Rocktober Hair Band Song #14: "My Michelle" by Guns N' Roses

"My Michelle" is one of my top five favorite Guns N' Roses songs.  It's the first song off the second side of Guns N' Roses's epic and life-changing debut album, Appetite for Destruction.  You see, kids, back when Appetite came out, there were these things called cassette tapes on which humans used to listen to music.  Half of an album was on one side of the tape, and the other half was on the other side.  When the first half of the tape was done, you had to physically press a button in order to eject the tape from the tape playing mechanism, remove the tape from the tape player, twist it 180 degrees -- no more, no less -- on its vertical axis, place it back into the tape player, close the cover or cartridge, and press the play button.

If you had done that with Appetite for Destruction -- as so many of us did so many times -- you would have been greeted on Side 2 with a guitar intro in a minor key, followed by a blast of gritty rock and roll, with lyrics about some dark shit.

The song is actually based on a woman named Michelle Young, who Slash had known since junior high and who used to hang out with the band.  She once remarked to Axl Rose, as the two were in a car listening to "Your Song," one of Elton John's many cheesy ballads from the '70s, that she wished someone would write a song for her.

Without her knowledge, Axl took her up on that.  He originally wrote it as a romantic song, but then decided to be honest about Michelle's life and completely changed the song into what it became: a dark, brooding, and raunchy rocker about drug abuse and parents who are either dead or working in the porn industry.  Other members of the band feared it might upset Michelle, but Axl showed it to her, and she appreciated its honesty.

As a ten-year-old, and even now, the brutal honesty and imagery of the first couple lines blew me away:  "Your daddy works in porno / Now that mommy's not around / She used to love her heroin / But now she's underground."  You think whatever trivial grade school drama you have is serious?  At least your mom didn't OD on heroin and your dad isn't involved in porn.  The song then detailed Michelle's own addictions and problems.

There is a silver lining for Michelle.  Apparently, she eventually straightened up, moved away from LA to get away from the lifestyle, and hopefully Axl's premonition that "someday [she]'ll find someone that'll fall in love with [her]" came true.

There's not an official video for "My Michelle," but someone made their own, with clips from an old GNR live show mixed with clips from the video from Slash's 2010 collaboration with Fergie, "Beautiful Dangerous," in which Fergie drugs and sexually assaults Slash.  It's better than staring at the Appetite album cover for three minutes and thirty-nine seconds, so here you go.