The Story Behind the Guns N’ Roses Epic ‘Coma’

This year is the 30th anniversary of the Guns N’ Roses ambitious Use Your Illusion albums, and to mark the occasion, Ultimate Classic Rock is doing something pretty cool by diving into the background of each song on the records with a new one every day. The track I got to tell the story behind was “Coma,” which is easily one of my favorite GNR compositions of all time.

Live, they’d only done it a few times around the release of the Illusions, so imagine my surprise in 2016 at the first full-fledged reunion show in Las Vegas when it was busted out smack-dab mid-set. To say I lost my shit was the understatement of 2016, and was going crazy by the time Axl Rose hit the ending right on point. Check out my review of that gig after it happened over at Vanyaland.

Onto Coma, hit up Ultimate Classic Rock for my piece which ran there last week, and please take some time to dig into all of the Illusion tracks while you’re there. Lastly, this got me thinking about the last anniversary of the Guns’ opuses, the 25th back in 2016. Again at Ultimate Classic Rock, a few of us were asked to pare down the two LPs to one. Five years is a long time, and I had completely forgotten that on my “Choose Your Illusion,” I kicked it off with “Coma.” Have a listen to that whole playlist below.