Credit: Dangerous Minds / Album Cover / Reddit

Guns N’ Roses were legit.

Just before the rise of Axl and Co, the Los Angeles hard rock scene had blown into the mainstream and lost the vast majority of the edge that had made it such an absurd, ridiculous time to live through. Sure, behind the scenes, many bands were still living life in the same bacchanalian haze of cocaine, booze and hookers they’d cut their teeth in, this time magnified by a 1980s music industry’s worth of money. However, the music no longer sounded like it.

Scene kings Mötley Crüe are a perfect example of this. Compare the raw, punkish rage of Too Fast For Love with the massive, polished riffs and harmonies on Dr Feelgood, and you can see where the edges got shaved off for daytime radio play and stadium sound systems. What’s more, they were still the heavy option. The Sunset Strip was still stuffed to the brim with flash in the pans like Autograph and Poison, who really could have just been Brian Adams with more hairspray.

Thus, when Guns N’ Roses hit the scene playing music that actually sounded as dangerous, sexy and chaotic as their real lives were, it’s no surprise that people latched onto them. However, just how messy their lives were didn’t just inspire the music. It also found its way into the records themselves as a legendary bit of recording studio naughtiness tucked away in the corner of the closing track of their debut record Appetite for Destruction shows.

What are the moans in ‘Rocket Queen’?

Like most of Appetite for Destruction, its closing track was written for a girl that Axl Rose was infatuated with. Stories vary as to whether this was an affection reciprocated. Probably in some way, everyone was fucking everyone in that scene (as we’ll soon find out!), but what Barbie Von Grief really wanted was to start a band. She had a vision for it, too. The look had been picked out. A number of the songs had been written, and above all, Von Grief had the name. The band would be called Rocket Queen.

As a tribute to her and her rock ‘n’ roll dream, Rose wrote the song of the same name, and when it came time to record the song, Rose decided that what would truly make the song’s bridge sing would be a few orgiastic moans. Now, anyone else would probably get one of their mates in there and try to fake it, probably to howls of hysterical laughter. However, Rose, ever the control freak, knew that it had to sound legit.

Thus, he cast an eye over the groupies hanging around the band. Adriana Smith, who’d been spending a lot of time with drummer Steven Adler, caught his eye. Adler had been loudly insisting that Smith wasn’t his girlfriend, so Rose reasoned that if he had sex with her in the vocal booth, recorded it and put it on ‘Rocket Queen’, no one would have a problem with it, right? Right?!

Yeah, turns out a lot of people did. Smith was mortified to learn that her moans had actually made it onto ‘Rocket Queen’. Adler was apoplectic that Rose had not only had sex with his on-again-off-again girlfriend (so now she was his girlfriend, hope you’re keeping up) but let the whole world know about it. Both would deepen an already heavy dependence on drugs and alcohol to cope with the shame of it all, but they needn’t have worried.

The band only became the biggest in the world off the back of a record that had Adriana Smith’s orgasmic moaning in the background of its closing track. A sound that at least 30 million people have purchased a copy of. Who could be surprised, though? Guns N’ Roses were, after all, neither good, nice nor respectful.

They were legit.