Bass Musician Magazine - 8th Anniversary Issue with Stu Hamm | Page 46

BASSLINES
By Jaime David Vazquez

Famous Bass Intros – Part XIII – Guns ‘n’ Roses’ “Sweet Child O’ Mine”
Hello bass player and fans of bass playing!

If there is a famous bass intro, it is this one, the classic of
the classics... Guns ‘N’ Roses - “Sweet Child O’ Mine,” wth
Bass Player Duff McKagan, from their debut album Appetite
For Destruction (1988). It is probably the most played and
well known in the music industry.

The hit single was #1 in the US Billboard Hot 100 and in the UK Rock Chart. “Sweet Child O’ Mine
“won Best Single, Heavy Metal/Hard Rock at the 1989 American Music Awards and the MTV Video
Music Award for Best Heavy Metal Video. It is one of the Rolling Stone’s 40 Greatest Songs that
Changed the World. It was also in VH1’S “100 Greates Songs of the ‘80’s.”

The original version appeared for first time in a movie called Bad Dreams (1988). The song was

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also featured in the films The Wrestler (2008) and Gulliver’s Travels (2010). Sheryl Crow did a
cover of this song for the film, Big Daddy (1999). Also, Taken by Trees did a cover version for a UK
TV commercial (2009). This cover was used in the promotional trailers for the 2009 remake of the
film, The Last House on the Left and at the end of the movie Life as We Know It (2010). In 2008,
the Recording Industry Association of America declared Appetite for Destruction as the best selling
debut album in the United States with 18 million copies sold.