Slash Tells True Origin Story Of Guns N' Roses' 'Sweet Child O' Mine' Riff

As the story goes, Slash came up with the iconic riff of "Sweet Child O' Mine" during a warm-up exercise, but apparently that tale is not true at all. During a recent interview, the Guns N' Roses guitarist debunked the rumor and told the true origin story.

"Somebody else said that and it just became one of those things," he admitted. "It wasn't a warm-up exercise. I was sitting around the house where Guns used to live at one point in '86 I guess it was and I just came up with this riff. It was just me messing around and putting notes together like any riff you do. You're like, 'This is cool,' and then you put the third note and find a melody like that. So it was a real riff, it wasn't a warm-up exercise."

"That's how it started, and then Izzy [Stradlin] started playing the chords behind it and then Axl [Rose] heard it and it started from there," Slash added before reflecting on the song. "At the time, it was just a song. Nobody had any designs for it to be a big hit or anything like that. It was just a song that we put together that was cool before we actually made the Appetite for Destruction record. So we put it on the record like that and then the next thing you know at some point after the record had been released for a while, that song all of a sudden just took off."

"We're sort of blessed that we have something that's become as memorable as that," he confessed. "You can't really mock that. You have to appreciate that you have something like that in your career that you have a song that is really that effective. So it's cool."