have a band and she was gonna call it Rocket Queen. She kinda kept me alive for a while. The last part of the song is my message to this person, or anybody else who can get something out of it. It's like there's hope and a friendship note at the end of the song. For that song there was also something I tried to work out with various people - a recorded sex act. It was somewhat spontaneous but premediated; something I wanted to put on the record. /../ All these qoutes were Axl's 'cause I wasn't there."

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