It's So Easy - Duff Mckagan [42]
Another key was the way we could be completely open with one another while working on songs. Writing songs is a highly emotional thing. Working on them in a group exposes you to others. Either you hold back or you risk feeling vulnerable. But the closeness in our band fostered intimacy; we weren’t afraid to expose our ideas and to have the rest of the band tweak them, kick them around, repurpose them—or not. That comfort level helped us all work together to create great songs. And nobody was holding on to stuff for another day or another band, either. This was the band, this was the moment.
We were also learning how to write lyrics, especially Izzy, Axl, and me. And as we developed songs, we put a lot of emphasis on anything that veered away from the main melody—we all felt that diverging from a good tune was only justifiable if the other part was just as good. That meant we rejected cookie-cutter songwriting that demanded bridges for bridges’ sake and strictly delineated between verses and choruses. Instead we only went places we really felt strongly about. There’s a reason the codas in songs like “Rocket Queen,” “Paradise City,” or “Patience” sound so distinctive—we didn’t feel compelled to add them; we were just so excited about certain ideas that, working together, day after day, we found ways to incorporate them. (We wrote “Sweet Child o’ Mine” later, and the “where do we go now” coda of that song actually was just sort of tacked on, which is one of the reasons we didn’t anticipate it being a hit—or even a single, for that matter.)
When we started to write the songs that would become Appetite, it was clear that Slash saw this as a chance to finally perfect his sense of melody on leads and his crunch when it came to riffage. Slash wrote and perfected those classic parts from some dark and beautiful place within himself. The shy introvert I’d first met had at last found the true medium to express himself.
I remember “My Michelle” coming together. Slash had a great riff, a typical Slash riff. It was a slinky, spidery thing, but he was playing it really fast at first. (His initial riff shows up, slowed down, in the intro of the recorded version—that brooding, eerie horror movie bit at the beginning.) While working on it together with the whole band—collaboration was the magic ingredient for almost all the songs—we hit on that bomp, bad-a-dam, bad-a-dam that kick-starts the song in its final version.
One of our signature songs from that period had an even longer gestation—part of it went back to the very first song I ever wrote. Now in L.A. 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. As with “My Michelle,” one of Slash’s amazing chiming staccato riffs became the intro, and the main section of the song hurtled along atop the riff from my Vains song “The Fake,” now played on bass. Axl had some lyrical fragments he’d been working on since the Seattle trip, and we created an extended bridge around those—a dreamlike section echoing the words when you’re high devolved into a churning, nightmarish wash of sound out of which Axl howled, “Do you know where you are?”
We called the result “Welcome to the Jungle.”
We played the song live for the first time when we opened a show at the Troubadour on a Thursday night in late June 1985. Also on the bill was a band originally from San Francisco called Jetboy.
“Jungle” went over great, and from then on crowds would get agitated as soon as they heard Slash’s intro riff—it became one of our