Rock out to Guns N’ Roses’ Top 11 Greatest Hits!

For frontman Axl Rose, music has always been an escape. Raised in a suffocatingly strict Pentecostal home in the middle of Indiana, he wasn’t allowed to listen to rock when he was growing up. Still, he was drawn to the genre. “Music was my best friend,” he once told the Los Angeles Times. “It was everything, so I’d find ways to listen to it. I remember once my friend Dave called me and played Supertramp over the phone. I just acted like I was talking to him so no one would know.”

In a twist maybe even he didn’t see coming at the time, Rose’s upbringing paved the way for his future stardom. “In some ways I hate the way I was raised,” he’s noted, “but in some ways I can’t hate it because it gave me this sense of drive — this mission to do something with my life.”

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Once he broke free from the confines of home and landed in LA making music with the likes of Slash, Izzy Stradlin, Duff McKagan, and Steven Adler — it was game on, and Rose and the band soon wrote some classics that would become Guns N’ Roses greatest hits. Rose, for one, was always willing to suffer for his art. “I live for the songs. If I go through a bad time, well, anything I have to go through is worth it if I’ve got a song out of it,” he told Music Connection magazine in 1986, early into his career.

“If I had to sleep in a parking garage and I hated it and I wanted to give up, I just kept going, and then I got a song out of it from the experience. I’m so glad that I had to go through a ton of sh—.” His passion seamlessly transferred to the stage. “I try to put every single thought I possibly can into every performance and every line,” he said, “and that’s why I might be known as histrionic, ’cause I go full out.”

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Audiences certainly responded to his and the band’s authenticity, as did industry bigwigs. “There are the singers, drummers, guitarists and bass players who sit around trying to figure out how to write songs so they can get [sex] every night, and there are artists who create what is inside of them, and they put it out because they have to get it out. That’s the way Guns N’ Roses seemed from the beginning,” Tom Zutaut, the Geffen suit who signed the band, once explained.

Though the band’s lineup has changed many times through the years — with Matt Sorum, Steven Adler, Dizzy Reed, among others — cycling in to replace some of the original lineup, Guns N’ Roses greatest hits have consistently thrilled their fans and their peers with their no-holds-barred fusion of rock, metal, and punk. As Green Day’s Billie Joe Armstrong said when he inducted the band into the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame in 2012, “They did it [all] for the love of playing loud-ass rock ’n’ roll music. The thing that set them apart from everyone else is guts, heart and soul. And most importantly, they told the truth and painted a picture of the mad world that they lived in.”

Here, a collection of some of Guns N’ Roses greatest hits that represent the mark they’ve left on rock ’n’ roll forever.