There’s something about rock n roll covers on the piano that really take my breath away and this one’s right at the top of the list.
Sweet Child O’ Mine was the 3rd single released from Guns N’ Roses’s debut studio album Appetite for Destruction behind Welcome to the Jungle and Paradise City. Interesting enough, it was the band’s only single to reach #1 in the United States last just two weeks in 1988.
Guitarist Slash said in 1990, “[The song] turned into a huge hit and now it makes me sick. I mean, I like it, but I hate what it represents.”
Slash fuckin HATED playing this song, mostly because it was difficult to remember and he loved getting loaded on whiskey. So it was a bad combination considering everyone everywhere wants to hear this song on the setlist, and he was always loaded.
And probably most interesting is that the band didn’t have any plans for it to be a single when the album was originally released. It wasn’t until long after that they realized Sweet Child O Mine had exploded in the fanbase. All of it was completely unintentional, making it one of the very few #1 songs of all time to hold that distinction.
On the subject, here’s some miscellaneous facts about the all time top 100
- Mariah Carey’s All I Want For Christmas Is You will ultimately log the most weeks at #1 in the US Billboard 100 after next December. It wasn’t until 2019 that it made it to the top spot, and for the last 6 years it’s spent a combined 18 weeks, which is just one week shy of Shaboozey and Lil Nas X each.
- Mariah Carey is 2nd, T-3rd and T-5th on the list all time which is actually remarkable to me
- Boyz II Men is also T-3rd and T-5th which I find even be more remarkable than Mariah Carey
- There’s a window where MTV became lame, Napster was illegal and before Spotify was invented… and that window yielded so little action on the historic top 100. That’s when Bruno Mars and Black Eyed Peas dominated Pandora and it’s basically the Dark Ages for the music industry as far as I’m concerned.
- Specifically: Country music got too popular. Metallica took a break from touring. Green Day became too culturally significant. And out sprung the bane of my existence: The Lumineers
HEY! HO! HO!
I fuckin hate the Lumineers but that’s a different blog.
For now just have a nice Tuesday, and don’t regret that you gave up piano lessons. You would’ve been a terrible musician anyways.