Guns N’ Roses weren’t ones to take shit from anybody. If there was anyone on the Sunset Strip who complained that they made garbage music or said that Axl Rose sounded like a wounded rottweiler when he sang, they would probably never get to the end of the sentence before they got knocked on their ass. They were still a brotherhood in the early days, but they may have been paying more attention when George Harrison called them out.
From day one, Rose seemed to want respect as a classic rock star. He may have spoken his mind a bit too much when making albums like Appetite for Destruction, but the band’s sophomore effort on the Use Your Illusion albums was where the frontman started to really spread out, taking inspiration from Elton John when making his ballads.
Just look at the covers they included on the album. While they had been known to cover artists that were more in their wheelhouse, like Aerosmith and the obscure Australian rockers Rose Tattoo on their live EP, seeing songwriters like Paul McCartney and Bob Dylan on the same album with songs like ‘Back Off Bitch’ was a little surreal.
When listening to the hard rock version of ‘Knockin on Heaven’s Door’, Harrison was far from impressed, telling Paul Cashmere, “Didn’t even get the chords right, did they? There’s only three chords in it, but they managed to get one of them wrong”. At the same time, did they really get the chords wrong?
Sure, they may rely on playing G-D-C while Dylan went G-D-A minor, but that’s just their way of interpreting the track. Since C major and A minor are practically the same chords with one note of difference, the song just seems to sound a lot better with Rose’s voice, especially when he does his little vocal ad-libs towards the end of the song.
Then again, Guns N’ Roses were far from a band that got a lot of airtime on Harrison’s turntable. Ever since he settled into his lane as a classic rocker of yesteryear, Harrison was more likely to throw on his old Dylan records or the occasional song by Carl Perkins when he wasn’t listening to the sounds of Eastern music half the time.
Did the band take more than a few liberties with the song? Oh yeah. The track is far from perfect, and while it was used for a soundtrack just like Dylan’s original, putting bits and pieces of dialogue from the movie hasn’t really aged well at all, almost like you’re listening to the audiobook version of the film.
Beyond Harrison’s critique of them as musicians, the main difference between both bands is how they use lyrical tone to help tell the story of the song. Whereas Dylan sounds like a man asking his lover to take his badge from him and lay him on the ground, Rose sounds like he’s desperately clinging to life, as if he’s on the verge of an overdose and on the verge of being rescued by paramedics.
Harrison might not have liked what they brought to the table, but the songs may as well be two distinct genres. Dylan made a song for a Western, but this track is better suited for a stylised crime thriller.
