In the 1980s, Los Angeles was a mecca for so-called \u201cglam rock\u201d bands and the \u201csex, drugs and rock and roll\u201d lifestyle with which they came to be associated. On any given night inside clubs like the Troubadour and the Whisky a Go Go, you could not only hear bands like Hanoi Rocks and M\u00f6tley Cr\u00fce or, later, Winger and Warrant, but you could also witness an expression of that lifestyle as decadent as any the music world had seen. The rise of \u201cgrunge\u201d bands like Nirvana and alternative rock effectively put an end to that scene in the early 1990s, but the first blow was struck by one of their own: Guns N\u2019 Roses, the band that made its big popular breakthrough on July 23, 1988, when their first hit single, \u201cSweet Child O\u2019 Mine\u201d entered the Billboard Top 40.<\/p>\n
To the guys in pop-metal groups like Poison, Guns N\u2019 Roses might have seemed at first to be just another fellow hair band, but Axl Rose and the rest of the classic GN\u2019R lineup\u2014Slash, Izzy Stradlin, Duff McKagan and Steven Adler\u2014were interested in rock and roll that was much more raw, angry and honest than what the pop-metal bands were playing. Originally formed out of the ashes of two other groups\u2014L.A. Guns and Hollywood Rose\u2014Guns N\u2019 Roses played in a style that owed much more to the pure hard rock of the 1970s than to the showy heavy metal of the 1980s. Signed to Geffen in 1986, GN\u2019R released their first full-length album, Appetite For Destruction, the following summer, and with it their debut single, \u201cWelcome To The Jungle.\u201d Appetite For Destruction would eventually be certified 15-times Platinum, and \u201cWelcome To The Jungle\u201d would become a massively popular Top 10 hit, but neither the album nor its first single was an immediate success. It took nearly a year of touring and the release of a second single, \u201cSweet Child O\u2019 Mine,\u201d to earn Guns N\u2019 Roses a place in music history.<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
Built around an opening riff that GN\u2019R guitarist Slash considered a silly throwaway, \u201cSweet Child O\u2019 Mine\u201d went on to become not just a #1 hit on this day in 1988, but also a true rock classic. Voted onto \u201cgreatest\u201d lists by Rolling Stone, Blender, the RIAA, BBC and the like, \u201cSweet Child O\u2019 Mine\u201d made stars out of Guns N\u2019 Roses, and it made so-called \u201cpower ballads\u201d like Poison\u2019s \u201cEvery Rose Has Its Thorn\u201d seem weak by comparison.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
In the 1980s, Los Angeles was a mecca for so-called \u201cglam rock\u201d bands and the \u201csex, drugs and rock and roll\u201d lifestyle with which they came to be associated. On any given night inside clubs like the Troubadour and the Whisky a Go Go, you could not only hear bands like Hanoi Rocks and M\u00f6tley […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[3506],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-9813","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-music"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack-related-posts":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.beanybux.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9813","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.beanybux.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.beanybux.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.beanybux.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.beanybux.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=9813"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/blog.beanybux.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9813\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.beanybux.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=9813"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.beanybux.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=9813"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.beanybux.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=9813"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}