Guns N' Roses

Rhythm guitarist Izzy Stradlin often failed to show, and Axl Rose drifted in and out of the session. Often bored and distracted, the rest of the band couldn't ...

Use Your Illusion I, for example, contained the 10-minute “Coma,” which was written by Slash when he was sharing a home in the Hollywood Hills with Izzy Stradlin. Unsurprisingly, the two albums debuted atop the Billboard 200, with the slightly more accessible Use Your Illusion II initially making it to No. I think the Use Your Illusion records were victorious, if you know the back story. Elsewhere, Use Your Illusion I found Guns N’ Roses surprising rock fans of all stripes with their surprisingly effective cover of Paul McCartney and Wings’ James Bond theme, “Live And Let Die.” Slash and Axl Rose decided to work this one up after discovering their mutual love of the track. The band worked up the basics for key Use Your Illusion tracks such as “Garden Of Eden” and the swaggering, Aerosmith-esque rocker “Bad Apples” during this period. But because I don’t like headphones, I’d go in there and play along with the band for the vibe and the energy. Yet when the band made their first fully-fledged foray into the studio to cut the epic protest song, “Civil War,” they discovered they had another issue to address before they could concentrate fully on nailing Use Your Illusion. “All I know is that we didn’t do it,” Slash later wrote in his memoir, Slash: The Autobiography. We started rehearsing this material, and next thing you know, we’re in the studio.” Often bored and distracted, the rest of the band couldn’t agree on the direction their new music should take. Yet, while both volumes of Use Your Illusion are now widely regarded as Guns N’ Roses’ most seminal artistic statements, creating them almost finished the band off on more than one occasion. The group’s answer: Double down on their artistic aspirations and simultaneously release two ambitious and frequently astonishing albums, Use Your Illusion I & II.