A good lyric is often in the ear of the beholder, but some lines are objectively worse than others. Take, for example, the follow-up lyric Guns N’ Roses guitarist Slash came up with while the band was jamming out a new song in a rental van. The entire story sounds like something straight out of a rock ‘n’ roll movie. Slash’s contribution, however, leans the film toward Spinal Tap.
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How Guns N’ Roses Wrote “Paradise City”
The story of how Guns N’ Roses wrote their hit song, “Paradise City”, sounds almost too quintessentially rock ‘n’ roll to be real. The band was riding in a rental van, headed from San Francisco back to their homebase in Los Angeles. As the musicians made their way down the road, they played acoustic guitars and drank (we said it was rock ‘n’ roll, not a good idea).
Slash began playing the bare bones of “Paradise City”, and Duff McKagan and Izzy Stradlin joined in. The guitarist also came up with the initial melody, to which vocalist Axl Rose added the lines, “Take me down to the Paradise City.” Slash responded, “Where the grass is green, and the girls are pretty.” Nice. Idyllic. Descriptive. When Rose sang the refrain again, Slash came up with a rewrite: “Where the girls are fat, and they’ve got big t****es.”
“It was decided that the ‘grass is green’ line worked a bit better,” Slash wrote in his memoir. “Though I preferred my alternate take, I was overruled.”
Look. We’re not saying there isn’t an audience for people who would love that line. And aside from the latter half of the lyric, it’s not far off from Queen’s “Fat Bottomed Girls”. But we’d say that the band made the right call not including that line—or a repeat refrain at all. Rather than going back to the “Paradise City” bit, Rose came up with the urgent, “Take… Me… Hoooome.”
The Final Product Was a Clear-Cut Hit
A Guns N’ Roses co-writing session in the back of a tour van would be a good enough rock story on its own. But the band got the added bonus of seeing that mid-drive creation go to the top of the charts. “Paradise City” peaked at No. 5 on the Billboard Hot 100 and No. 6 in the U.K. It topped the charts in Ireland and hit No. 2 in the Netherlands and New Zealand.
“Paradise City” remains a beloved addition to the Guns N’ Roses catalog. In the years since its release on the 1987 album Appetite for Destruction, “Paradise City” has been a staple of GNR concerts, often showing up at the very end of the show as the band’s encore song.
Photo by Jeffrey Mayer/WireImage
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