Tuesday Top Ten: Fun Facts About Appetite For Destruction

This past Saturday marked the 25th anniversary of the release of one of my generation's defining albums, Appetite for Destruction by Guns N' Roses.

Yesterday, Pissed Off and Weez nearly simultaneously sent me a link to a Dead Spin article recounting others' memories of Appetite, often relating to the first time they heard the album.  It's a pretty good read, and the stories are often similar.

I have recounted my love for Appetite and how I came to love Guns N' Roses in piecemeal fashion in various posts, but here is the complete version.

I will never forget exactly where I was when I discovered Guns N' Roses.  While the album came out in July 1987, it really didn't take off until the summer of 1988.  That summer, I was visiting one of my best friends from Houston, Pat, who had since moved to Germantown, Tennessee.  At that point, I'm not sure if I had even heard of Guns N' Roses, and I guarantee Pat hadn't.  So we were sitting in his living room watching MTV in the middle of the day.  All of a sudden, this guy with a top hat and no face plugs in a Les Paul and plays this beautiful fucking riff that can't help but enrapture anyone who hears it.  That was it, man. That's all I needed.

When I got home from the trip, I went to the local Phar-Mor, which is where I made most of my tape purchases, video game purchases, sportswear purchases, and movie rentals before it filed for bankruptcy because its CEO and CFO were embezzling tens of millions of dollars.  Anyway, I asked my mom if I could get it (with my own money, of course), and she said "yes."  To this day, I have no idea why my mom let me buy the tape.  She had to have seen the "Parental Advisory" sticker and the cross with five skulls on it, or maybe I hid it from her.  Feeling like I had pulled one over on her and it was only a matter of time before she found me out, I raced to the cash register and paid for it with the money this sweet, naïve woman had given me to mow the lawn.

As soon as I got home, I ran up to my room and popped the tape in my Magnavox dual-tape boom box.  I was floored.  By the middle of the second song ("It's So Easy"), my innocence (or whatever was left of it) was lost faster than Axl could say, "why don't you just . . . FUCK OFF?!"  What did he just say?  I think I rewound that song three or four times to make sure I heard that right.  I did, and it was awesome.  At that time, there really wasn't all that much swearing in albums.  There might be a "shit" here or an "ass" there, but it was rare.  The number of f-bombs throughout this album was eye-opening for a 10-year-old in 1988.  I had no idea you were allowed to say that in a song, or anywhere, for that matter.

And of course, there was cover art.  Sure, the outside has skeletal representations of the band members, and that's cool, but the inside is insane.  There are cartoons depicting chicks with their panties around their ankles who were apparently recently sexually assaulted by flying robot pods with knives for teeth and alligator skeletons walking on two feet with either guns or binoculars for eyes.  A ten-year-old just isn't the same after seeing that.  I didn't get what was going on, but I knew I didn't want my mom to ever see it.

All it took was one listen for me to be hooked.  There was something different about the album, even if I didn't know why at the time.  I just knew that I liked it a lot, even if I didn't understand why anyone would stay in bed for two hours after waking up.

As time goes by, I think I appreciate the album even more.  It kicks your ass every time you hear it, and there hasn't been a band or an album that has replicated what Guns N' Roses did on this album since then.  I can't think of an album that has withstood the test of time so well.  It has never been uncool to listen to Appetite for Destruction.  It captured everything that was great about rock and roll:  drugs, booze, sex, the attitude and raw energy of punk, the grittiness and swagger of AC/DC and Aerosmith, and the showmanship and bombast of Queen and Van Halen.  Most importantly, though, the songs are GOOD.  There is not a bad song on the album, and I cannot foresee a circumstance where I would ever get tired of listening to it.  I still get excited when I hear the first notes of "Sweet Child O' Mine" or "Nightrain," the distorted pseudo-hand jive opening beat of "Mr. Brownstone," the groove of "My Michelle," or that opening drum pop on "Rocket Queen."  Shit, I'm listening to it right now.  It very well might be:  (1) the best album released since I was born; (2) the best hard rock album of all-time; and (3) the best debut album of all-time.

With that, here are ten fun facts about the album, followed by a streaming playlist with the album (and a couple other GNR songs that someone on Grooveshark for some reason added to Appetite):

1.  The album reached #1 on the Billboard charts, but not until 50 weeks after it was released. In all, Appetite was #1 for five weeks (although not consecutively).

2.  The album produced three Top 10 hits, "Welcome to the Jungle" (#7), "Sweet Child O' Mine" (#1), and "Paradise City" (#5).  "Sweet Child O' Mine" is the band's only #1 hit in the US.

3.  It has sold more than 30 million copies worldwide, including over 18 million in the US, making it one of the top 30 biggest-selling albums in the world and the 11th biggest-selling album in the US.

4.  In 2009, VH1 named "Welcome to the Jungle" the best hard rock song of all-time.

5.   "My Michelle" is actually based on a woman named Michelle Young that the band used to hang out with.  Axl originally wrote it as a romantic song, but then decided to be honest about Michelle's life and completely changed the song into what it became: a dark, brooding, and raunchy rocker about drug abuse and parents who are either dead or working in porn.  The first couple lines kind of blow you away (certainly when you're ten the first time you hear them): "Your daddy works in porno / Now that mommy's not around / She used to love her heroin / But now she's underground." At least poor Michelle gets free coke.

6. "Nightrain" is an ode to the cheap booze Night Train Express, which the band drank a lot of when they were still poor, up-and-coming Sunset Strip rockers.  The band had written parts of the song, but its completion was spurred one night when the band was walking down the street passing around a bottle of Night Train.  Someone yelled, "I'm on the night train!," and the whole band joined in, with Axl improvising the lines in between ("Bottoms up!." "Fill my cup!" "And I can never get enough!").  They finished the song soon thereafter.  Aside from "Welcome to the Jungle," "Sweet Child O' Mine," and "Paradise City," this was the only other song off of the album released as a single in the US, and it peaked at #93.

7.  "Out Ta Get Me" was written in less than three hours and is about Axl's trouble with the law when he was a kid growing up in Indiana.

8.  "Mr. Brownstone" is about a guy who can't get out of bed for two hours in the morning.  As it turns out, it's because he's a heroin addict –- or, more appropriately, two heroin addicts.  Slash and Izzy Stradlin wrote this song about their typical day as heroin addicts.  They wrote the lyrics on the back of a grocery bag.

9.  "Rocket Queen" –- which was, is, and will forever be my favorite Guns N' Roses song –- contains an audio clip of coitus.  That moaning you hear beginning around the 2:20 mark is actually a sound recording of Axl Rose fucking Steven Adler's girlfriend, Adriana Smith, in the studio.  Even though Adler had apparently sanctioned this, as you might imagine, things between him and Smith kind of deteriorated after that.

10.  "Paradise City" was written in the back of a van driving back to LA from a gig in San Francisco.  One of Slash's improvised original lines after Axl sang "Take me down to the Paradise City" was "Where the girls are fat and have big titties."  The latter line sadly did not make the cut.