The 100 Greatest Guitar Songs of All Time : Rolling Stone

63 "Sweet Child O' Mine"
Guns n' Roses (1987)

Slash was sitting on the floor in Guns n' Roses' squalid East Hollywood house sometime in 1986 when he started fooling around with a chiming, circular melody. "It was an interesting sort of pattern," Slash says. "But Jesus Christ, I never thought it was going to become a song." As he kept playing, fellow G n' R guitarist Izzy Stradlin joined in, playing a simple chord progression. They didn't realize that Axl Rose was listening in from upstairs — and writing lyrics. At rehearsal the next day, the band hashed out what would become "Sweet Child" — over the objections of Slash, who was convinced that the music was too lightweight for what he saw as a "thrash band." But he relented, and soon came up with the lyrical, multisectioned solo that ended up on the finished song. "It's a combination of influences," Slash says. "From Jeff Beck, Cream and Zeppelin to stuff you'd be surprised at: the solos in Manfred Mann's version of 'Blinded by the Light' and Gerry Rafferty's 'Baker Street.'" Despite the solo's complexity, it was the song's precise intro that proved challenging onstage. "It's easy now, but it was very daunting in the early days," Slash says. "Especially because I drank exorbitant amounts of alcohol and had other chemical things going on. I hated playing that song for years." BRIAN HIATT