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After learning how to play Sweet Child o’ Mine and Welcome to the Jungle, the third Guns and Roses song that we will learn how to play on a guitar is Paradise City.

How to play “Paradise City”

Much like “Welcome To The Jungle,” this was inspired by Los Angeles, where the band was living. The verses deal with the rough life on the streets, but the chorus was based on Axl Rose’s memories of the Midwest, with images of green grass, innocence and possibility.

During the composition of the song, Slash was not in favor of the lyric ‘Grass is Green”. Slash wanted the chorus to be: “Take me down to the Paradise City where the girls are fat and they got big t–ties.” He hated the “Grass Is Green” line, but the band overruled him to make the song more radio-friendly.

With Axl Roses’s suggestion, this is the only track on Appetite For Destruction with a prominent synthesizer.

This was the first song that the original Guns N’ Roses lineup of Slash, Steven Adler, Duff McKagan, Axl Rose and Izzy Stradlin wrote together – all five members are credited as writers. According to McKagan, they started working on it during one of their first rehearsals, and it started with some lyrics he brought from a notebook.

On 93.1 WIBC FM, a radio station in Indianapolis, Indiana, Jake Query, who is a friend of Axl Rose, explained that the part of the song where they sing, “Where the grass is green, and the girls are pretty” is about when Axl Rose and his family would go down to Bloomington, Indiana.