I’m not afraid to say that Guns N’ Roses helped me make friends. I had just started a study abroad program in Melbourne, Australia, and was living in a dorm full of locals who weren’t as enamored with my accent as I was with theirs. It’s not like I had moved to Tokyo, but yeah, there was a little culture shock. Start with the guy on my hallway who actually used all the Aussie slang printed on coffee mugs in tourist shops: "chockablock," "good on ya," "fair dinkum." They slathered tar on their toast and called it Vegemite. They hated peanut butter.

The only common ground I found in the beginning was "beer"…until I heard Slash’s guitar solo to "Sweet Child o’ Mine" through my next-door neighbor’s walls. I knew that solo. I loved that solo. Not back when they first debuted Appetite for Destruction— I was only six, and Slash wasn’t the greatest role model —but through high school and college, when I played GNR on repeat for the better part of a decade. It was "Welcome to the Jungle" and "Paradise City" before every soccer game, and "November Rain" when I was mad at my mom for not letting me wear man-sized flannel shirts to school. And when I daydreamed about fronting a rock band, I always started my set with a cover of "Sweet Child o’ Mine." If Axl could hit those falsetto notes, imagine what a girl could do!

It seemed my Aussie wallmate had the same daydream. Aaron, a skinny redhead who disappeared behind his electric guitar, had been perfecting the Slash solo in his dorm room—with the door open—for the better part of an hour. I got up the nerve to peek in, offered some kind of lame compliment, and then got to chatting about how amazing it would be to see GNR live. The rest, they say, is ace.

Fast forward to today. A week after Guns N’ Roses entered the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame (beating out Northwest favorites Heart, no less), a ghostly shade of the band is slated to play KeyArena this Friday. And it’s killing me. It’s as close as I’ll ever get to seeing them live, but this is imitation GNR. A cover band. Axl Rose, now with cornrows, and his backing seven. Sure, Duff McKagan’s new band Loaded will open, and I hear the concerts are three-hour epics, but when it comes to the international language of Slash’s guitar solo, I’d rather hear the original.

Guns N’ Roses plays KeyArena Dec 16 at 8.