As many of the musical teenagers of my generation, I started my career in liking rock music with Linkin Park, a band I still respect and am fond of.
I used to profoundly dislike Guns’n’Roses or the little I knew about them anyhow. Maybe I was just one of those persons who, as Slash said in his autobiography, didn’t get their music. What I certainly didn’t get was Axl’s high pitched but then I knew so little about good voices, guitars, riffs, chords or to what I now consider the actual spirit of rock’n’roll.
How I came to like them, that’s a different kind of story. I was at a friend’s house and bunch of the guys there were playing Guitar Hero 2, I think. Most of us are familiar with that game. Anyhow, it looked interesting so I asked a friend to teach me how to play. While I was concentrating on hitting the notes a.k.a. colors and trying not to embarrass what was left of my dignity as a gamer I wasn’t paying much attention to the song I was playing. However, I finished soon enough to grab hold of the last part of the song which immediately caught my attention.
“Hey, what band is that?” I asked.
“Guns’n’Roses.” Someone said from behind. I puffed and moved on to another song and my first experience with a Guns song was soon forgotten.
Some week afterwards, I made acquaintance with one of my best friends’ neighbors. He played the guitar and asked me if I wanted him to play something for me. What he played was the intro of Sweet Child o’ Mine. It was then when it really caught me and I felt like I had missed out on something that would prove essential to my life. It was the second time I listened to Sweet Child o’ Mine.
“What are you playing?”
“Don’t you know Sweet Child o’ Mine? Guns’n’Roses?”
Of course I’ve heard of them but it wasn’t really my cup of tea. So he sent me the song. What happens is that when I like a song, I usually put it on repeat and listen restlessly to it. For at least a weak I didn’t listen to anything else but Sweet Child o ’Mine. Afterwards, little by little, I discovered the rest.
Before that I wouldn’t put too much attention in knowing the members of a band, unless I really liked it.
One day, I was at a concert in a public square that I love very much, Unirii and the guys played a cover of Sweet Child o’ Mine. The friend I was with was telling me just how talented Slash is. How talented who is? He did me the favor of enlightening me by letting me know that Slash was the guitarist of Guns’n’Roses.
I can say that was the day when my madness began. I became “die-hard” Guns’n’Roses fan and the fact that I’m never going to see them in a concert, with the line-up that made me love their music so much almost makes me cry. I would probably but if I weren’t a person that seldom cries.
One year later, I took on guitar and of course, the first song I ever tried my hand at was Sweet Child o’ Mine. Guns and Slash in particular will always influence the music I’ll end up making. They were the first band whose albums I knew, whose concerts I watched over and over again, whose music I wanted to play. Moreover, the love for them opened my perspectives to many bands I had overlooked, like Aerosmith, Motley Crue, etc.
My friends are used to that already and I’m still surprised that they even let me go near a jukebox that has Guns’n’Roses ready to be listened to.
My influence while writing this is Appetite for Destruction and reading Slash’s autobiography.