Slash Wrote 'Sweet Child O' Mine' Intro Hoping To Kill The Song

Slash's intro to "Sweet Child O' Mine" is nothing short of iconic, but according to his Guns N' Roses bandmate Duff McKagan, the guitarist actually came up with the arpeggio riff in an attempt to "get rid of the song."

The bassist reminisced about writing the Appetite For Destruction hit on an episode of the Songcraft podcast. “Izzy [Stradlin] had the three chords,” McKagan recalled. “OK, well that’s… ‘What do you do with that?’ Axl liked it. ‘OK, well let’s try to make this work somehow.’”

But apparently the guitarist was not into the track. “The intro for ‘Sweet Child o’ Mine,’ Slash just did not like the three D, C, G [chord progression],” he said before revealing that Slash told him, “We’ve got to get rid of this song somehow.”

His plan to kill the song was to write “this twisted, just atonal thing."

“And of course that part to try to get rid of the song, totally worked,” McKagan said. “It was this amazing intro to the song, and suddenly we had this ballad. … It just goes to show that everything was clicking with that band at that point.”

Slash expressed his initial distaste for the song in a 2005 interview. “I hated it for years,” he said at the time. “But it would cause such a reaction — just playing the first stupid notes used to evoke this hysteria — so I’ve finally gotten to appreciate it.”