Sweet Child O’ Mine may be Guns N’ Roses’ calling card – and for many guitarists, their entry point into the band and even Slash’s repertoire. However, the Les Paul slinger admits he wasn’t so keen on what would become a career-defining song – and, according to rock ’n’ roll lore, even deliberately tried to sabotage it.
“Yeah, I have to admit I did have a thing with it,” he says with a laugh in a new Guitar World interview.
“It was a riff I came up with, and I didn’t know what I was going to do with it. I wasn’t really thinking about it at the time, but it inspired the whole song.”
Slash wasn’t a fan of the D, C, G chord progression, and according to a previous interview with Duffy McKagan, he even said, “We’ve got to get rid of this song somehow.”
“I always say this, but to me, we were like a Motörhead-type hard rock band, so any kind of ballads were sort of uncongressed,” he continues. “But it really became part of our set. We played it one time opening for Ted Nugent, and when it was time to play that song, I was like, ‘Oh, fuck…’
“And, of course, I had to remember how to play the riff accurately by myself in front of everybody every time we played, which, at the time, I was a little drunk, and you never knew what was going to happen.”
And like many other iconic riffs, there are tons of tales surrounding its inception – including one that it was originally crafted as a warm-up exercise, a rumor Slash disputed in 2022.
“Somebody else said that and it just became one of those things,” he said on the Eddie Trunk Podcast.
“I was sitting around the house where Guns used to live at one point, in ’86, I guess it was, and I just came up with this riff,” he continues. “It was just me messing around and putting notes together like any riff you do. You're like, ‘This is cool,’ and then you put the third note and find a melody like that. So it was a real riff; it wasn't a warm-up exercise.”
Elsewhere, Slash once told Total Guitar that, had the band not been in the same room together at that time, he might not have shared the idea with them – meaning that the riff, and subsequent song, would have been lost forever.
For more from Slash, plus new interviews with Chris Buck, Samantha Fish, and many more, pick up issue 597 of Guitar World from Magazines Direct.
