Guns N’ Roses’ iconic 1991 release, Use Your Illusion I, harbors a handful of the band’s greatest hits, like “November Rain” and “Don’t Cry.” However, another tune, an often overlooked rock masterpiece, lurks among the album’s classics, encasing the snarling vocals of one particular rock god in its gloomy twang.
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“The Garden” features the legendary sneer of shock rocker Alice Cooper, an expected, but welcome addition to the dark rock deep cut. In an interview with Classic Rock, Cooper discussed how the collaboration came about.
The rocker first detailed his relationship with the band, having met them as young rockers and taken them on as a supporting act on the road. “We took Guns N’ Roses on their first tour,” he explained to the outlet, “and the very first night after they played, I told my band, ‘We’d better be very good tonight.’ They had the attitude, the sound, the swagger. I had to send somebody out for bail money on that tour because one or two of them were in jail. So we were kinda like their big brothers and they knew they could call me any time.”
And call at any time they did. “With ‘The Garden,’ Axl called me at two in the morning—‘Can you come over to the studio?’ I said, ‘Sure, I’ll be over, but I can’t spend three days doing it,’” Cooper shared, describing the scene when he arrived at the studio. “Axl was there, and maybe Slash or Duff, and everything was ready to go. The lyrics were there. I listened to the song three times and said, ‘No problem.’ Axl didn’t have to describe what ‘The Garden’ was about. Being a lyricist, I saw where they were going with it. I got the imagery. To me, ‘the garden’ was where you go to pick the drugs you want.”
Turned into my worst phobia, Cooper voices in his theatrical growl against the song’s rage-filled breakdown, A crazy man’s utopia / If you’re lost, no one can show ya / But it sure was glad to know ya / Only poor boys take a chance / On the garden’s song and dance / Feel her flowers, as they wrap around / But only smart boys do without.
“To give Guns N’ Roses credit, as dysfunctional as they were at points, they really had clever ideas,” the artist continued. “Axl might have given me a couple of pointers but we nailed it pretty quickly—in two or three takes—and I was surprised when he went, ‘Yeah, that sounds great.’ I didn’t hang out afterward. I just said, ‘Guys, I know you’re gonna stay up for three days, so I’m gonna go home.’ We could laugh about that, because they understood I’d been there once, too.
“I’ve sung a lot of different bits with a lot of different people,” he added, “but it’s always great to be on a classic album. Use Your Illusion is not just another album. It’s an album that will go down in history.”
Photo by Denise Truscello/Getty Images for Keep Memory Alive
