“Where Do We Go Now?”: Guns N’ Roses Initially Didn’t Know How to End “Sweet Child O Mine”

The Guns N’ Roses classic “Sweet Child O Mine” is one we all know if we’ve spent any time listening to rock radio in the last 37 years. Without a doubt the solo is one of the most recognizable and iconic in guitar history. You know it, you love it (or hate it), but were you aware that the ending—Axl Rose asking “Where do we go now?” following the solo—was actually the result of the band not initially knowing how to end the song?

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“Sweet Child O Mine” started as a guitar warm up for Slash as the band gathered for a jam session at The Hellhouse, their base of sleazy operations on the Sunset Strip. “I was f—ing around with this stupid little riff,” Slash recalled to Q Magazine in 2005, via a Guns N’ Roses fan archive. “Axl said, Hold the f—ing phones! That’s amazing!”

That “stupid little riff” became the opening of the song. From there, they worked up a bare bones version with no lyrics, which would come later after much toil and deliberation. “Writing and rehearsing it to make it a complete song was like pulling teeth,” Slash said. “For me, at the time, it was a very sappy ballad.”

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The lyrics eventually came that afternoon; Axl Rose based the song on his girlfriend, Erin Everly, daughter of Don Everly of the Everly Brothers. Even though Slash said he found the song “sappy,” there’s no denying that it struck a chord with listeners. That may have had something to do with the influence of Lynyrd Skynyrd—apparently, Rose took inspiration from the southern rockers “to make sure that we’d got that heartfelt feeling,” he told Q Magazine.

The next session added the iconic guitar solo as well as a bridge. Then, it was time to record demos. Guns N’ Roses worked with producer Spencer Proffer, who suggested a breakdown at the end of the song. That was all well and good for the band, but they didn’t know what that breakdown should be.

According to Slash’s autobiography, written with Anthony Bozza in 2007, Axl Rose listened to the demos on a loop, then started muttering “where do we go?” to himself, thinking things over. Proffer evidently suggested that line as the breakdown. When the band went to record the final version with producer Mike Clink, it was done in just a few takes.

“That song made the hairs on my arms stand up,” Clink said, according to Q. “It was magical.” Guns N’ Roses had something special with “Sweet Child O Mine,” and the song went on to become their first and only No. 1 on the Billboard Hot 100.

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