Guns N Roses – Paradise City

Guns N’ Roses’ stadium closer began as a singalong in the back of a rented van, where Slash lost a band vote over the second line.

On August 16, 1988, Guns N’ Roses walked onto the stage at Giants Stadium in East Rutherford, New Jersey, as the opening act on a bill with Deep Purple and Aerosmith. Axl Rose told the crowd why there were cameras everywhere: the band was shooting a video for its next single. Then they played Paradise City, and before the set was over they played it a second time so the crew could get more shots. The album it came from was a little over a year old and had only just reached No.1.

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The song itself was older than the album, and it came from a much smaller room. Slash’s account puts it in a rented van, on the drive back to Los Angeles after a San Francisco show with Jetboy. The band was drinking and passing acoustic guitars around. Slash found the opening figure, Duff McKagan and Izzy Stradlin fell in behind him, and Rose sang the title line over the top. Slash answered with a second line, then offered a cruder alternative he liked better. The rest of the band outvoted him. They filled in the remaining words in rounds, and Slash added the heavy riff afterward.

What a broke band wrote in that van was a song about being somewhere else. Rose never pinned the place to a map. He told Hit Parader in 1988 that the verses were about life in the jungle, and that the chorus was “like being back in the Midwest or somewhere.” He had grown up in Lafayette, Indiana. The paradise of the title is defined mostly by distance from wherever the singer happens to be standing.

Six minutes and one synthesizer

On record, that homesick chorus got the biggest frame the band could build. Mike Clink produced Appetite for Destruction across three California studios: Rumbo in Canoga Park, Take One in Burbank and Can Am in Tarzana. Geffen released the album in July 1987 with Paradise City as its sixth track, running 6:48. It is the only song on the album with a synthesizer, played by Rose. For its last two minutes the band shifts into double time and repeats the chorus while Slash solos over it, an ending built to finish a night. Guns N’ Roses have usually closed their shows with it since at least 1988.

Radio had to wait for it. Geffen worked the album slowly, and Billboard had already ranked Sweet Child o’ Mine at No.1 and Welcome to the Jungle in the Top 10 before the label issued Paradise City as a US single in January 1989, backed with Move to the City. Billboard entered it on the Hot 100 dated January 14, 1989, and moved it to No.5 on March 11, where it held for a second week in a run of 17 weeks. Geffen released it in Britain on March 6, 1989. The Official Charts Company ranked it No.6, and it topped the Irish chart.

Four days in August

By then the video had been finished for months, and it showed a different band from the one in the van. Nigel Dick, who had directed the clips for the album’s two earlier hits, cut color performance footage from Giants Stadium against black-and-white film shot offstage: rows of empty seats before the doors open, the band on a New York street, the five of them boarding a Concorde. Nasty Suicide, formerly of Hanoi Rocks, turns up briefly. Then a sign comes into frame that reads Welcome to Donington.

That footage carries a weight the video does not show. Guns N’ Roses played the Monsters of Rock festival at Donington Park in England on August 20, 1988, four days after New Jersey, before a crowd that reports put between 90,000 and 107,000. During their set the audience surged toward the stage, and two people died in the crush. Rose had asked the crowd to move back, and the band stopped playing when it became clear how dangerous the front had become. Monsters of Rock did not take place the following year.

The song was written by people imagining a better place from the back of a van, and the video was filmed in the one week when the band finally reached a place that size. What the camera caught was the arrival and, in the same four days, its cost. The band’s official upload, posted on December 25, 2009, has passed 900 million views, and most of those viewers see a victory lap. The chorus still says what it said in the van: paradise is somewhere else, and the singer wants to be taken home.