Alice Cooper Sang on a Guns N’ Roses Song From ‘Use Your Illusion I’
TL;DR:
- Alice Cooper said he’d appear on a Guns N’ Roses song if it didn’t take too long.
- He revealed what it was like in the studio with Guns N’ Roses.
- He discussed the genre roots of Guns N’ Roses.
Alice Cooper and Guns N’ Roses are two of the greatest classic rock acts of all time. During the 1990s, Alice Cooper appeared on a Guns N’ Roses song from the album Use Your Illusion I. Afterward, Cooper revealed what he thought of the song and Guns N’ Roses as a whole.
Alice Cooper instantly understood the lyrics of the Guns N’ Roses song he appeared on
During a 2023 interview with Loudersound, Cooper discussed the origin of his Guns N’ Roses collaboration “The Garden.” “With ‘The Garden,’ Axl called me at two in the morning: ‘Can you come over to the studio?’ I said: ‘Sure, I’ll be over, but I can’t spend three days doing it.’
“When I came in, the scene in the studio was very clean,” he said. “Axl was there, and maybe Slash or Duff, and everything was ready to go. The lyrics were there. I listened to the song three times and said: ‘No problem.’
Cooper felt like he understood “The Garden.” “Axl didn’t have to describe what ‘The Garden’ was about,” he recalled. “Being a lyricist, I saw where they were going with it. I got the imagery. To me, ‘the garden’ was where you go to pick the drugs you want.”
What Alice Cooper thought of ‘The Garden’ and ‘Guns N’ Roses as a whole
Cooper revealed what he thought about Guns N’ Roses as musicians. “To give Guns N’ Roses credit, as dysfunctional as they were at points, they really had clever ideas,” he opined. “Like any hard rock band, they were blues-based, and ‘The Garden’ starts out like a more modernistic take on that, with the psychedelia coming through in the lyrics.”
Notably, “The Garden” was not the only time Cooper and Guns N’ Roses crossed paths. The band recorded a cover of Cooper’s “Under My Wheels” for the soundtrack of the documentary The Decline of Western Civilization Part II: The Metal Years. In addition, they went on tour together during the band’s early years.
How ‘The Garden’ and ‘Use Your Illusion’ performed in the United States
“The Garden” was never a single, so it did not chart on the Billboard Hot 100. It’s shocking that a song featuring two legendary acts was just an album track. Considering how popular Cooper and Guns N’ Roses were at the time, it could have been a huge hit.
The track appeared on the classic album Use Your Illusion I. That record peaked at No. 2 on the Billboard 200 and stayed on the chart for 108 weeks. It spent more time on the chart than any of the band’s other studio albums, with the exception of Appetite for Destruction.
“The Garden” is a great moment in 1990s rock even if it didn’t receive much attention.
