Civil War

Notable Performances:
April 7, 1990 - Indianapolis, IN - Farm Aid performance. This was the first time the song was played.
February 6, 1993 - Auckland, New Zealand - The last known performance of the song.

Axl: There's stuff like "Heaven's Door" and "Civil War" and the song "Yesterdays" and a song called "Breakdown", that definitely have a bit of a southern rock feel. I'd say "Paradise City" like in the chorus has that, and "Sweet Child" kinda has that.

Slash: We did "Civil War" with Steve Adler, and before I could put the guitars on, we had to edit the drums because he was so out of time. He couldn't keep his meter together. So it was another one of those situations where I had to judge when he was gonna come in.

Steven: I had to play it like 25 times until it was useable. My timing was so up and down because I was so weak. The whole time I kept telling the guys, "I don’t feel good, I’m really down" and they kept saying "You're just fucked up", "I’m not fucked up!" I was sick from an opiate blocker I got from a doctor that Doug Goldstein took me too. I think he knew what effect it would have on me...I wanted to wait another week or so before we went in to the studio to record. Slash says that we couldn’t waste the money, and we had to do it that day. They all knew I was sick....it’s a great song, it came out great, but I’m sure had I not been in the position that they put me in I would have nailed it in one take. Slash called me on a Thursday, knowing that I was sick, and said "We’re going in the studio this weekend" I said "dude, you know I can’t go, I’m sick from this bullshit medication". He said we can’t waste the money, an I said don’t even tell me about wasting money, we know somebody who wasted plenty of fucking money! If one of them was sick, it would have been postponed! We just weren't a team anymore.¹

Slash: I love playing "Paradise City" and "Civil War." Sometimes it's because they're comfortable and sometimes because I can put in more energy without compromising the quality of my playing. Sometimes it's a give-and-take thing.²

Duff: Slash had a riff that he always played during our soundcheck. From that riff the whole band worked out "Civil War."³

Duff: Basically it was a riff that we would do at soundchecks, and... umm, Axl came up with a couple of lines, at the beginning and... I went on peace march when I was a little kid with my mom. I was like four years old. For Martin Luther King, and that's when "Did you wear the black armband when they shot the man who said: "Peace would last forever"?". And it's just... true-life experiences, really.⁴

Axl: "Civil War" ended up on the benefit album, coz ummm Tom Petty called me and asked me, which was really weird, asked me if George Harrison could call me. And then George Harrison called me and we were talking and all of a sudden he started talking about his wife flying to Bangladesh and all of a sudden my mind was like BOOM, hyperspace I'm talking to a Beatle…Wow. And he was being very Beatlesque, talking about Bangladesh, it was pretty wild. They asked for the song. And the inspiration was that a friend wanted me to write a song about how crazy the world was and certain things and I just thought it was an interesting subject and Slash had this music and it exactly fit what I had written.⁵

Slash: It's the same version [as the one on Nobody's Child - Romanian Angel Appeal], just mixed better. It was ironic in the timing when it came out. When we recorded that, it wasn't in our normal studio. I didn't have a normal amp. It was one of those things where we had to do it because we were doing it for a benefit album, and it was a rush thing. The song was great, but Steven couldn't play. It took two days just to get the drums. That's out of the norm for us. I had to use a rented amp, and I wasn't particularly happy with the sound. Then Clink tried to mix it in a couple of different studios. I wasn't happy with the mix, and we usually don't use Clink to mix. We sat in on the mix, but I couldn't get it right. I don't like the studio. When it came time to use it for our album, we had it mixed by Bill Price, who is awesome.⁶

Slash: "Civil War" was an instrumental that I had written just before we took off for Japan [1988]. Axl started writing lyrics to it and we worked it up into a proper song at sound check in Melbourne, first the beginning part then the heavy section. That song came together very quickly.⁷

Slash: We were asked to donate a track to a charity album called "Nobody's Child", which benefited Romanian children orphanaged during the Romanian revolution in 1989. We'd thought it would be a great forum for "Civil War". By then we were completely alienated by Steven. In that session, there was us and there was him. After it was finished, before Mike Clink could mix it, he found that he had to cut and paste the whole drum track together.⁸