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Fast and furious as Live is, its covers and B-list tunes barely tapped the band’s deep creative well. And when Appetite for Destruction came roaring along the next year, it charged across the landscape of the alternative rock that was dominating the airwaves. Appetite for Destruction still serves as Guns N’ Roses’ definitive album and the foundation of Slash’s searing guitar style. The disc’s trifecta of classics, “Welcome to the Jungle,” “Sweet Child o’ Mine,” and “Paradise City,” were all powered by his hell-bent-for-leather string slinging. At the soul of these songs—and his style—is Slash’s love for blues. Not the kind from the Delta, the Mississippi hills, or Chicago, but the blues that a core group of British guitarists including Eric Clapton, Jimmy Page, and Jeff Beck had recast in their own image during the 1960s. You can hear their influence reflected in Slash’s unsparing use of vibrato, which he decorates with pinched overtones and swatches of creeping feedback, and in the full-tilt application of major pentatonic and minor harmonic scales in his hot rod solos. Slash’s interest in harmonic minors gave birth to the unforgettable introduction to “Sweet Child o’ Mine,” which employs one of that scale’s offbeat intervals to achieve a calliope-like sound.