Recording in Hollywood can always get you into hairy situations.
By the time Guns N Roses finished the tour for Appetite for Destruction, it was a slow process to get Use Your Illusion off the ground. Just because they were big didn’t mean they didn’t run short of strange stories.
When tracking songs at the studio, some members of the band heard about human remains being found in a dumpster on the other side of the studio.
Reminiscing about it, Matt Sorum mentioned how gnarly it was saying,
“The lyric happened on that song because where we were recording they found a head and an arm in a garbage can.”
So how to deal with seeing human body parts? You write a song about it.
In his autobiography, Slash remembered Izzy Stradlin working the incident into the lyrics saying,
“One event that got everyone talking during the recording of Illusions I and II was the day there was a huge commotion in the alley. It turned out that the cops found a dismembered arm and a head in the Dumpster behind the studio. All I know is that we didn’t do it, but Izzy turned the event into a lyric on “Double Talking Jive.”
You can hear that same nervous energy on the final track too, with Axl Rose sounding like he’s on the edge of sanity and Slash laying down some of his fastest licks before everything comes crashing down into a flamenco style guitar solo.
Rose might like to wait, but Matt mentioned how fast the song came together saying,
“That was the first take. Izzy came in with the guitar riff and I immediately started playing the drum rhythm to it.”
Considering what they just saw though, you have to wonder if the first take was to give them an excuse to get the hell out of there.
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