The Guns N’ Roses song Slash is the most proud of: “That was my mathematical musical discovery”
In the 1980s, Guns N’ Roses were like a freight train moving down the track way too fast. Although the band were one of the most exciting acts to come out of the Sunset Strip since Van Halen, they were just as explosive off the stage, with every member getting into their separate vices when on the road. Although the shows and antics may have gotten more than a little bit chaotic, the band left all of their perfection on their records.
When working on their first handful of demos, the band wanted to make something much more feral than what they heard from the rock scene. Looking to capture the spirit that he heard in the blues rock records that he loved, Slash would spend hours trying to get his signature guitar sound for Appetite for Destruction, going so far as to throw one of his guitars through the windscreen of the band’s van neck first.
After being gifted a sunburst Les Paul, though, Slash would get precisely what he was looking for, tracking songs like ‘Paradise City’ and ‘Welcome to the Jungle’ in days. Although the studio may have been hard work, the songs were coming together incredibly fast, with ‘Welcome to the Jungle’ in less than a half hour while the group were jamming.
Once the public heard the band’s singles, though, a sea change began happening, with everyone abandoning the sounds of the hair bands in favour of something more dangerous. Although the band’s debut stood up as a landmark of classic rock, they had their work cut out for them when trying to follow it up.
Looking to bury their previous record, frontman Axl Rose wanted to create the most ambitious project the band had ever worked on, causing Use Your Illusion to balloon into a double album experience. While the band’s sound began straying away from street-level hard rock, Slash thought he had created one of his landmark compositions at the end of the first disc.
Having gone through the excesses of colossal ballads like ‘November Rain’, ‘Coma’ brings the first side of Use Your Illusion to a stirring close, spanning over ten minutes with a looping chord progression. Even though Rose would add his stamp to the song afterwards, Slash thought that the song was one of the best performances he had ever played.
When discussing the band’s catalogue retrospectively, Slash singled out ‘Coma’ as one of his favourites, saying, “That’s a song that I’m still proud of. There’s not a lot of ‘technique’ – it’s a pretty straight-up kinda Slash approach. But the thing that’s really interesting was the vamp-out, which was this circular rotating chord progression that never ended: the same chord progression every time, but it just kept changing key. That was my mathematical musical discovery”.
Using the warped chord progression to his advantage, Rose wrote lyrics revolving around a near-death experience he had while overdosing, going so far as to bring in the doctors who helped revive him to add bits of spoken word to the song’s outro. Although Slash may be proud to see one of his musical brainchildren down on vinyl, the dark subject matter could have also been an omen of the darkness to come.