Some songs become so classic that it’s hard to imagine there was a point in their gestation where a bunch of confused band members were staring at each other in a rehearsal room mouthing, “Are you playing a C or a G there?”. The Guns N’ Roses classic Welcome To The Jungle is a case in point. It’s such a cocksure, swaggering titan of a rock anthem so explosive that you’d assume it was one of the reasons behind the big bang, not cobbled together over a few years by a bunch of LA-based delinquents looking for their big break.
But writing in his 2011 memoir It’s So Easy (And Other Lies), G N’R bassist Duff McKagan says the iconic opening track from Appetite For Destruction had one of the longest gestation periods for any of Axl & co.’s songs. “Part of it went back to the very first song I ever wrote,” he recalled. “Now in LA seven years later, the main riff from that first song came back to me as we were putting together another tune about the hardscrabble lives we lived.”
