Five months after its release, Appetite for Destruction by Guns N' Roses had sold about 200,000 copies, and Geffen Records was ready to pull the band off the road and move on to a follow-up. The debut had entered the Billboard 200 at number 182, radio would not touch it, and MTV did not want the video. Then the network finally aired "Welcome to the Jungle", and the switchboard lit up.
A little over a year after release, the record was number one in America. It went on to spend 147 weeks on the Billboard 200, earn an 18-times-platinum RIAA certification and, by Billboard's 2008 reckoning, become the best-selling debut album in US history. All of it came from five broke Sunset Strip musicians, a producer with a razor blade and a budget of about $370,000.
Album Facts
| Field | Detail |
|---|---|
| Artist | Guns N' Roses |
| Album | Appetite for Destruction |
| Release Date | 21 July 1987 |
| Label | Geffen |
| Producer(s) | Mike Clink |
| Studio(s) | Rumbo (Canoga Park), Take One (Burbank), Record Plant and Can Am (Los Angeles); mixed at Mediasound, New York |
| Genre / Subgenre | Hard rock, heavy metal, glam metal |
| Track Count | 12 |
| Billboard 200 Peak | 1 (four non-consecutive weeks, from 6 August 1988) |
| UK Albums Chart Peak | 5 |
| Other Notable Chart Peaks | New Zealand 1, Canada (RPM) 2, Germany 2, Austria 3, Netherlands 3, Spain 3, Australia 7 |
| Certifications | RIAA 18x Platinum (2008), Music Canada Diamond, BPI 8x Platinum, ARIA 7x Platinum |
| Estimated Sales | Over 30 million worldwide |
| Key Singles | Welcome to the Jungle, Sweet Child o' Mine, Paradise City |
Cultural Context
By 1986 the Sunset Strip belonged to hairspray. Mötley Crüe, Ratt and Poison were selling multiplatinum by mixing an exaggerated take on seventies glam-rock style with pop hooks.
Rolling Stone's Brian Hiatt later described Guns N' Roses' music as "ferocious, sexy hard rock that found common ground between Aerosmith and the Sex Pistols, Lynyrd Skynyrd and the New York Dolls." When Appetite arrived in July 1987, it was up against heavyweight competition. Music journalist Stephen Davis pointed to Aerosmith's comeback album Permanent Vacation, Def Leppard's Hysteria all over the radio, and U2 dominating MTV's prime time. Outside California, American press and radio barely noticed it.
Guns N' Roses Before Appetite
Two pairs of childhood friends sat at the core of the band. Slash (born Saul Hudson) and Steven Adler had skipped junior high together in Los Angeles, while Axl Rose and Izzy Stradlin ran wild in Lafayette, Indiana. Duff McKagan came down from Seattle with real punk credentials: he had been the original drummer in the Fastbacks while still at school.
The name came from a short-lived merger of Rose's Hollywood Rose and L.A. Guns, the band led by Tracii Guns. A planned EP in March 1985 fell through when Tracii left, and the others pushed him out to make room for Slash but kept his name. "Hey, man, it's just a band name," Stradlin told him. The classic five-piece first rehearsed in a Silverlake studio in May 1985.
"The moment that we fuckin' slammed into our first chord, there was something, and we all knew it. We were only twenty years old, but we considered ourselves real veterans."
Duff McKagan, Rolling Stone, 2007
Most of them lived, rehearsed and wrote in a vermin-ridden space with no toilet at Sunset and Gardner. "Strippers were our main source of income," Slash told Rolling Stone. Geffen signed the band in March 1986, with Tom Zutaut as their A&R man. They wrecked a rented house on the former estate of Cecil B. DeMille, tearing out the toilets and throwing them through the window. The damage came to $22,000, and managers Arnold Stiefel and Randy Phillips sent the bill to Geffen and dropped them. Amid the squalor, Zutaut found Axl's padlocked room spotless.
The band eventually settled on a manager, the Englishman Alan Niven, who also looked after Great White. To keep interest alive while they disappeared into the studio, and to calm a label that doubted they had enough songs, Guns N' Roses released the four-track EP Live ?!*@ Like a Suicide in December 1986.
Pre-production and Demos
Rose said many of the songs were written while the band played the Los Angeles club circuit. Several songs that ended up on later Guns N' Roses albums were in the running, including "Back Off Bitch", "You Could Be Mine", "November Rain" and "Don't Cry". Rose already had a version of "November Rain" when he played it to Nazareth guitarist Manny Charlton, who cut demos with the band at Sound City in 1986. "That one's for the second album," he told him.
Finding a producer took several attempts:
- Spencer Proffer was hired to test the chemistry on "Nightrain" and "Sweet Child o' Mine" and ended up recording nine songs.
- Paul Stanley of Kiss heard a "Nightrain" demo and suggested the chorus needed an extra hook. Rose never spoke to him again.
- Robert John "Mutt" Lange was considered, but the label would not pay for a famous name.
- Mike Clink, a former Record Plant engineer who had produced Triumph, got the job, and the band cut "Shadow of Your Love" with him first as a test.
Rose later said Proffer's sound was too radio-friendly, and that was why they went with Clink.
Creating Appetite for Destruction
Clink rehearsed with the band for weeks before they moved into Rumbo Recorders in Canoga Park in January 1987. The studio belonged to Daryl Dragon, the Captain of Captain and Tennille. Sessions officially ran from 18 January to 23 June. The band spent two weeks laying down basic tracks, and Clink cut the best takes together with a razor blade on two-inch tape.
Then came a month of eighteen-hour days. Slash overdubbed through the afternoons and evenings, and Rose sang until the sun came up. Slash could not find his guitar sound and got so frustrated with a rented Gibson SG that he smashed it through a van window. He finally settled on a Les Paul copy fitted with Seymour Duncan Alnico II pickups, played through a Marshall, and spent hours with Clink trimming his solos until they were as catchy as the vocal melodies.
Adler said his drums were done in six days. Rose took far longer, insisting on recording his vocals one line at a time, and his perfectionism drove the rest of the band out of the studio. He had mostly been a high screamer on stage, but in the studio he revealed a much wider range: a low harmony at the start of "Paradise City" and the siren wail that opens "Welcome to the Jungle".
"With the intro to 'Welcome to the Jungle,' he didn't just open his mouth and that happened; we tried multiple, multiple takes to make sure it was the right growl."
Mike Clink, Rolling Stone, 2007
Final overdubs and mixing moved to Mediasound Studios in New York, where Steve Thompson and Michael Barbiero mixed the record, and mastering was done at Sterling Sound. Rolling Stone described Appetite as one of the last classic rock records mastered with vinyl in mind and mixed by five people frantically riding faders on a desk with no automation. "We used classic instruments and classic amps," Clink said. The budget came to about $370,000, an extravagant sum for a debut at the time.
"It could almost be seen as the last of one of those types of records, from Layla to Abbey Road on down. It could be seen as the last great rock record made totally by hand."
Vic Deyglio, assistant engineer, Rolling Stone, 2007
Personnel and Credits
| Role | Player | Notes |
|---|---|---|
| Core band | ||
| Lead vocals | W. Axl Rose | Also backing vocals, percussion, synthesizer on "Paradise City" |
| Lead guitar | Slash | Also acoustic, slide guitar and talk box |
| Rhythm guitar | Izzy Stradlin | Also lead guitar, backing vocals, percussion |
| Bass | Duff "Rose" McKagan | Also backing vocals |
| Drums | Steven Adler | Cowbell on "Nightrain" |
| Production and engineering | ||
| Producer, engineer | Mike Clink | |
| Mixing | Steve Thompson, Michael Barbiero | Mediasound, New York |
| LP and cassette mastering | George Marino | |
| CD mastering | Barry Diament | |
| Assistant engineers | Dave Reitzas, Micajah Ryan, Andy Udoff, Jeff Poe, Julian Stoll, Victor Deyglio | Deyglio credited as "Victor 'the fuckin' engineer'" |
| Artwork | ||
| Original painting | Robert Williams | Moved inside the sleeve |
| Cross tattoo design | Billy White Jr. | Redrawn by Andy Engell |
| Art direction and design | Michael Hodgson | |
| Photography | Robert John, Jack Lue, Greg Freeman, Marc Canter, Leonard McCardie | |
| Uncredited | ||
| Background vocals | Adriana Smith | "Rocket Queen" only |
The credits list no guest musicians, and Stradlin's contribution is easy to underrate. He plays the lead intro and the first half of the first solo on "Nightrain", and McKagan remembers his style well: "Izzy had this thing where he'd play, like, half the notes. It was cool, it was his style. Slash and I would have to figure out what he meant to play."
The single uncredited voice on the record belongs to Adriana Smith, and her story belongs with "Rocket Queen" below.
The Songs on Appetite for Destruction
| # | Title | Writer(s) | Length | Single? | Notes |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | Welcome to the Jungle | Guns N' Roses | 4:31 | Yes | First song the band wrote together |
| 2 | It's So Easy | Guns N' Roses, West Arkeen | 3:21 | Yes | Started as an acoustic song by McKagan and Arkeen |
| 3 | Nightrain | Guns N' Roses | 4:26 | Yes | Named after a cheap fortified wine |
| 4 | Out ta Get Me | Guns N' Roses | 4:20 | No | Rose's teenage run-ins with Indiana police |
| 5 | Mr. Brownstone | Guns N' Roses | 3:46 | Yes | Heroin song, lyrics written on a grocery bag |
| 6 | Paradise City | Guns N' Roses | 6:46 | Yes | Only track with synthesizer |
| 7 | My Michelle | Guns N' Roses | 3:39 | No | Slash swapped to a 1960s SG |
| 8 | Think About You | Guns N' Roses | 3:50 | No | Began as a Stradlin solo song |
| 9 | Sweet Child o' Mine | Guns N' Roses | 5:55 | Yes | The band's only US number one |
| 10 | You're Crazy | Guns N' Roses | 3:16 | No | |
| 11 | Anything Goes | Guns N' Roses, Chris Weber | 3:25 | No | Rewritten Hollywood Rose song |
| 12 | Rocket Queen | Guns N' Roses | 6:13 | No | Riff dates back to Road Crew |
The vinyl sides were labelled G and R instead of A and B. The "Guns" side deals with drugs and hard city living; the "Roses" side covers love, sex and relationships.
Welcome to the Jungle
The band's first true co-write began with Slash playing a riff to Rose in Slash's mother's basement. "I picked up my guitar, standing in front of the couch on one knee, and said, 'Check this out,' and it stuck with him," Slash recalled. McKagan built the trippy breakdown from "The Fake", a song he had written in 1978 for his punk band the Vains, and Stradlin pieced together the bridge. Slash reckoned the whole thing took about three hours. Rose based some of the lyrics on a man he met in New York soon after arriving from Indiana in 1980.
It's So Easy and Nightrain
"It's So Easy" was McKagan's song, started with West Arkeen as what Rose called an acoustic "Hippie Ya-Ya" number until Slash turned it into a rock song. It became the band's regular show opener after the album came out. "Nightrain" grew from a rough Stradlin riff and only got its chorus when the band were walking down Palm Avenue in West Hollywood, sharing a bottle of Night Train Express, and someone yelled "I'm on the night train!" Slash later called it his favourite song to play live.
Mr. Brownstone and Paradise City
Slash and Stradlin wrote "Mr. Brownstone" in Stradlin's apartment, lamenting their heroin habits, and scrawled the lyrics on the back of a grocery bag. It was the first song they finished after signing to Geffen. "Paradise City" came together in the back of a rental van on the way home from a San Francisco gig, with the band drinking and playing acoustic guitars. Slash pitched a much cruder second line for the chorus and was outvoted. Rose told Hit Parader the verses were "about being in the jungle; the chorus is like being back in the Midwest."
My Michelle
In one of two accounts of its origin, "My Michelle" was written about Michelle Young, an old friend of Slash's. Rose's first draft was sweet and romantic and bore no relation to her life, so he rewrote it with brutal honesty about her addiction, her mother's death and her father's work in pornography. The band worried it would upset her. She liked it, honesty and all.
Sweet Child o' Mine
The last song written for the album started as a throwaway. At the DeMille house Slash was playing a circus-style melody, which he called a "goofy personal exercise", while pulling faces at Adler. Stradlin added chords, and upstairs Rose was listening and writing lyrics about his girlfriend Erin Everly, daughter of Don Everly. When the band cut demos with Spencer Proffer, Proffer suggested a breakdown at the end. Rose, listening to the loop, kept muttering "Where do we go now?", and Proffer told him to sing it. "If Axl hadn't been there writing those lyrics, chances are that song would have never existed," Slash said.
Rocket Queen
The closer's riff dates back to Road Crew, the short-lived band Slash, McKagan and Adler had before Guns N' Roses, and McKagan says its groove owes a debt to Cameo, whose "Word Up!" he and Adler jammed along to for hours. During the New York mixing sessions, Rose wanted real sex sounds for the bridge. Barbiero set up the microphones and handed the job to his assistant, Vic Deyglio, who recorded Rose with Adriana Smith, Adler's on-off girlfriend. "It was like a Ron Jeremy set in there," Deyglio said. In the song's final verse the bravado drops away, and Rose said he wanted to give the album a happy ending after all the darkness.
B-sides, Outtakes and Lost Songs
The singles carried their share of extras, much of it recorded live:
- "Shadow of Your Love", a Hollywood Rose song, and "Move to the City" on the 12-inch of "It's So Easy".
- A live cover of AC/DC's "Whole Lotta Rosie" backing the UK "Welcome to the Jungle", with live "It's So Easy" and Bob Dylan's "Knockin' on Heaven's Door" on the 12-inch.
- A live "It's So Easy", recorded at the Marquee in London on 28 June 1987, on the US "Sweet Child o' Mine".
- "Reckless Life" behind "Nightrain".
In 1999 Rose re-recorded the whole album with his late-nineties line-up to modernise the sound. That version was never released, though half of the new "Sweet Child o' Mine" plays over the end credits of Big Daddy.
Album Artwork and Packaging
The title came from Robert Williams' painting Appetite for Destruction, which showed a robotic rapist about to be punished by a metal avenger. It was the original front cover until several retailers refused to stock the record. Geffen moved the painting inside the sleeve, and the band insisted it was "a symbolic social statement, with the robot representing the industrial system that's raping and polluting our environment."
The replacement started life as a tattoo. Billy White Jr., an art student in Long Beach, drew it for Rose after Axl spotted a drawing White had done on his cousin's wall.
"The cross and skulls that looked like the band was Axl's idea, the rest was me. The knot work in the cross was a reference to Thin Lizzy, a band Axl and I both loved."
Billy White Jr., 2016 interview, via Ultimate Classic Rock
On the finished CD cover, redrawn by Andy Engell, a purple cross with gold Celtic knotwork stands against solid black. Five cartoon skulls sit on it, each with the hair and headgear of a band member: Stradlin at the top, Adler on the left, Rose in the centre in a blue cap and dark glasses, McKagan on the right in a red bandana, and Slash at the foot in a top hat and round shades. An orange scroll above carries the band name, and a red banner below reads Appetite for Destruction. On the vinyl edition the name and title run sideways down the left and right edges.
Release and Reception
Contemporary American critics were mostly unimpressed, and many complained that its success owed more to the sex-and-drugs taboo of the Reagan era than to the music. Dave Ling of Metal Hammer dismissed it in 1987 as an inferior blend of Aerosmith, Hanoi Rocks and AC/DC. British critics were warmer. Kerrang! declared that rock was being "thrust back into the hands of the real raunch rebels." Even so, American critics voted it 26th in the Village Voice's 1988 Pazz & Jop poll, though its supervisor, Robert Christgau, gave it only a B-minus.
The chart run was the slowest of slow burns. The album entered the Billboard 200 at 182 on the chart dated 29 August 1987 and reached number one on 6 August 1988. Slash summed up how the band saw it: "We thought we'd made a record that might do as well as, say, Motörhead. It was totally uncommercial." In the UK it peaked at number five in July 1989.
Later verdicts were far kinder. Ann Powers wrote in the Rolling Stone Album Guide that it "changed hard rock's sensibilities at the time", Stephen Thomas Erlewine called it "the best metal record of the late '80s" for AllMusic, and Maura Johnston gave it 10/10 in Pitchfork, hailing "a watershed moment in '80s rock". Not everyone agreed: Sputnikmusic called it overrated.
Singles and Music Videos
| Single | Released | US Hot 100 | UK | B-side(s) |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| It's So Easy / Mr. Brownstone | 8 June 1987 (UK only) | Not released | 84 | Shadow of Your Love, Move to the City (12") |
| Welcome to the Jungle | 21 September 1987 | 7 | 67; 24 on 1988 reissue with Nightrain | Whole Lotta Rosie (live, UK); Mr. Brownstone (US) |
| Sweet Child o' Mine | 3 June 1988 | 1 | 24; 6 on 1989 reissue | It's So Easy (live, US); Out ta Get Me (UK) |
| Paradise City | 30 November 1988 | 5 | 6 | Move to the City |
| Nightrain | July 1989 | 93 | Reckless Life |
Nigel Dick directed the "Welcome to the Jungle" video, in which Rose steps off a bus into Los Angeles and Stradlin plays a dealer. Niven said he came up with the idea by "stealing from three movies": Midnight Cowboy, The Man Who Fell to Earth and A Clockwork Orange. MTV did not want it. In Rolling Stone's account, Zutaut begged David Geffen to lean on the network, and it played the clip once, at 4 a.m. on a Sunday. Requests flooded in, and it became MTV's most requested video.
Dick also shot "Sweet Child o' Mine" at Mendiola's Ballroom in Huntington Park, with every band member's girlfriend in the clip. He thought it was dull until he saw how the label's female staff reacted.
"I remember looking at my monitor and thinking, 'This sucks, this is really ordinary.'"
Nigel Dick, Rolling Stone, 2007
Rose hated the radio edit, which cut much of Slash's solo. "My favorite part of the song is Slash's slow solo," he told Rolling Stone in 1989. His own concept for the video, built around drug trafficking, had been turned down by Geffen.
Touring and Live
The Appetite for Destruction Tour ran from 14 August 1987 to 19 December 1988: 176 shows over seven legs on four continents. Three shows at London's Marquee in June 1987 came first. For much of the run the band were the opening act, playing under The Cult, Mötley Crüe, Alice Cooper, Iron Maiden and Aerosmith. It was the only full tour the classic line-up ever played together. "We started out as a hardcore band and we toured our fucking asses off," Slash said. "Next thing you know, we've turned into pop stars."
- 8 October 1987: Hammersmith Odeon, London.
- 30 October 1987: CBGB, New York.
- 20 August 1988: Monsters of Rock, Donington Park, in front of more than 100,000. Two fans were trampled to death; the head of security said the band stopped as soon as they were asked.
- 17 September 1988: Texas Stadium. "The band completely fell apart in front of this massive audience," Slash said. "I have nightmares about it."
Support acts over the run included Faster Pussycat, The Quireboys, T.S.O.L., U.D.O. and Zodiac Mindwarp and the Love Reaction. "Paradise City" has closed Guns N' Roses shows since at least 1988.
In TV, Film and Media
- "Welcome to the Jungle": The Dead Pool (1988), Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas, Guitar Hero III, and the unofficial anthem of the Cincinnati Bengals. Rolling Stone readers voted it the greatest sports anthem.
- "Sweet Child o' Mine": The Wrestler, Step Brothers, The Big Short and Thor: Love and Thunder.
- "Paradise City": the theme of the 2008 game Burnout Paradise, which is set in a city named after the song.
Controversy
Beyond the withdrawn cover, the songs have drawn their own disputes. Hanoi Rocks guitarist Andy McCoy has claimed "Paradise City" borrows from his band's riffs; Rose often named Hanoi Rocks as the band's biggest influence. In 2015 an Australian article noted how close "Sweet Child o' Mine" is to Australian Crawl's 1981 song "Unpublished Critics". McKagan called the likeness "stunning" but said he had never heard the song. "Mr. Brownstone" was dragged into the coverage of the Virginia Tech shooting after the killer wrote a play named after it. "Shackler's Revenge" on Chinese Democracy was written partly in reaction to that coverage.
Reissues and Anniversaries
The original painting was meant to return on the 2008 vinyl reissue, but executives swapped it for the skulls at the last minute. The Locked N' Loaded box set, released on 29 June 2018, went all in:
- 73 songs, 49 of them previously unreleased, on four CDs and seven 12-inch LPs, with a launch price of $999.
- 25 recordings from the 1986 Sound City sessions with Manny Charlton, the remastered Live ?!*@ Like a Suicide and two unreleased Clink-session tracks.
- A 96-page book of photos from Rose's archive and 12 lithographs, one for each song.
- "One in a Million" from G N' R Lies was left out.
"Shadow of Your Love" was released as a single on 4 May 2018, the band's first in almost a decade. The set scored 95 on Metacritic, earned a Grammy nomination for Best Boxed Set (it lost to "Weird Al" Yankovic's Squeeze Box) and put Appetite back in the Billboard top ten for the first time in 29 years.
Legacy and Influence of Appetite for Destruction
The line-up that made the record did not last. Adler was fired in 1990, accused of heroin use that was out of control even by the band's standards, and replaced by Matt Sorum of The Cult. Stradlin, newly sober, quit during the Use Your Illusion tour. Zutaut believed Appetite haunted Rose through the long making of Chinese Democracy: "It's because of Appetite that it's so hard for him to let go of Chinese Democracy."
The honours have kept coming. Rolling Stone ranked it 27th of the 1980s in 1989 and 62nd in its 500 Greatest Albums (2012, held in 2020). Kerrang! named it the most essential hard rock album in 2004, Q put it tenth among the best albums of the eighties in 2006, and it appears in 1001 Albums You Must Hear Before You Die. Slash has his own way of measuring it.
"And we made one of those records, which is all I could ever have asked for. It gives me goose bumps. That's something no one ever can take away from me."
Slash, Rolling Stone, 2007
Things You Might Not Know
| Fact | Detail |
|---|---|
| Adler's missing drums | Before the first rehearsal, McKagan and Stradlin hid all of Adler's extra drums, stripping his pop-metal kit back to punk-rock basics. |
| Paul Stanley's parting shot | Rejected partly for wanting to change Adler's kit, then told Slash was saying he "dressed weird", Stanley noted their singer wore a woman's red vinyl jumpsuit on stage. |
| The open-E secret | McKagan says West Arkeen taught him open-E tuning, and without it "It's So Easy" would not exist. That is why Arkeen has a writing credit. |
| The real Rocket Queen | The sleeve credits "Barbi (Rocket Queen) Von Greif", taken to be the girl Rose wrote it for. Adriana Smith says Barbi is the real Rocket Queen. |
| Thirty minutes of tape | Mixer Steve Thompson said they ended up recording about 30 minutes of sex noises for the "Rocket Queen" bridge. |
| The Challenger cover | Rose's first idea for the sleeve was the photo of the exploding Space Shuttle Challenger from Time. Geffen called it "in bad taste". |
| A hidden demo tape | Buyers of the 2018 Locked N' Loaded box reported finding a tape of the band's five-song 1985 Mystic Studios demo session in one of its drawers. |
Listen to the Riffology Podcast
The Riffology podcast took on Appetite for Destruction back in episode six, and the full conversation is embedded at the top of this page. The show is available on all the major podcast platforms, so if the story of five broke Sunset Strip musicians and a razor-wielding producer has you hooked, there is plenty more where that came from.
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