But honey you're a bit obscene

Guns 'n' Roses - 'Rocket Queen' (Appetite for Destruction - 1987)

There are two women at the heart of Guns ‘n’ Roses’s ‘Rocket Queen’. The first provided inspiration, and the second provided perspiration. Appetite For Destruction was released in 1987 to not much in the way of fanfare, reaching only #182 on the Billboard charts and hanging around the lower reaches for almost a year before it blew up and went on to be the 7th largest selling record of all time in the USA and the highest debut on that list.

With the record divided into two sides, the first “Guns” and the second “Roses” the songs about living hard on one side and romantic relationships on the second, clearly the closer had to deal with love in some form. Slash’s band before Guns ‘n’ Roses was called Road Crew, and the riff to ‘Rocket Queen’ was from that time; it remained an unfinished Slash/McKagan/Adler song. All it needed was the subject matter.

Lead singer Axl Rose has said;

I wrote this song for this girl who was gonna have a band and she was gonna call it Rocket Queen. She kinda kept me alive for a while.

The woman in question is credited in the album’s liner notes as Barbi (Rocket Queen) Von Greif, by all accounts a notorious young lady on the L.A. scene that Axl was fascinated with from the band’s club days.

The song is broken into two sections - a verse, chorus, verse section with Rose’s swaggering performance and bravado front and centre. The song’s second half is a more affectionate declaration that builds from the bridge and instrumental section, bringing us to the second woman who is key to this song. During that section, some noises sound like a couple having it off; that is because they have it off.

The moaning is from a woman, Adriana Smith, a Guns N' Roses groupie and burlesque artist at the time. She was said to be dating drummer Steve Adler for around a year, and one night, when mad at Adler for not referring to her as his girlfriend, she agreed to sleep with Rose for the band and a bottle of Jack Daniel's.

An engineer, Michael Barbiero, did not want to record the adult session, so Vic Deyglio had to step into the “Ron Jeremy set” in the vocal booth - where Rose and Smith had careered into a microphone - earning him a dedication on the album’s credits as “Victor, ‘the f**king engineer, Deyglio”.

Smith said she had a hard time in the aftermath, saying the incident "weighed on her soul." All she got out of it was the bottle of Jack Daniel's and a degree of infamy. As the band’s popularity went stratospheric, she felt ashamed and had issues with drug addiction. Famously, Adler and Rose had a relationship that was often strained, and likely this made it worse. Adler sought solace in the bottom of a bottle, and he would be fired from the band in 1990 due to his crippling drug addictions.

The early part of the song features Rose’s razor tongue. One that he can use to turn wicked with his way of words. Or act wicked in terms of indulging in what probably sounded like deviancy in Reagan’s America as the AIDS epidemic started to bite. Rose is hoping that despite the air of a well-travelled explorer of these parts, with tongue or otherwise, she can snap him out of his funk - she will do what he wants, and he will help her out with something or other - rigid lid on a jar of pickles potentially.

Axl Rose said;

The last part of the song is my message to this person or anybody else who can get something out of it. It's like there's hope and a friendship note at the end of the song.

He has also added;

For that song, there was also something I tried to work out with various people—a recorded [carnal] act. It was somewhat spontaneous but premeditated, something I wanted to put on the record.

While the uplifting message contrasts the more mature content that precedes it, there is something uncomfortable about something like that being included on the record. I suspect many were ready to veto the song, the band and the album. However, given their growing reputation, it isn’t that bad at all in reality, and it is pretty hard to deny the post-wailing section that turns the song at the three-and-a-half-minute mark as being everything right with this record even if Smith’s “backing vocals” are a good shorthand for the problematic sections of it.