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This song is about a junkie prostitute who was once the love interest of Axl Rose. He was going to start a band with her called Rocket Queen, but she was too strung out. (thanks, nikki - sunderland, England)
If you listen closely towards the end, you can her frontman Axl Rose having sex in the studio with the woman who helped inspire the song. Axl explained: "She kind of kept me alive for a while. 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. For that song there was also something I tried to work out with various people - a recorded sex act. It was somewhat spontaneous but premeditated; something I wanted to put on the record. It was a sexual song and it was a wild night in the studio. This girl we know was dancing; everyone was getting real excited. The night could have gotten really explosive, lots of trouble for everyone, and I thought wait a minute, how can we make this productive. And this is what we got." (thanks, Bobbie - Cockeysville, MD - quote courtesy
gnrsource.com)
While performing this song in St. Louis in 1991, Axl Rose jumped into the crowd and hit a fan who had a camera. The singer said, "Thanks to the lameass security I'm going home," then walked off stage. The rest of the band soon followed, causing a full-scale riot to break out. (thanks, Owen - Liverpool, England)
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"Alright, before we get into this next tune I wanna get some houselights on these f---ers? Can we do that? F---in', you can dance to this s--t...come on,"
"A credit in the booklet for Appetite for Destruction reads "Barbi (Rocket Queen) Von Grief", implying that she was "this girl" Rose mentions in the quote. Slash states that he and Duff McKagan wrote the main riff to "Rocket Queen" when they first got together, before either of them had joined Hollywood Rose or L.A. Guns.
It has also been said that Rose brought a woman, Adriana Smith, to the studio for recording. Steve Thompson, an engineer on the album, said the following in an interview:
Axl wanted some pornographic sounds on Rocket Queen, so he brought a girl in and they had sex in the studio. We wound up recording about 30 minutes of sex noises. If you listen to the break on Rocket Queen it's in there.
It was later stated in the music magazine Classic rock, as well as Rolling Stone, that the person who had been recorded performing sex noises on the song was Adriana Smith, an on-off girlfriend of drummer Steven Adler, who also allegedly had an intimate relationship with frontman Rose."
There are indeed 2 people having sex in the background of this song. Those people are Axl Rose and a woman named Adriana, who at the time was the girlfriend of then-drummer Steven Adler. Adriana went along with this to get back at Adler for cheating on her.
Having participated in this, and having millions and millions of people buy and listen to the record it was on caused a lot of psychological damage to her, according to the article, as she heavily abused drugs and alcohol in the years following the release of A4D. She's now 40 and a single mom.
True brillance .