Songoftheday 11/30/17 - I'm a cold heartbreaker fit to burn and I'll rip your heart in two, and I'll leave you lyin' on the bed...

"You Could Be Mine" - Guns N' Roses
from the album Use Your Illusion II (1991)
Billboard Hot 100 peak: #29 (one week)
Weeks in the Top-40: 8

Today's song of the day comes from the rough and tumble heavy metal/ "glam" band Guns N' Roses. After their massive success with their debut album Appetite For Destruction, they took a left turn, releasing the odds n' sods record G N'R Lies, which still scored them a top-five pop hit with the acoustic ballad "Patience" in the summer of 1989. After a tour with Aerosmith in the late 80's, the first year of the new decade was rather scattershot, with the band fighting with each other and their own management. Drummer Steven Adler was fired, rehired, then fired again, replaced by the Cult's Matt Sorum (who also was joined by keyboard player Dizzy Reed). Longtime manager Alan Niven was dumped as well. The only music coming from the band included a contribution to the Tom Cruise movie Days Of Thunder, which was a cover of Bob Dylan's "Knockin' On Heaven's Door" which climbed to #18 on Billboard's Mainstream Rock radio chart. That was followed by "Civil War", an original that still had Adler playing that climbed to #4 on that same chart, which was from a charity record. Both of these songs would be included in the band's upcoming album, which actually was a first; a double album release called Use Your Illusion. Leading up to the September release of the two albums, another movie song was released by Guns N' Roses as a single to promote the upcoming sets.

"You Could Be Mine", written by lead singer Axl Rose and rhythm guitarist Izzy Stradlin, was first heard in the Arnold Schwarzenegger franchise film Terminator 2: Judgement Day. It wasn't included in the soundtrack, but the Terminator character makes a cameo hunting for Axl in the music video that MTV ate all the hell up...

Even though it was by far a risky choice to release as a pop single, and probably the "hardest" metal hit up to that time, "You Could Be Mine" spent two months in the American top-40 in August of 1991. The song also climbed to #3 for a week on Billboard's Mainstream Rock radio chart. Internationally, the record would hit #3 in the UK, which would be their second all-time highest rank there (ironically their re-release of "Knockin' On Heaven's Door" got one step higher at #2). The single logged four weeks at #1 in Spain. It also spent five weeks at #2 in New Zealand, also hit #2 in Switzerland, Sweden, Norway, Ireland, and Italy, and made the top ten in Australia (#3), the Netherlands (#4), Germany (#5), France (#8), Austria (#8), and Belgium (#10).

The popularity of this song certainly helped the Use Your Illusion II album, which contained the song, outsell Use Your Illusion I and debut at #1 above it on its first week on the Billboard albums chart (a first at that time for two albums from the same artist to debut in the top two spots in the same week). While most of the American hits would eventually be pulled from Use Your Illusion I, the second disc included the aforementioned British success of "Knockin' On Heaven's Door", along with the UK top ten hit "Yesterdays" (UK #8), which was a minor American pop hit at #72 (it reached #13 on the Mainstream Rock list), and again, "Civil War", which was released in 1993 in the UK and hit #11. Also, two more tracks from the second volume reached the Mainstream Rock chart, "Pretty Tied Up" (#35) and "Estranged" (#16).

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Here's the band in their first live performance of the song at the Rock In Rio II festival in 1991...