At a time when Tiffany, Belinda Carlisle and Europe were topping the charts, one band came along and re-affirmed the thinking music aficionado’s faith in popular music. The eighties started promising enough with the emergence of New Wave but several years of cocaine fuelled self indulgence had left the doors wide open for the Milli Vanilli scandal that was just around the corner. “Appetite For Destruction” was the debut album from the Gunners. Unbelievably, the band left arguably their greatest song, ‘November Rain’ off this collection, feeling they already had an abundance of ballads. And despite being over hyped by rock journalists the world over, the band hailed as the new Rolling Stones and next big thing, for once, really did live up to those lofty expectations in a way the Strokes never could. Twenty eight million sales later and the rest, as they say, is history. What made this album special was that these songs were all road tested on the Los Angeles club circuit for many months before being committed to tape.
Before the drugs, debauchery and private jets got hold, Axel, Slash (who mainly wrote “Rocket Queen”), Duff (who wrote most of ‘It’s So Easy’) and Izzy (“Think About You” which is a song inspired by his use of heroin) were all writing great songs and were unarguably some of the most incredible musicians in the rock/metal genre of the era. You only have to compare how incredible spin off band, Velvet Revolver sounded, compared to Axel and some random session musicians on the bloated and frankly embarrassing ‘Chinese Democracy’. As you would expect, some of these songs were inspired by encounters with groupies, notably “My Michelle”. Occasionally, the lyrics break away from the sex and drugs theme, Axel got the idea for “Welcome To The Jungle” when he picked up a crazy hitchhiker on his way to LA from his small town home in Indiana. The song is notable for the UK release, which contained an ACDC cover of “Whole Lotta Rosie” on the b-side. The irony of Axel drawing inspiration from mental illness would not be lost in the future when a diet of drugs and alcohol would result in some bizarre behavior and god-awful music, an album of covers, “The Spagetti Incident” being the pinnacle of subsequent career low points.
If one song is the centerpiece of this album, it is “Paradise City” written mainly by Slash in the back of a van, the original Eric Cartman-like lyric, sadly left on the cutting room floor, “where the girls are fat and they have got great titties”. A curious footnote in this album’s legacy was that the original cover featuring robot rapists was consigned to the scrap-heap after the band’s label Geffen were forced to take it off the market. All great albums generally have one sing-a-long anthem, on this album being “Sweet Child of Mine”, which went to number one virtually everywhere on planet earth. This song was inspired by Slash’s then girlfriend, Erin and in Slash’s autobiograghy he confesses the famous riff at the start was intended as a musical joke, only the rest of the band loved it and insisted it be included in the final version.
