“That song, and Perfect Crime, we started writing when we were doing pre-production for Appetite” – Slash tells the story of Guns N’ Roses’s long-in-the-waiting classic You Could Be Mine

(Image credit: Kevin Mazur/Getty Images for Live Nation) If you flicked on MTV over the summer of 1991, you’d probably have been faced with the surreal sight of Axl Rose staring down the shotgun of a cyborg in sunglasses. By this point, there was a list of people who might have considered terminating the mercurial Guns N’ Roses frontman. Fortunately for Rose, however, this was merely the video for You Could Be Mine and the killer robot was Hollywood beefcake Arnold Schwarzenegger, there to promote its inclusion on the soundtrack to Terminator 2. In July 1991, this was simultaneously the coolest video, most anticipated single and part of the best movie on Earth. It couldn’t fail. Strange, then, that Guns N’ Roses had buried this classic song in the vaults for nearly five years. Scan the inlay card to 1987’s Appetite For Destruction and you’ll find the key lyric – ‘With your bitch slap rappin’ and your cocaine tongue you get nothin’ done’ – printed almost as a band mission statement. Meanwhile, Slash told Total Guitar magazine in 2011 that the music was nailed when GN’R and producer Mike Clink hunkered down for initial sessions at the SIR Studios in Hollywood. “That song, and Perfect Crime, we started writing when we were doing pre-production for Appetite,” he revealed. “You Could Be Mine was one of Izzy’s riffs, and as always with Izzy [Stradlin, guitar], he’d play something and it would catch my ear, and I’d play along, but in my own sort of style. That was what was so magical about Izzy and I: we never sat down and worked out anything.” Every so often, I feel it’s necessary to use a tremolo on something! A chaotic squall of punky chords with a white-hot solo, Slash pushed for You Could Be Mine to appear on the band’s hedonistic debut, noting in his autobiography that “it’s more reminiscent of that time than anything else on the Use Your Illusion albums”. Tracklisting limitations wouldn’t allow that, but by the time Guns headed into A&M Studios for the Illusion sessions, You Could […]

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