APPETITE FOR DISCUSSION
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APPETITE FOR DISCUSSION
Welcome to Appetite for Discussion -- a Guns N' Roses fan forum!

Please feel free to look around the forum as a guest, I hope you will find something of interest. If you want to join the discussions or contribute in other ways then you need to become a member. We especially welcome anyone who wants to share documents for our archive or would be interested in translating or transcribing articles and interviews.

Registering is free and easy.

Cheers!
SoulMonster

Appetite for Destruction

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Appetite for Destruction Empty Appetite for Destruction

Post by Soulmonster Thu Jul 10, 2014 5:52 pm

APPETITE FOR DESTRUCTION
Appetite for Destruction 220px-Appetitefordestruction
[Original cover]

Appetite for Destruction 220px-GunsnRosesAppetiteforDestruct
[Second cover]

Release date:
July 21, 1987

Track list:
01. Welcome to the Jungle
02. It's So Easy
03. Nightrain
04. Out ta Get Me
05. Mr. Brownstone
06. Paradise City
07. My Michelle
08. Think About You
09. Sweet Child o' Mine
10. You're Crazy
11. Anything Goes
12. Rocket Queen

Singles:
"It's So Easy"- Released: June 15, 1987
"Mr. Brownstone"- Released: July 21, 1987
"Welcome to the Jungle" - Released: October 3, 1987
"Sweet Child o' Mine" - Released: August 17, 1988
"Paradise City" - Released: November 30, 1988
"Nightrain" - Released: July 29, 1989
"My Michelle" - Released: 1989

Recorded:
March–April 1987 at Rumbo Studios, Canoga Park, CA; Take One Studio, Burbank, CA; The Record Plant, Los Angeles, CA and Can Am Studio, Tarzana, CA
Final overdubs and album mixing at Mediasound Studios, NYC
Original mastering at Sterling Sound, NYC

Musicians:
Axl Rose – lead vocals, percussion on "Welcome to the Jungle", synthesizer and whistle on "Paradise City", additional percussion
Slash – lead guitar, co-rhythm guitar.
Izzy Stradlin – rhythm guitar, backing vocals, co-lead guitar on "Nightrain" and "Think About You", percussion on "Paradise City", additional percussion
Duff McKagan – bass guitar, backing vocals
Steven Adler – drums

Production
Mike Clink – production & engineering
Steve Thompson – mixing
Michael Barbiero – mixing
George Marino – LP & cassette mastering
Barry Diament – CD mastering
Dave Reitzas, Micajah Ryan, Andy Udoff, Jeff Poe, Julian Stoll, & Victor "the fuckin' engineer" Deyglio – engineering assistance
Robert Williams – "Appetite For Destruction" painting
Michael Hodgson – art direction & design
Robert John, Jack Lue, Greg Freeman, Marc Canter, & Leonard McCardie – photography
Tom Zutaut – A&R coordination
Teresa Ensenat – A&R coordination
Stravinski Brothers/Alan Niven – career affairs
Boulevard Management – business affairs
Bill White Jr. – cross tattoo design
Andy Engell – cross tattoo redrawing
Robert Benedetti – tattoos (at Sunset Strip Tattoo)


Band members talking about the album:
[Our first video] is going to be realistic and it might show a lot of violence so it might get banned. There's a lot of violence in the world. That's the environment we live in and we like to show what we live in rather than hide it and act like everything is nice and sugary. Everybody likes to paint their pretty pictures, but that just ain't how it is. It just seems easier to know the rougher side [of life] than the more pleasant side just because it's more readily accessible [Los Angeles Times, July 1986].
About recording for Geffen: I have something I want to do with Guns & Roses and this is part of me that I want to get out and take as far as I can. That can be a long career or it can be a short explosive career--as long as it gets out and it gets out in a big way [Los Angeles Times, July 1996].
[The debut record] is due on the first of April [KNAC, December 1986].
Talking about the name of the record: There's millions of names, we haven't picked one yet. When the record is done we'll probably decide [KNAC, December 1986].
Adding: The name, "Guns N' Roses Record"...yeah [KNAC, December 1986].
About fearing that Geffen would subdue the band [in regards to how the end product would be]: Haha, that's why we went with Geffen. We went with om Zutaut who signed [...] and Motley Crue to Elektra and he went to Geffen and he was looking for a band he could just go balls out with. In a matter of fact, in one of the songs, when we just went in and we laid down the song and I left out some obscenities and they told me to go and re-do them[KNAC, December 1986].
Adding: It's like whatever we do they are behind it [KNAC, December 1986].
Adding: We have total artistic control! [KNAC, December 1986].
Talking about whether the songs on the EP will be on the LP: No. Definitly not. It will be new stuff.[KNAC, December 1986].
[...] the next one [= Appetite for Destruction] will probably be ten songs [...][KNAC, December 1986].
I doubt there will be any covers on [Appetite for Destruction][KNAC, December 1986].
We’ve got our progressions already planned out. How we’re going to grow. This record’s going to sound like a showcase. I sing in, like, five or six different voices, so not one song is quite like another, even if they’re all hard rock. In the last year I’ve spent over thirteen hundred dollars on cassettes, everything from Slayer to Wham! – to listen to production, vocals, melodies, this and that. I’m from Indiana, where Lynyrd Skynyrd were considered God to the point that you ended up saying, ‘I hate this fucking band!’ And yet, for our song Sweet Child O’ Mine I went out and got some old Lynyrd Skynyrd tapes to make sure that we’d got that downhome, heartfelt feeling.[Sounds Magazine, April 1987].
Talking about working in the studio: It was all right. We did the set… We went in the studio with the same attitude that we have when we go on stage. It was really not that… It's not that involved. [...] Some of us play guitars, one guy plays drums, and one guy sings. And we just do this and then, you know…[...] We're not… [inaudible] through our fucking… [inaudible] Electric Light Orchestra, or anything. [inaudible] I mean, I have respect for people who go in and take a lot of time to get the shit right. But we… [inaudible] It's a rock n' roll band [June 1987].
Talking about working in the studio: I mean, if you look at recording in a very simple way… I mean, that's the only way to look at it, you're getting the band on a tape. On a tape and put it on a record, you know. [...] We just go play and the record what you're playing [June 1987].
Talking about the songs on the record: Umm, well… Yeah, we write a lot. We got a lot of songs next time too. But we write all the time, so everything we… We try… I don't know, stuff get stale, you know. If you don't do something in music right away then it's like… It's really sort of like, a step downward to go back to it, you know. [...] and there's songs that we used to play that didn't make the album, simply because we were just bored with playing them…[June 1987].
With our record right now - it's like there's a lot of barriers that need to be broken down because people have got used to what they're supposed to hear. A lot of bands -- look, even Judas Priest did it, they decide, okay, we're going to try selling out and see if that works, they toned their music down and tried to appease somebody else besides themselves and it cost them. But the public is conditioned on what they're allowed to like, and if something's too far out of the norm, even if it's cool, they won't - we want people to realise man, just play whatever the f* *k you want to play, not what someone else thinks you should play, so that's what we've done.

I sing in about five or six different voices - that are all part of me, it's not contrived - and there's a ballad, there's one song that's kind of like Black Sabbath goes to Ireland, there's two guitar players that play very different from each other - one plays an '80s blues electric guitar and the other guy's completely into Andy McCoy and Keith Richards - and they've figured out a way to fit it together
[Kerrang!, June 1987].
I think [the record's] going to kick ass. It's against the - mainstream grain. It's definitely a case of you'll either love it or hate it - which is good, as long as you notice it[Kerrang!, June 1987].
Talking about the original cover: No, it wasn't banned by the record company, it was banned by a lot of stores. The record company was actually pretty much into it. It was banned by Warner Brothers, they wouldn't produce the album cover that way so we had to hire an independent artist to put the album cover together. [MTV, October 1987].
With this particular album, Appetite for Destruction, we wanted to put the rock and roll out first, the hard stuff out first[Interview after show, October 1987].
There were a lot of record stores that didn't like the [original] cover and had a different opinion on what it meant. So we knew that was going to happen but we wanted to get the cover out so then we made another cover. So basically there are two covers because we weren't stupid, we didn't want to limit our sales and plus we like both covers[Interview after show, October 1987].
Adding his drunken thoughts: Plus it's a catch-22 'cause we were putting out the first record, right, I mean the first cover, sold so many [?], and we changed it [inaudible, fumbling words]...shit! The first cover's inside the inner sleeve so it's a catch-22. It doesn't really matter, y'know? [Interview after show, October 1987].
I don't really care about the PMRC. I think it is stupid. [...] When the parents hate it, the kids love it [Interview after show, October 1987].
The more stickers they put on records, the more records we sell. It's the whole philosophy of being a teenager and rebellion [Interview after show, October 1987].
About the original cover: I submitted it as a joke. But I thought it kind of described us. Here's this girl that's just been ravaged by this robot; mechanized society. And then here comes the hand over the fence to kill the monster, steal the girl away and make her our girlfriend. [...] [The critics] think it promotes rape. But that's not looking at the picture right. [...] I've noticed that there are so many things you can get away with, except on records [BAM Magazine, November 1987].
It was done live, pretty much. Like, the drums, the rhythm guitar, the bass, are all live in the same room so there's bleeding of the instruments into each other mics and things like that. Just to get as much energy and live feel to the songs.

It was very hard to find someone to produce the record because some of the main producers of our favourite material from the 70s had changed their styles, their approach, or were burned out, you know, or people in the record industry wouldn't work with them anymore because they don't know what they are doing anymore [...] So it took us a long time to find Mike Clink. We work with him and it is basically a co-produced album. But, you know, we got him for a lure amount of money [...] and he gave us the freedom to do whatever we wanted which worked really good for us. He trusted me a lot in the studio with all the vocal ideas, 'cause most of the harmonies I came up with, like on 'It's So Easy' and 'Paradise City', I came up with the night I was recording those parts. Because I had never had the opportunity to work on them before.

[...]Some places you had ideas burning in your mind. In other places you didn't know what to do in that part but you heard this part and right when you heard it, you thought, "yeah, and this part will work in there, too, and what if I did this?" "Now I'll try this one to see if that works," and a lot of times you had things that work, some times you had things that didn't. And you just decide what was best at the moment, felt right, sounded good, take a tape home and listen to it that night and next day decide if you're going to keep it or not. It was real exciting, creative experience. It wasn't like we just in and had to lay down things just this way
[Interview with Sam Harris, December 1987].
Being asked if he would like to go back and change anything: No, the only thing I would like to do, I wish we had more time to mix but we were working on a release date and there were a couple songs that I didn't feel we had enough time to make just right. 'Paradise City' could have been a little clearer. We were mixing two songs a day to make the release date and there were all kinds of reasons why we had to make that release date, like getting a record out before [...] the month of August, there were tons of reasons why we had a certain amount of time to get it done. So we did as best we could. We didn't really compromise 'cause we still hit pretty close to the mark we wanted to hit. There really isn't anything I want to change...there's two words, I think, in that whole record that I didn't quite say the way I wanted to and I forget which words they were, without time to go back to find them and re-do them, and they're not out of key so no one else knows it, I am the only one who personally knows it [Interview with Sam Harris, December 1987].
Talking about other producers they considered: I can say that, anybody that I am naming, I can't say they were burned out or anything, 'cause I never met any of these people. First off we were interested in Mutt Lange [perhaps John Mutt Lange who produced a lot of rock records in the 80s and 90s] but he wanted a million dollars and he's busy anyway. That was one of them. Roy Thomas Baker [RTB would later work on Chinese Democracy] must be, just, kind of a psycho, I have [or "haven't] really looked forward to meeting him just because of that, I mean, he was an idea. The guy who did all the early Aerosmith stuff [perhaps Jack Douglas], the name's escaping me right now, uhm, I can't think of the name, but that guy was one of them. There were different people. It's hard to find people, you come up with the name on the record [...] discussions or something. But we talked to a lot of different people. We flew in Manny [Charlton] from Nazareth, but he wasn't quite...he is a really great guy, we love Nazareth, but he was kind of in a different sphere than us at the time so that it didn't quite work [...] it didn't quite feel right. We talked to Paul Stanley for about five minutes and he wanted to re-write 'Welcome to the Jungle' and something else so that was the end of the conversation and now he goes around saying he was going to produce the record but these guys were too crazy and this and that. No, there was no chance of him producing the record. We talked to him once. We did some stuff with Spencer Proffer [pre-production] who did the second Wasp tape ['The Last Command', 1985] and while that tape sounds really bold and powerful lour material sounded really weak so we kind of just shied [?] that, too. Our EP was recorded in his studio [Interview with Sam Harris, December 1987].
The record's selling alright [Interview with Sam Harris, December 1987].
Talking about the reasons being the limited radio exposure: [Being a new band] is part of it, and the music, and the controversy around us. People think that every song in our record has the word 'fuck'. Four songs have obscenities in them. Four songs, not 12, four. And we're not asking them to play those four, I'm saying, pick one of the others. Also, you know, we have loud guitars, real guitars, real drums. The guitars not the same way on other peoples' records as they are on ours [Interview with Sam Harris, December 1987].
Talking about producers for the album: Tom Werman [a big glam rock producer] didn’t work. We tried out a whole bunch of those fuckers, and the reason we went with Mike Clink was because we’re so set in our ways that we didn’t want anybody to re-write our songs. So what we did for the album was, we signed up with an engineer, who was really hot shit. He produced the album. Basically he just got all the sounds, and produced it. He just basically got Guns N’ Roses on tape. [...] You should have seen him. When we first met him he was Mike Clink and then after a while with us he was Mike Clink plus 15-20 years. After we finished the album there was a complete difference. Then he started going out, he started screwing around with all these different girls, he broke up with his girlfriend. Then he started getting difficult about jobs. He started getting real picky [Rock Scene Magazine, August 1988].
When you get like a Tom Werman (not putting him down-he did a great job on the last Crue album), when you get a “producer” they’re gonna try to do something of their own, when they haven’t been around the whole time you’re bands’ been playing in the dirt. Therefore, where do they get the right to tell you to change this lyric or that riff? You know what I’m saying? That makes sense, right? So, we found a guy who would parlay our sound onto a tape, therefore onto a record, therefore into a record store, and therefore into somebody’s house, onto their turntable. [...] Tom Werman came down to our rehearsal like this (puts his hands over his ears) going, ‘Fuck.’ We never heard from him again [Rock Scene Magazine, August 1988].
Each song on the album was done in maybe two or three takes. We just went in and played. [...] We knew what we wanted to do, so we went in there and kicked ass on the record, and we got done with it [Rock Scene Magazine, August 1988].
Being asked why it didn't take just a week then to do the record: That was just for the basic tracks. The bass, drums, rhythm guitar, and the song structure. Then we went into the studio and I played leads on top of that. At the time the basic tracks were being recorded, I put dummy guitar tracks on there (cause I don’t like to wear headphones) then went back into the studio and just ripped through the whole album, with it coming out through the monitors real loud [Rock Scene Magazine, August 1988].
Being asked which parts of the record he is unhappy with: Unhappy about? It’s like, why get unhappy about it? Why spend that much time being unhappy about it? Fuck it! If there’s something that we aren’t exactly pleased with, it’s twelve songs. Twelve songs to get exactly perfect. . . It doesn’t matter, it’s like there’s little things here and there, where you know you would have liked it a bit different, but it doesn’t matter cause it’s done. It’s there, and you might as well like it cause if you don’t you can put yourself into an early grave worrying about something that you can’t do shit about [Rock Scene Magazine, August 1988].




Last edited by Soulmonster on Sun Nov 23, 2014 7:28 am; edited 2 times in total
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Post by Soulmonster Tue Jul 15, 2014 3:01 pm

If you can play your songs good live you don't have any real problems in the studio. We did the basic tracks in two weeks. We'd have all the amps set up in one room. We had the guitar amps isolated and the bass direct and Steve's drums were in the room and we played in the room off the drums, putting all the tunes down in two weeks. Once in a while Slash would do a live solo and he usually would go back and recut them. He is a perfectionist in a lot of ways [Guitar for the practising musician, September 1988].
About the rawness of the record: Because we did basic tracks in two weeks and then I went back in. Izzy did the basic tracks, that's it. Otherwise what's coming out of the left speaker is what we did in two weeks. Everything he did was in mono. I went back in and did all the stereo stuff. Izzy is on the left, I am on the right and I'm stereo with the echo and the slide stuff. I'm more distorted than Izzy [Guitar for the practising musician, September 1988].
About recording with scratch vocals: When we were going to do that Axl got a sore throat so he ended up doing it later. There were previous recordings where we recorded with vocals. We spent time with Manny Charlton from Nazareth. He came over because we were thinking bout having him produce the record. We were in the studio for two and a half days and we did everything live. We recorded 25 or 30 tunes. We never did anything with that album but we have the masters to it. It's something where we'll go back and pick through it. A lot of the stuff that comes out when your just jamming as a band is the best [Guitar for the practising musician, September 1988].
I went in and did basic tracks and played along with the drums and bass and Izzy. I would screw around but keep the actual song going. Then I would go back later and redo the whole rhythm and all the leads in front of the monitor in the control room. I had the monitors cranked up really loud and would just play along[Guitar for the practising musician, September 1988].
In the studio our drummer is completely hyper. We'd do a song two or three times and if you don't get it you move along. Sometimes you'd have to slow him down. Even now when I listen to him these songs sound kind of fast. Plus we were so excited to finally be working on a record. We were signed for a year before we actually got in with the right people and knew this was it [Guitar for the practising musician, September 1988].
Talking about what they did that year before production started: We tried out a lot of different people for producing. We worked with Manny for three days. We tried a lot of people who wanted to come in and change the music. We were totally against that. You figure if there's nothing else you have it's your music. At least you can say this is my record. We stuck with that [Guitar for the practising musician, September 1988].
Talking about the PMRC sticker: The sticker's pointless [laughs]. It means nothing either way. And if I don't say the word "fuck" or whatever on the next record that's just because it wasn't put in that song, you know, it's nothing to do with, we don't writ songs based on sales or anything else, we just write songs about how we feel [...] [MTV Headbanger's Ball, September 1988].
Adding: We don't write words to put "fuck" in them, it is just life stories. When you talk to somebody on the streets, when you talk to somebody anywhere, swearwords will come into it [MTV Headbanger's Ball, September 1988].
Being told that there are people protesting against the original artwork being on the innersleave of the record: Oh now it's the innersleeve? It wasn't good enough when we took it off the cover and put it on the inside. You know, that's... That blows. They can't...They can't do anything about it. [...] To us it was just a picture that looked sorta cool. [...] People have nothing better to do with their time than picking things apart and make a big deal out of stuff [MTV, October 1988].
Adding his thoughts: Exactly. I mean, for people to look at that sexist, or anything, I guess I can see what they're saying, you know. But we don't look at it that way, and that's the most important thing. If we don't look at it that way, we're not trying to make the sexist statement at all. And I think that's the most important thing. We didn't do that for any reason against women or whatever. And it doesn't matter. It's just artwork. [...] So go ahead. Let them do that, if that makes them feel... If they think they're doing something, then fine   [MTV, October 1988].
The reason, one of the main reasons [Appetite for Destruction's] doing so well, I could be wrong but, I think a lot has to do with timing, and just sort of, you know, the gap that we filled, as far as music's going [MTV, October 1988].
Reaction to Appetite going to number one on the lists: I mean, did that really happen to us? It's like, there's that, and then there's regular life. The rest is just words and numbers that don't really mean a thing [Kerrang!, December 1988].
Explaining Appetite's success: I think the only reason it could have possibly gone to Number One is we're filling some sort of void. That's really the only thing I can attribute it to. It's not because the songs are all huge hits - that's the last thing they are, they're just a bunch of dirty rock 'n' roll songs. So I figure, we're just like the resident down and dirty rock band in town at the moment. Everybody wants to have that record because it's not really that safe... and it looks cool next to George Michael records in their collection [Kerrang!, December 1988].
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Post by Soulmonster Tue Sep 13, 2016 8:57 am

Masterpiece review in Consequence of Sound:

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Post by Soulmonster Fri Jul 21, 2017 6:14 pm

Interesting interview with Tom Zutaut:

Art Tavana wrote:A&R Legend Tom Zutaut Risked His Job to Sign Guns N' Roses, L.A.'s Most Dangerous Band

He looks more like a mountain man than a record executive. With a Led Zeppelin T-shirt and blondish white hair, he gives me a stone-cold stare, followed by an awkward pause. “I don’t do very many interviews,” he finally says. “In fact, 100 journalists from all over the world have reached out and I’ve declined them all, barring a writer from France.”

Inside his 250-year-old historic home, surrounded by paintings of the founding fathers, Tom Zutaut, the former Geffen Records executive who signed Guns N' Roses to a record deal in 1986, is holding an LP as if it were the Constitution. “I’ve held back doing this for 30 years. Saved it for a special moment.”

He gingerly removes the plastic wrap off a first pressing of GNR’s debut, Appetite for Destruction, released 30 years ago this week. The skull and crossbones decal falls onto his Persian rug. When he plays the virgin LP through a hi-fi stereo and four booming speakers, Slash’s blade-like opening riff slices through the thickness off the room.

Now retired to the rolling Blue Ridge Mountains of Virginia, Zutaut has agreed to do an exclusive interview to discuss the best-selling debut album of all time, his greatest accomplishment as an A&R mastermind who reshaped rock & roll in the ‘80s.

TOM ZUTAUT: These first pressing stampers were made entirely at Sterling Sound with George Marino. And this was the only one you could get, initially, with the DMM [direct metal mastering] stamped on the inner grooves with the banned “robot rape” artwork.

L.A. WEEKLY: How did the Robert Williams artwork land on the original cover?
Axl showed me a card with the Williams painting and said, “You realize … this is the future,” then he pointed to the woman: “This is the victim; this is the media, and above them is the monster that the media creates.” He predicted, in 1986, that we were going to live in a world of “fake news,” where we’d feed on tragedy. It depicted human nature and the ugly need we have for an appetite for destruction. Axl told me that CNN was going to change the world by feeding that appetite. He saw the future in that painting, and because GNR had 100% creative control in their contract, the label had to use the artwork.

Was there an alternate cover available simultaneously at record stores?
No, they didn’t get that one initially. We knew after the initial runs of the DMM, which I think we had about 30,000 copies of, that we were going to change the cover so they could order the skull and crossbones after the first run of orders were filled.

Thirty years later and you’re listening to this record for the first time in years. How does it sound?
This was the last great hard-rock record made entirely by hand. No computer assistance or automated faders. It’s a piece of imperfect art that will stand the test of time because it was made manually on a console. It captured lightning in a bottle.

How involved were you, beyond A&R duties at Geffen, in the actual creation of the record?
GNR were always on the verge of implosion, so I had to be very hands-on. A lot of it had to do with drugs the band abused, and I was naive to that at the time. But I remember inviting the band to my house in Hollywood to listen to a bunch of records, like UFO and Aerosmith’s Get Your Wings, and pick and choose what we liked, or didn’t like. The one thing we found consensus on was that UFO’s Strangers in the Night was the best live record ever made. It took us about a year and a half before we went into the studio from that point.

What took so long?
They were writing, and I kept telling them that they needed that one song that would define them and take them to the top. They kept asking me what that was, and I said I’d know it when I heard it. I couldn’t help them write it, but as an A&R person, you always have a lot of say on the first album.

Which song ended up being the one?
"Sweet Child O’ Mine.” I knew right away that it was the missing song before booking them studio time. And it worked because it wasn’t a traditional, formulaic power-ballad. It was seven minutes long and nobody saw it as a single, but I knew it was going to be No. 1 on Billboard.

We had “November Rain” and “Don’t Cry” before we even recorded Appetite, but I didn’t feel like those were songs you would put on a debut. They needed to start with an honest punk statement. Those ballads were overly complex and could alienate their audience outside of L.A. with the image of Axl behind a grand piano. Axl understand that better than anyone. He wanted GNR to start off punk, to counter hair metal.

In terms of track order, why is “Sweet Child O’ Mine” buried on side two?
Most people in radio don’t listen to side two of a record. They don’t even get beyond the first five songs. I intentionally buried the hit and put the credibility tracks first, like “Welcome to the Jungle,” “Night Train” and “It’s So Easy,” which had the punk ethic down.

Why was “It’s So Easy” released as the first single?
Well that was specifically a U.K. strategy. It was written by Duff, with help from the now-deceased West Arkeen, who had the strongest punk ethos in the band. So based on the pre-Appetite Marquee Club shows, it made more sense to start with “It’s So Easy” in the U.K. to get a buzz going.

What’s your personal favorite track off the record?
You know, I’ve never told anyone this, but my personal favorite is “Think About You,” and I fought to have that one to be the second track on side two. I also pushed to have the acoustic guitars mixed at the center, really loud, jangling in the foreground. To me, that was their greatest post punk-rock Rolling Stones moment. I grew up a Stones fan in the world of Beatles versus Stones.

Before recording Appetite, you predicted to David Geffen that the record would sell at least 10 million copies. How did you have the balls to make that kind of prediction?
I believed they were going to be the biggest band in the world after hearing them play just two songs at the Troubadour. Just listen to it on the record. Slash was this 19-year-old kid who could give Jimmy Page a run for his money. Slash at 19 was better than Page at the same age.

This was rock & roll. Not metal, not hard rock. Which is the key to the origins of this record: This is a rock & roll record by a band that I predicted would be bigger than Led Zeppelin, which is what I told David Geffen and put my ass on the line and requested a $75,000 advance to sign GNR in 72 hours.

Did Geffen ever listen to GNR before signing them?
No, he never heard the band until the record was released in July ’87, and even then, I don’t think he listened to a track until it went gold. David Geffen trusted me, which is why I worked for him after I left Elektra where I had helped sign Mötley Crüe. David let me do my thing and I didn’t have to argue with a bunch of accountants to get shit done.

Did you ever talk to Geffen about Appetite after it became a hit in 1988?
After it hit around 10 million in sales, he called me and told me: “I thought you were out of your mind when you said they’d be the biggest rock band in the world … but you were right.”

Why do you think MTV initially declined to play the video for “Welcome to the Jungle”?
Because half their cable outlets were run by a right-wing conservative, John Malone, who told MTV’s founder Bob Pittman that if he played dangerous junkie bands he’d knock MTV off his cable networks.

Why did they end their blockade of “Welcome to the Jungle” in the fall of ‘87?
The album was seen as a failure by the label. GNR had sold 200,000 units within nine months of release, which many bands could have done in those days. Geffen CEO Ed Rosenblatt called me into his office and said the record was dead. That it was time move on to the next one. So I went over his head to David Geffen, who called MTV CEO Tom Freston and pulled a favor to get the video on MTV, at 4 a.m. in New York.

What happened then?
A lot. The next day, I had multiple phone calls from my office. I called my assistant and she said that Rosenblatt and Geffen were looking for me. I got in around 4 in the afternoon, and the head of promotion told me the video had lit up MTV’s switchboards. He was yelling hysterically and said MTV finally added the video into rotation after just one play of “Welcome to the Jungle.”

I can’t believe how sharp Axl’s voice sounds on the intro to the “Jungle.” It literally rips through your ears listening to it right now. Tell me what you felt the first time you heard him sing.
He’s the only guy since Jim Morrison with that kind of animal magnetism and snake-like movements, like two birds in a mating dance. Writer Danny Sugerman would compare him to Jim all the time; he schooled me on Morrison, since I’d never seen him, and Axl was that. Had the rest of the band sucked, I would have signed just Axl. Very few people on the planet have that range and power when they sing. It’s a mythological thing that nobody in rock has possessed since. Read Danny Sugarmen’s out-of-print book on GNR, Axl and mythology.

What’s your relationship like with Axl today?
We haven’t talked in years. But I love him like a brother and I hope he can forgive and look beyond whatever our differences were. I’ve only done my best to help him and the band. I loved Chinese Democracy. I worked on it for a year with him, and it is a brilliant record, but I believe it was ultimately more of an Axl solo record.

Was Axl the bandleader during the recording of Appetite? Some people would say it was Izzy Stradlin.
Well, think about it like this: While the rest of the band was living in a squalor at the Hell House, Axl had a room with a padlock on it that was pristine. He stayed away from the chaos and was sober as a church mouse and overthought everything. But that dichotomy worked because Axl would hear the work, sing through it, and make the changes. Everything had his final say on it. But initially, Izzy had a lot of the ideas. He was the primary creator of the Appetite sound, Slash’s monster guitar riffs were the icing, Duff’s complex bass parts were played like a lead guitarist, but every word and arrangement had Axl’s fingerprints all over it because he was the band’s quality control.

The first thing that hits me listening to this is Adler’s drumming. He sounds like a fucked-up jazz drummer because he never plays the same thing twice, the same way — the imperfections are part of the sound.
He gave them a disco punk quality with dance swing. I used to call Steven’s sound “disco boy puppy dog.” And that’s the key to Appetite. With any other L.A. metal or stadium rock drummer, Appetite would never have sounded as rock & roll or as raw as it did. You know it’s funny, because Steven couldn’t even keep time very well. And there was no software in ’86 to fix that. But Steven was the foundation of the band, and the producer, Mike Clink, knew how to get the best performances out of him. And that’s the greatest secret to Appetite for Destruction: The record doesn’t sound out of time only because the band plays to Steve Adler’s best performances. It sounds tight as fuck because the band follows his imperfections.

Was it hard to find a producer to record Appetite?
I didn’t want the band to be “GMO-ed.” A lot of people wanted to overproduce the band, or just didn’t get it. Nikki Sixx thought the band was crap. We never considered someone like Mutt Lange because his stuff was too slick. We only seriously considered about five guys. One of them was Max Norman, who worked with Ozzy, who wasn’t interested because GNR wasn’t metal enough. We also listened to Nazareth’s “Hair of the Dog,” so we invited Manny Charlton to Sound City, but his personality wasn’t a good fit. He was too nice. But his sessions were bootlegged and they’re out there somewhere.

So how did Mike Clink, an engineer who had never produced a record before, become the producer of Appetite?
I chose him. It took some selling on my part, but it goes back to UFO’s Strangers in the Night, and Mike worked on that record. So I knew he could capture their live sound and run the room. He was the consummate recording engineer and understood how to capture a band on tape, which meant getting a great performance out of them.

What was your role in the studio?
I had to keep them focused, make sure what was recorded had that electricity to it, but also make sure they were able to be in studio when they needed to be in the studio. I mean, Izzy was on smack. Duff was drinking too much. Axl was in his own head, defining that fine line between genius and insanity. So part of the secret was making sure to capture them when genius struck.

I did something pretty unprecedented as well, and requested Geffen give me a private purchase order book so that I could book studio time whenever, even at 3 in the morning, and if Mike was awake, he’d show up. If not, one of the engineers would fill in. GNR could be very time-consuming.

How did Appetite’s unique recording process set it apart from, say, Bon Jovi’s Slippery When Wet and Poison’s Look What the Cat Dragged In?
Those were formulaic hair band records made by factories. They were made for radio, that’s it. Appetite was nothing like that. This wasn’t a hair metal record. It was subversive. Mötley Crüe had some timeless records later on, but other than that, even those records sound dated. Appetite engineering, from the drum track up, with Mike Clink behind the console, just captured the rawness of the ‘70s while the mixing engineers Michael Barbiero — who was more traditional, like Clink — and Steve Thompson were the perfect unit because Thompson was anything goes in the studio, which added a level of chaos to the final mixing process. Man, Thompson wanted to blow up the world and Barbiero wanted to help Clink keep it going. Which is ironic since it was Barbiero who had to mic up Axl and Adriana Smith during the fucking part on the bridge of “Rocket Queen.”

Is there any raw audio of Axl and Adriana’s famous sex scene?
There was about an hour of them fucking on tape. But after it was spliced into the best parts, the stuff Axl liked, we burned the rest of the tape, per the request of Axl. Or so GNR folklore has it. But some of it may have survived!

In hindsight, is there anything about Appetite that you’d change?
I wish we had put “Reckless Life” on it. But that was an argument I lost. I think it might have had to do with the fact that Chris Weber co-wrote it, and it would have led to a publishing issue. But that song belonged on the record.

Do you think the rawness of Appetite began the slow process of cleaning hair metal from the American music industry?
If anything, it inspired bands like Mötley Crüe to make better records. “Wild Side” and “Dr. Feelgood” came out after Nikki Sixx saw GNR and declined to produce them. So if anything, GNR raised the game, unlike Nirvana and Alice in Chains and many other shoegaze bands, who killed rock & roll in the stadiums. But GNR inspired it. Aerosmith had a renaissance after GNR opened for them and hair metal got better because of Appetite.

How does Appetite stack up against music today?
There aren’t any more rock stars. It’s about celebrity, not art. Music as an art form is mostly lost, and it’s been replaced by a giant hit-making machine where Bruno Mars, Katy Perry and Beyoncé, who don’t write their own songs, are now the new “rock stars” in the same vein as the TMZ-fueled non-musicians like the Kardashians.

If you dig deep enough, in the voluminous amount of obscure music on the net, you can find some great music being crafted by true musical artists. But there is no shelf space for it like there is craft-brewed beers at Ralph’s or Kroger. Every now and then something good will accidentally find a crack in the star-making machinery. But the big music companies A&R through mainstream media. The smaller labels feed a niche on low budgets. Much of the best music resides on a server somewhere hidden or lost from the world.

Appetite for Destruction was one of the last times, if not the last time, rock & roll was real, with a budget for exposure. It was the last time major-label rock record-making was funded as an art form. That’s why teenagers today are rediscovering GNR. That is why it doesn’t just stack up against today’s music … it crushes it.
Source: http://www.laweekly.com/music/tom-zutaut-guns-n-roses-aandr-man-talks-about-the-making-of-appetite-for-destruction-8425626
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Appetite for Destruction Empty Re: Appetite for Destruction

Post by Soulmonster Fri Jul 21, 2017 6:22 pm

Art Tavana wrote:How Guns N’ Roses’ ‘Appetite for Destruction’ Hijacked the Music Industry

Maple trees line the roads of Hillsborough, New Hampshire. Shaped into the curved body of a guitar, the old growth can produce a warm tone that’s absent from the ‘80s metal canon.

It does, however, sink deep into the tracks of Guns N’ Roses‘ groundbreaking 1987 debut Appetite for Destruction, where Slash’s ’59 Gibson Les Paul replica bakes a thick layer over Izzy Stradlin’s sticky syncopation. The result is a throwback sound, like early Aerosmith being reborn in the age of modish Van Halen.

For Slash, his tone was the result of American engineering, coupled with his singular desire to blend the blues with heavy metal – rather than shattering the speedometer on his Les Paul. On most of Appetite’s 12 tracks, Slash’s tone feels unlike anything from the period, which defied the sameness of the era it was forged in.

Three decades later, this genre-defining album has sold 30 million units sold worldwide, putting Appetite for Destruction at No. 11 all time. Yet, as legend has it, the project was nearly buried by the risk-averse programmers at MTV, banned by terrestrial radio, and ignored by the Manhattan-dwelling rock critics who held their noses at the scent of Aqua Net hairspray wafting over from the West. Some of the stories behind Appetite’s ascension into the stratosphere are the stuff of legend; other parts are verifiable history that have either been revised, or forgotten by the dead brain cells of those who lived in that cultural milieu.

First, some facts: Appetite for Destruction was never a flop. By October 1987, the album had sold a respectable 150,000 copies, just three months after being released. By all accounts, this was a successful debut. Appetite had taken over the charts by the end of 1988, having then sold 6 million units. It proceeded to pummel the competition during two decades of rumors and high drama, peaking on Sept. 23, 2008, when it reached 18 million in certified units according to the Recording Industry Association of America.

That makes Appetite for Destruction the best-selling debut ever, regardless of genre. The album’s metastasization into pop-culture consciousness, from the point of containment in 1987 to all-out epidemic in 1988, began in the early ‘80s when a farmer in the sticks of Hillsborough handed a flashlight to a 30-year-old guitar maker with bushy eyebrows.

The luthier was an Allman Brothers Band fan who resided in an old trailer in Redondo Beach, behind a guitar shop that employed him. His name was Kris Derrig and, with graying long hair, he began to rummage through a pile of curly maple gathered inside the farmer’s barn. The wood, as described by journalist Matthew Wake, was “old growth, New England fence line” that Derrig would use to build his handmade beauties: Replica 1959 Gibson Les Pauls, hand-painted to a faded sunburst finish.

Jim Foote, the owner of Music Works and Derrig’s boss, suggested he switch the original pickups with the “zebra-style” Seymour Duncan Alnico II Pro version which produced a crunchier tone that was “simultaneously classic and contemporary.” Here’s Stradlin in U.K.’s Sounds magazine, dated April 4, 1987, where he pitches his rock and roll worldview: “Motley Crue was more teen metal. We wanted to go for a more roots-oriented sound than most other bands around here.”

In 1986, while in the studio recording his parts for Appetite, Slash had grown frustrated with the tone of his Gibson SG. He would record with a B.C. Rich Warlock, Firebird, and two Jackson guitars; each missed the mark. Manager Alan Niven — a witty New Zealander who had fashioned GNR as the new Rolling Stones — would purchase a custom guitar for “curly,” one that cost him $2,500 in ’86. It was a 1959 Les Paul replica, a Derrig guitar made with Hillsborough wood. This would become Slash’s main stick.

“Kris had the brilliant idea that he could make a better ’59 than Gibson,” Niven said. “His logic was that in 1959 these guitars were made on the conveyor-belt system. He thought that the craft of a single luthier applied to a single guitar could exceed that system. He found parts of the period, and built 13 of them before he died.” The Derrig guitar was used to record the overdubs on Appetite, which helped Slash add both heavy-metal attack (like Kirk Hammett’s work on Master of Puppets) and backwoods soul (like an Allman Brothers LP) — industrial yet rural. It’s a tone that Slash could never replicate, the rock and roll equivalent of what jazzman Mezz Mezzrow described as Bix Beiderbecke’s imitable “pickled-in-alcohol” tone.

Slash’s tone was a symptom of the band’s desire to produce an unpolished pistol of a recording. The retro approach worked in their favor, as rock and roll was being reconfigured in 1986. MTV had reduced their rock playlist between 1984 and 1986, during the rise of “classic rock” radio when American hard-rock – except for a returning Aerosmith – was practically comatose. A “classic and contemporary” rock band would fill a gap that had widened in the mid ‘80s. It happened just as contemporary heavy metal was saturating the market to the point of annoyance. Through Guns N’ Roses would initially be classified as metal, they refused the label – a genuine, but also savvy business move.

“The label I think deserves to get stuck on us is ‘hard rock,'” Rose told reporter J.D. Callahan of BAM on Nov. 6, 1987, when Appetite was No. 64 on the Billboard 200. In marketing, they refer to this as a “point of difference.” It became Appetite’s underlying theme: This is roots-oriented hard rock, not heavy metal.

The West Coast media was sympathetic to Guns N’ Roses’ “roots-oriented” DNA. In June 1986, LA Weekly described GNR as “Led Zeppelin II,” while the New York critics mostly saw them as yet another hair-metal band entering an already-crowded arena. The critics, too consumed by the perception of L.A. as a factory for boy bands, simply didn’t buy it. They ranked Appetite at No. 26 out of 40 albums in the 1988 Pazz & Jop critics poll, an afterthought the same year GNR was arguably changing the flavor of rock and roll.

In June 1987, Billboard‘s No. 1 album was U2’s The Joshua Tree. The other five places were taken by metal bands that drew on the same audience as GNR: Whitesnake, Bon Jovi, Poison, Motley Crue, and Ozzy Osbourne. In other words: Had GNR tried to follow the blueprint of the other metal hitmakers — fashioning themselves as heartthrobs with anthemic, fist-pumping shlock — they would have been a footnote in history.

Guns N’ Roses would hire a recording engineer who had never produced a major album before. Whether this was a strategic move or one of pure street desperation depends on who you ask. The even-keeled Mike Clink (a trainee of Ron Nevison, engineer behind The Who’s Quadrophenia) came recommended as an engineer at the reputable Record Plant. While other producers were auditioned, and a few helped cut polished demos, heavy metal hit-makers like Mutt Lange, according to former Geffen A&R executive Tom Zutaut, were never considered.

Zutaut said Clink was both a great engineer and egoless hand they could rely on to manage, rather than maestro, the process. “The band basically co-produced the album themselves,” said Zutaut, a 26-year-old baby mogul when he signed GNR in 1986 with a five-figure advance he squeezed from David Geffen in the span of 72 hours. (The figure, again depending on who you ask, was between $50,000 to $75,000.)

“Zoots (Tom Zutaut) and I wanted Mike to record the band because he would let them be who they were – and not, for example, try to sound like a radio-friendly band,” said Niven, who advised GNR between 1986 and 1991. “Bad Company ruled the airwaves at that time. Guns were more raw than that.”

Not that Clink was an insignificant studio tech. Early demos of the tracks that would appear on Appetite for Destruction – including live recordings – were, well, rough. Clink was a difference maker in the studio, no matter how you slice it. Without him, Appetite could have either sounded overproduced or worse, underproduced and forgettable. “We wanted to capture lightening in a bottle, a raw animal magnetism, like a Doors record,” Zutaut said.

This would establish the attitude of the record and allow the band to record freely, stream of consciousness. In order to get there, Zutaut pressured Geffen to give him his own purchase-order book directly from Mo Oston, the CEO at Warner Bros., which distributed Geffen albums. “It broke all the rules.” he said. “But I didn’t know until 7PM if they wanted to go into the studio, and then, whenever creativity flowed, they’d call me to book studio time – sometimes at 4AM.”

Zutaut’s backdoor dealmaking with Geffen and Warner allowed Guns N’ Roses to document their sound in the wild, which incorporated an element of cinéma vérité on Appetite: Real orgasms were recorded during a sexual encounter between Axl and a stripper, for instance, then added to the bridge of the album-closing “Rocket Queen.”

“It was the last record that I know of in rock that was mixed manually without automation,” Zutaut said. “We used an old, warm analog console at Media Sound, in New York.” Vintage, but ultimately modern, Appetite was a classic rock record cut during the heyday of polished Top 40 metal like Def Leppard’s Hysteria, or New Jersey’s Bon Jovi, who had the No. 1 record in 1987 with Slippery When Wet. Guns N’ Roses were trying to tag graffiti all over the rock establishment with an embrace of simple, all-American brutality – like John Rambo parachuting into the jungles of Vietnam.

Their “animal magnetism” embodied the spirit of early rock and roll, aptly described in the Music Journal in 1958 as a “throwback to jungle rhythms” that incited “youth to orgies and violence.” This could have been the tagline for Appetite for Destruction, as GNR ruthlessly chipped away at the shine of ‘80s metal with sinister riffs, R-rated lyrics, and a risqué attitude that moved dark clouds over the fairytale of Tommy and Gina in “Livin’ on a Prayer.”

Appetite was what Axl described in LA Weekly as “depressing,” which turned the American dream into a livin’ nightmare in 1987. It’s what Slash described in a November 1987 issue of BAM as “very realistic” – something in stark contrast with how Nikki Sixx positioned Motley Crue in Rock Beat a month later: “Our reality is a lot of people’s fantasy.”

‘LIKE A SUMMER BLOCKBUSTER’

The authenticity of Appetite or Destruction was chiseled with sharp objects and callused fingers. It was mastered on a manual mixing board and cut with razor blades on two-inch tape that captured everything from the unedited orgasms on “Rocket Queen,” to the precision bumble-bee bass on “It’s So Easy.” Survey rock magazines from 1986 and 1987 (where lipstick and teased hair was still a national habit), then study a few from 1988 – when the same bands look more like bikers, or more masculine versions of their previously feminine selves. Appetite’s success in 1987 wiped the makeup off the faces of ’80s metal bands by embracing the outlaw spirit of the Old West, or ‘50s greaser, rather than the vagina-obsessed teenagers in Fast Times at Ridgemont High.

This made Gun N’ Roses a dangerous new drug being sold in Reagan’s anal-retentive America, when conservative John Malone ran Tele-Communications, Inc., a top cable provider in the United States which carried MTV. Appetite caught on fire because it cast a light on the dark corners of Reagan’s faux utopia: AIDS was no longer the “gay cancer,” anyone was at risk, the crack epidemic was beginning to leak into the nightly news, and crimes rates were going up. Clearly, by 1987, Americans were living on the edge. The rogue spirit of American bravado, with the nuclear clock ticking daily, was riding high in both Hollywood and politics.

Appetite fed on the world around it. On July 7, 1987, the the Wall Street Journal front page read: “Which Col. North Will Tell His Story to Nation: The Villain Who Deceived or Hero Who Obeyed?” The answer for young Americans was evident in 1986’s Iron Eagle, where the hero is depicted as rebellious teenager who disobeys the U.S. government. In 1982’s First Blood, Rambo symbolized an unabashed criticism of law and order that bleeds all over Appetite’s fourth track, “Out Ta Get Me.” The image of GNR as lawbreaking punks was captured in 1988’s The Dead Pool, a Dirty Harry film the band makes a cameo in; it remains famous for a scene where Jim Carrey, playing a junkie, lip-syncs “Welcome to the Jungle.” By that point, in the summer of 1988, Appetite for Destruction was penetrating the cultural consciousness like a summer blockbuster.

In an Los Angeles Times review of Guns N’ Roses’ opening performance for the Rolling Stones a the Coliseum in 1989, the reviewer writes, “Rose exhibits a fierce independence that sometimes leads to errors in judgment as he races in a somewhat romantic pursuit of artistic truth.” The description captures the decade’s spirit of Huck Finn adventurism. Just as GNR was breaking, Americans were suddenly feeling more outlaw-ish. While Motley Crue allowed teens to live vicariously through their decadent lifestyle, Axl became the extension of their adolescent rage.

This is typified in 1988’s Young Guns, where Billy the Kid mirrors the duality of Axl as both sex addicted outlaw and naive redneck. In Hollywood, Americans had a reputation for being gritty working-class heroes who smoked their cigarettes with style, like guitarist Izzy Stradlin with his newsboy cap in front of the Rainbow Bar & Grill. In early portraits taken by band photographer Robert John, Guns N’ Roses look like the bikers aping the sex-on-fire appeal of Marlon Brando and James Dean. Appetite was the album for Americans who wanted rebel heroes, not just party animals. It would threaten the rock and roll establishment of gym rats from the East Coast and British showman with an unabashed American grittiness, something that resonated during the decline of flamboyant hair metal.

In the liner notes of Appetite, GNR cheekily thanked the “teachers, preachers, cops, and elders who never believed,” a gangsta move which happened a year before N.W.A. released Straight Outta Compton. The latter may have been a more socially important record, perhaps, but it was Appetite that first highlighted the commercial viability of selling reality through the lens of a “gang,” as drummer Steven Adler often described them.

In terms of the hometown press, Appetite for Destruction’s hyper-localism made it everlastingly appealing to writers at the Los Angeles Times and LA Weekly. They’d spend 30 years promoting GNR as the last great L.A. rock band. But Appetite resonated with everyone from the horny Midwesterner to the blonde bombshell at the Sherman Oaks Galleria and the British working class. When GNR didn’t appear in Penelope Spheeris’ documentary The Decline of Western Civilization Part II: The Metal Years, they told the world that they were the dangerous alternative to smily hair metal bands that entertained, rather than frightened the status quo. The fear made them a hard pill to swallow in the states. So they invaded England, like the Go-Go’s in 1980 and the Ramones in 1976.

“It’s So Easy,” released as a single in the U.K. in June of 1987, was banned by the BBC for darkly ironic lyrics that were too racy during the Thatcher era. Guns N’ Roses’ cultivated bad-boy rep in the British tabloids drew the ire of the censors. This was the whole idea. “My strategy with GNR was the break them in England, like [Tom] Petty, [Jimi] Hendrix, and JJ Cale before,” said Niven, who helped push rumors of Axl being abusive to puppies in the U.K. tabloids. As a preemptive strike in the heart of Britain, GNR would play the legendary Marquee in June 1986 – well ahead of peers in the Los Angeles music scene who weren’t as ambitious or shamelessly American enough to piss all over Fleet Street.

“It was easier to penetrate a small island market then a huge American continent,” Niven said. “And the English press, I knew would connect faster than Americans.” A ban on “It’s So Easy” in the U.K. is verified by Niven, who worked at Virgin Records when Malcolm McLaren was orchestrating the propagandistic rise of the Sex Pistols. (Their single “God Save the Queen” was similarly banned in 1976.) It’s no wonder that Izzy and Axl were stylistically inspired by the sexual fetishism and biker fashion of McLaren and Vivienne Westwood; this move transformed Axl, specifically, from a blue jeans-wearing juvenile from the Midwest into a leather clad, quasi-nude cowboy.

GNR’s aesthetic in the early concert photos by Canter’s Deli owner Marc Canter would sell the idea that this was a pornographic punk band. His photos, along with shots by band photographer Robert John, made a fashion statement that bassist Duff McKagan lived by wearing sleeveless Misfits and CBGBs T-shirts. That reminded fans that Guns N’ Roses were different: They were punk. “(‘It’s So Easy’) would obviously be totally misread and create a ruckus,” Niven added.

Manipulating the music media was part of the equation. Like the Pistols marching towards the Queen’s palace, “It’s So Easy” included lyrics that were taken far too literally. The U.K. press they garnered worked in the band’s favor, as Guns N’ Roses began to conquer England as uncouth scoundrels, rather than clean-cut yuppies – ala Michael J. Fox chomping sushi on the cover of Esquire in 1988, or Jon Bon Jovi in an issue of Tiger Beat magazine from October of 1987. Appetite was trying to erase the appeal of yuppiedom from L.A. to the north of England.

Their antics in the U.K. built awareness back in the states, which was the point, but it still didn’t ignite sales. MTV and terrestrial radio, as late as October 5, 1987, were pushing back against the label’s request to put “Welcome to the Jungle” into heavy rotation.

“In the states, they’re too much of pussies to play the f—ing thing. I think that’s why we came over here instead,” Rose told a crowd of 3,000 working-class Brits at a gig at Rock City in Nottingham, just five days before Whitesnake’s power ballad “Here I Go Again” would become No. 1. Less than a year later, two fans were crushed to death during GNR’s set at the Monsters of Rock festival at Donington Park, and that actually boosted sales of Appetite for Destruction in the U.K.

Invading England and leaving a stain on the island was terrorism by proxy of rock and roll. It was Guns N’ Roses sending a political message back home: We’re coming for you. “It’s So Easy” was never released as a single in the U.S., where the terror was more symbolic.

‘ECHOING THE ANXIETY OF THE AGE’

The original cover art of Appetite was never “banned,” as much as it was used to garner headlines and sell the idea that GNR had gone rogue. This was, of course, a delicious exaggeration. The initial cover includes a malfunctioning robot in a trench coat standing over a defiled woman. Her panties are pulled down below her knees, and she’s topless as if she’s been raped by the crab-like hands of the robot. It was a low-brow painting by artist Robert Williams from 1978 titled “Appetite for Destruction,” which Axl discovered at either a gift shop on Melrose or at Tower Records on Sunset, and then presented to the label as a joke. Zutaut and Niven quickly realized there was a unintended genius behind Rose’s attempt at being an amateur art collector.

With the threat of 25,000 nuclear warheads the U.S. and Soviets had aimed at strategic targets in 1987, he was echoing the anxiety of the age, where Americans were symbolically being raped by corporate America. While estimates vary depending on the source, there were between 30,000 to 65,000 copies of the original artwork printed on the LP, exclusively, which were then sent to record stores that had elected to carry it. The skull-and-cross tattoo design was an option on the purchase sheet, so two covers were printed for record store clerks to choose from – and that apparently screwed things up, as nobody caught on.

The confusing compromise between the label and their distributor, Warner Bros., included covering the cassette with the more commercially viable crucifix art, while the inner jacket would include the Williams painting. It was a messy compromise, but a fantastic PR tactic. It would also prove to be a serendipitous decision, as the skull-and-cross “alternative” had a broader appeal as an art piece, heavy metal comic, bands crest and a way more stylish T-shirt. This second design sold Guns N’ Roses like Kiss for the next 30 years.

In 1986-87, cassettes were the most popular medium for listening to music. At the time, young Americans had more tape players than turntables. It was the age of the Walkman, so Appetite was listened mostly on the cassette. That means that the “robot rape” impact was negligible, in terms of sales, but it did sell GNR’s dangerous appeal – especially to rebelling teens and their uptight dads who had watched the PMRC censorship hearings in 1985, making Guns N’ Roses “too hot for TV.”

Geffen, who already begun to wave the finger at Tipper Gore’s PC lynch mob, understood this. Guns N’ Roses’ team wanted to cause a controversy. They were fully aware that the minimal impact on sales would be recouped by all the buzz. Niven says that 30,000 copies of the original artwork were sold before there was a “ban” by major retailers like K-Mart and record store chains. (Tower Records on Sunset, for example, carried the Williams version until it sold out.) The number is corroborated by Slash in an interview in Rock City News dated January 1988. According to this version of history, LP No. 30,001 was the first one without the Williams art.

Another “ban” to factor in when considering the rebellious draw of Appetite was the video for “Welcome to the Jungle,” which depicted an uncomfortable reality for the MTV generation. Axl, who refused to smile, is seen in various stages of urban decay – first as the naive hillbilly, then as the sweaty brute in assless chaps, and finally as the psychopath being conditioned by images of war, bikinis and police brutality.

Rose became a sex symbol when photographer Herb Ritts sexualized him in 1991, but prior to that, with his hunched shoulders and baby-corn teeth, he seemed too Indiana – and that actually helped him connect with rural teens in Middle America, the way Metallica appealed to pissed-off teenagers who wore “Metal Up Your Ass” T-shirts.

For MTV, which was launched in 1981 to hook teens who were watching sitcoms in the ‘70s, rock and roll was about showmanship, matching jumpsuits and coordinated dance moves. MTV founder Bob Pittman envisioned it as a “mood enhancer” that eliminated the logical brain with a kind of colorful hypnosis, what Jello Biafra of the Dead Kennedys described as the moment when “rock and roll and advertising became one and the same.” “Welcome to the Jungle” seemed to be a direct criticism of MTV as orchestrated by the anti-authoritarian minds of manager Alan Niven and Nigel Dick, who directed the video.

It’s hard to say exactly when MTV first played “Welcome to the Jungle,” but sources said an edited, more-PG version of video was put into heavy rotation in January 1988. That followed months of pressure from David Geffen, who called MTV CEO Tom Freston personally to ask for more GNR airtime.

It wasn’t just Geffen; the whole team pushed: Niven pressured executives with mind games, while Zutaut used his gravitas to sell Geffen on GNR. Also, though perhaps on the back-burner, there was the U.K. media, who had dubbed the band the “most dangerous” in the world. All of it worked in concert to finally get MTV’s attention. Besides, in 1987, the network was in desperate need of a ratings draw. They were also being criticized for turning their back on rock and roll. In the 1988 Rock City News interview, published when Appetite for Destruction had sold close to 400,000 copies, Slash was asked by the interviewer: “Are you guys on MTV?” He replied: “No. We gave them the new video.” This was, of course, an exaggeration.

According to both Zutaut and Niven, at some point between August and October 1987, MTV played the video for “Welcome to the Jungle” at 4AM EST on a Sunday night and then again a few times. Legend has it that video “lit up the switchboards” at MTV, making Guns N’ Roses the most requested band on the network. Whether this is history or legend, MTV overnight broadcasts of “Welcome to the Jungle” became a major factor in Appetite’s breakthrough. It may not have taken place, had MTV not been going through a rebranding in 1987 that made room for more hard rock.

‘THE BIGGEST BAND ON THE PLANET’

Ratings were down in 1987, and MTV needed to reestablish their indie cred. Ratt Cinderella, and Tesla were beginning to get more MTV exposure. The old guard at the network was departing to make room for programming directors who wanted to focus on hard rock rather than Top 40 dance music, which the network had begun to cut out of their overall playlist.

“The whole idea here isn’t revamping the format, so much as refocusing it,” Sam Kaiser, MTV’s vice president of programming, said in a Feb. 8, 1987 interview with the Los Angeles Times. “We want to get back to the channel’s original mandate, which was to break new artists.” The process of making MTV rock again began in earnest around October 1987, when CEO Bob Pittman was on his way out and Tom Freston – who was sympathetic to Guns N’ Roses – stepped in.

The front page of Billboard from Oct. 11, 1986 read: “MTV: Changes at the Channel; More Rock and New Acts, Execs Say.” The network was reacting to both their audience and pressure from the rock media. In February 1987, Circus reported that only four of the 30 videos in heavy rotation at MTV could have been considered “metal.” Frustrated artists like Ronnie James Dio spoke out: “MTV suddenly seemed to desert us all. The sad thing is when you spend $250,000 on a video and you only see it once.”

On Oct. 24, 1987, Guns N’ Roses appeared on an episode of Headbanger’s Ball, a relatively new metal-oriented show that had premiered on MTV in April and pulled an average rating of 1.3 million viewers a week. It gave GNR a platform to promote their tour with Motley Crue to a mass audience, while giving the PG viewers of MTV a preview of the “next” Motley Crue. In a Jan. 8, 1987 edition of Rock City News, Slash told the interviewer that the Motley Crue tour helped GNR move 18,000 units.

By the end of 1987, it seemed MTV was on board, which boosted sales of Appetite steadily as tour dates continued. An excited Tom Zutaut made a ridiculous promise that he fully intended to keep: “I told David Geffen they were gonna be the biggest and last big rock and roll band,” he said. Between January 1988 and the release of their EP GN’R Lies in November, Guns N’ Roses crossed the tipping point and did in fact became, for a brief moment, the biggest band on the planet.

Ground zero for their acceptance as a mainstream act was the band’s second single, a ballad that followed the playbook of how to inject hard rock into Top 40. Kiss did it in 1976 with “Beth.” Aerosmith’s biggest hits were love ballads, along with their only No. 1, “I Don’t Want to Miss a Thing.” In the summer of 1988, Guns N’ Roses would release a ballad that infected the Top 40 by targeting a demo that Appetite had mostly ignored in order to be taken more seriously: teenage girls. “Sweet Child O’ Mine” boasted romantic overtones that rebranded Axl as Bon Jovi meets Rambo, and suddenly the Kelly Bundy types were plastering their walls with cutouts of Rose’s buns from rock magazines they were stealing from their little brother.

Nothing is more endearing the brutish hunk with a broken heart, and Axl sold the classic American archetype in spades. While Appetite for Destruction was dripping with lust, it was never advertised as a record about girls, or chasing girls or tag-teaming girls. This attracted an older female demographic that saw GNR as more adult than their oversexed contemporaries. With the female demographic indoctrinated, Appetite would finally reach No. 1 on the Billboard album charts. It was Aug. 6, 1988 and Guns N’ Roses were on the road with Aerosmith, a band they had once mirrored and now quickly began to overshadow by playing rock and roll as if their time on earth was limited to this very tour.

On Sept. 10, 1988, behind a video MTV would play in heavy rotation that summer, “Sweet Child O’ Mine” also went to No. 1, spending 24 weeks atop of the Billboard singles chart. “It showed a different side of the band,” Marc Canter said. “It’s just the perfect song that will stand the test of time, as well as that whole record.”

To push themselves over the top, GNR make a well-timed debut on the stage of MTV’s Video Music Awards on Sept. 7, 1988. The event was held in their hometown, and found madcap comedian Sam Kinison introducing them with a guttural intensity that makes Jimmy Fallon’s angsty intro in 2002 seem almost wimpy in comparison.

Guns N’ Roses performed “Welcome to the Jungle” by opening with Axl’s excruciatingly intense 10-second screech, where he’d proceed to spin around with his mic stand, and pose by breathing in the adoration as if was his birthright. This was GNR at the height of their powers, fresh off a summer tour with Aerosmith that cemented them as the torch bearers of American rock and roll. At the time, the genre seemed to be overtaken by heavy metal, which accounted for 40 percent of music sales.

By November, about a year after the U.K. media filled their newsstands with Guns N’ Roses-related gossip, editors at Rolling Stone made the band cover stars. New York was still playing catch up, as was much of the nation, when Guns N’ Roses released “One in a Million,” a song from GN’R Lies that leveraged white rage. The single lit up the media during a time in American history where foreigners were portrayed by Hollywood as either mercenaries or welfare recipients. “One in a Million” was seen as an inexcusably racist and homophobic rant by a hillbilly inflicted with toxic levels of masculinity and privilege.

In 1988, however, the song reflected the way a lot of the white working class felt, as well as the film executives who depicted Middle Easterners and Russians as the enemy, and African-Americans as crack-addicted welfare recipients. “One in a Million” struck a chord as a product of the times: Sales of Appetite for Destruction never slowed during the period when the press began to portray Rose as a symbol of Reagan-era bigotry. He became a scapegoat used to mislabel GNR as right wing. A master troll, Rose pumped up the image by brandishing a shotgun and looking every bit like card-carrying member of the NRA on the cover of RIP magazine in 1989.

‘PART OF THE FABRIC OF CLASSIC ROCK’

A decade later, Appetite for Destruction was still selling like hotcakes, mostly because Guns N’ Roses were broken up between 1998 and 2008. The decade was marked by a long tease of reunion rumors, false starts, Axl’s cornrows at the 2002 MTV VMAs, and a 2004 greatest hits collection that was nothing more than a reminder that, for most fans, Appetite represented GNR’s greatest hits. The media’s obsession with the delays, PR stunts and $14 million dollar recording cost of 2008’s Chinese Democracy would essentially make Appetite an artifact of a bygone era when the “gang” was still riding high – like reading an old dime-store novel about outlaws that were later hanged.

In the media for the next 20 years, Rose was being similarly treated for the sins he committed by missing shows, dissing the fans, and holding his old bandmates ransom. That was the perception, unfair but also earned. Rolling Stone described this period, somewhat insultingly, as “The Lost Years” of Axl Rose, when fans began to look back to Appetite or the two Use Your Illusion albums as a kind of nostalgic antidepressant to help them forget Axl’s decision to rebrand GNR as an anti-Communist supergroup, and then quietly disappear into the hills of Malibu.

Even within the Guns N’ Roses bubble, Appetite for Destruction was a more authentic expression than anything else they would release a solo artists or supergroups. The long-awaited Chinese Democracy, an experimental rock record, was lost in the hype and couldn’t dodge comparisons to the more stripped simplicity of Appetite. In the media, it became the dangling carrot that drove fans to purchase Appetite for Destruction as a protest against Chinese Democracy or simply as a byproduct of consumers who were again purchasing classic rock LPs. By the 2000s, Appetite was “classic rock,” and while it was essentially ignored by the radio in 1987, the three singles off the record are now part of the very fabric of classic rock radio.

For GNR fanboys, Appetite had become the symbol of a band that was never designed to last the test of time. At any point between their formation in 1985 and 1996, when Slash faxed in his resignation, any one of the members of Guns N’ Roses could have either died or ended up in jail. The rush to purchase Appetite for Destruction was driven by a logical neurosis, or anxiety that the band could implode at any time, making the album a collector’s item in the wake of tragedy. Even if nobody died, the time bomb that was GNR kept fans on the edge of their seats for three decades, fueled by fantastic stories of romance, greed, self-destruction, and the hopeless feeling for Guns N’ Roses might never reunite again. Of course, that only added to the demand for Appetite for Destruction.

Memories of MTV’s long-ago refusal to play “Welcome to the Jungle,” or their cover art being banned, made GNR the closest thing to the Sex Pistols for fans during the corporate Reagan era. Into the ‘90s, as bands like Poison began to lose their audience, Guns N’ Roses toured stadiums and produced music videos as dramatic epics. “November Rain,” released in 1992 but written in 1986 during the run up to Appetite, became as overplayed at high school proms as “Paradise City” – the third and final Billboard Top 10 single from Appetite – was at pubs. “November Rain” later apotheosized into the best song to hear when you’re wasted, while “Paradise City” remained the sunniest moment during an unsafe and reckless drive to become the best band on the planet. Appetite for Destruction was their travel log between 1980 and 1987.

This is still far more than a hard rock record. Guns N’ Roses’ story was filled with guilt-free turmoil, as they emerged from the dust and bones of scene that was perhaps never meant to last the test of time. That makes Appetite for Destruction an historical document of a lost generation of hustlers with big hair and untrammeled ambition.

No film or book could have told this tale quite as ferociously, turned up to 11. Appetite for Destruction made history as the only album from the so-called “Metal Years” that boasted the believability to be stacked up against the classics – not just the spectacularly dazzling ‘80s metal canon from which it emerged but the records Guns N’ Roses drew from, and then subsequently left in their rearview mirror.
Source: http://ultimateclassicrock.com/guns-n-roses-appetite-hijacked-music-industry/
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Post by Soulmonster Mon Jul 24, 2017 6:45 pm



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Post by Blackstar Sat Apr 28, 2018 9:15 pm

Article in LA Weekly, April 2016:

Matt Wake wrote:How a Custom Guitar Made in Redondo Beach Saved Appetite for Destruction

The man who hand-built the guitar Slash played on most of Appetite for Destruction lived in an old trailer behind Redondo Beach's Music Works. His name was Kris Derrig.

Even though he was just in his early 30s, Derrig's waist-length hair was already gray. The replicas he made of 1959 Gibson Les Pauls, a holy-relic instrument, were stunning in their rich sound and flame-top beauty. Derrig would pour any money he made from selling these replicas into converting his beloved red 1967 Pontiac LeMans convertible into a light-blue GTO.

But he never finished that convertible. In 1986, Derrig was diagnosed with cancer. Within a year, he was dead.

His craftsmanship lives on in Slash's starburst intro to Guns N' Roses' lone No. 1 hit, "Sweet Child O' Mine." And the Hollywood pavement grooves of "Welcome to the Jungle." And the Southern rock–gone-thrash flurry at the end of "Paradise City."

Alan Niven, Guns N' Roses' Appetite-era manager, bought the "lemon drop"–finish Derrig guitar from Music Works as a gift for Slash. The corkscrew-haired guitarist was unsatisfied with his guitar tone on Appetite's basic tracks, recorded at now-defunct Canoga Park facility Rumbo Recorders using two Jackson guitars and a B.C. Rich Warlock. and he was growing increasingly frustrated as he attempted to rerecord all his parts with producer Mike Clink at Take One Studios in Burbank.

A few days before purchasing the Derrig, Niven dropped by Take One and parked next to the band's rental van. "There was a fucking [Gibson] SG though the windscreen, neck-first," Niven recalls, in his rascally New Zealand accent. "And that's a message that even I can understand."

Niven asked Music Works owner Jim Foote if the store had anything Slash could try. Foote pulled out a guitar case and opened it up. "And I just went, 'Oh my God, look at that. That's beautiful,'" Niven says. He thinks he might have paid around $2,500 for the Derrig guitar.

At the time, Music Works was located at 1804 Artesia Blvd.; today it's at 4711 Artesia in Lawndale, in a nondescript, six-unit commercial building about a mile east of its original location. Foote is known for repairing vintage instruments, and his workbench is surrounded by old Fender and Marshall amplifiers. Derrig left his luthier tools to Foote after he died, and Foote still has them, including chisels and a carving machine used to rough-shape the tops.

A graduate of Boston's Berklee College of Music, Derrig began his luthier career in the late '70s in Atlanta. "Kris was a huge fan of the Allman Brothers," Foote, now 63, says, "which is why he moved from the New England area down to Atlanta. You couldn't get Gibson to make a flame-top Les Paul at that time because they simply weren't doing it, so that's why he decided to make one for himself."

Foote believes Derrig, whom he describes as "the softest-spoken, nicest person you could ever possibly meet," made around a dozen guitars at Music Works. Lenny Kravitz owns one. Foote helped Derrig find connections for the maple he used for his Les Paul replica tops, although Derrig's brother Dale, a retired Massachusetts police officer, says the wood for Slash's guitar came from an old barn in Hillsborough, New Hampshire, that Kris flew back east specifically to collect.

"It was extremely dense, old wood. That's where the tone comes from and that's what Chris wanted," Dale, now 69, says. "Mellow, but with a bite to it."

"He liked to pick tops that were highly flame-y, because there was a lot of wow factor," Foote says. Derrig used old-school aniline dyes to help achieve this flame effect, applying finishes in a spray booth Music Works had set up in a two-car garage out back.

Whenever Derrig finished a guitar, he'd bring it into the store, where the amps were, to make sure all the electronics worked. "I would put on an Allman Brothers record when [Kris] went to plug in, and he would sit there and play note for note with the whole side of the album," Foote says. (When I interviewed Slash in 2010 and asked who his favorite Southern rock band was, he immediately cited the Allmans.)

Slash declined to be interviewed for this story. But the other person in the room when he recorded all his Appetite guitars, producer Clink, can still recall hearing Slash play that Derrig guitar for the first time at Take One. "We knew instantly that was the tone for the record," Clink says. "It wasn't, 'Oh, let me think about it.' It was, we finally had found the sound for Slash."

Now known as Glenwood Place Studios, Take One also was where Rose recorded his Appetite vocals, Clink says. According to Slash's 2007 self-titled memoir, the studio is also where Robert John shot the iconic Appetite back cover photo, with the band sprawled across an Oriental rug looking dazed and dangerous.

Slash used the Derrig guitar on early GNR tours, but retired it from the road around 1989. It also appeared in several early GNR videos, including "Welcome to the Jungle" and "Sweet Child O' Mine." In his memoir, he wrote that the Appetite guitar was "made by the late Jim Foot. [sic]" Foote says the guitarist simply mixed him and Derrig up. Although GNR practiced sometimes at Music Works' rehearsal space, a converted three-car garage, Slash never met the man who made his guitar, according to Dale Derrig.

Released July 21, 1987, Appetite took several months to break, but it eventually sold more than 18 million copies. According to the Massachusetts Registry of Vital Records and Statistics, Derrig died just two months earlier, on May 17, 1987, at the age of 32. So he never knew the impact his guitar had or heard how amazing it sounded on GNR's earth-scorching debut.

Asked how his brother might've reacted to his guitar being at the core of one of rock's greatest albums, Dale says, "He'd be laughing his ass off. Because he was very self-effacing." In 2010, Gibson released a signature Slash Les Paul model based on Derrig's 1959 replica.

The only other guitar Slash used on Appetite that made the final mix, Clink says, was a borrowed Gibson SG — the same one that ended up through the van windshield — which can be heard on the dark, drug-laced tune "My Michelle." Clink says the SG "was going to be the sound of the record," and that guitar, a horned model favored by rock greats such as AC/DC's Angus Young, "would have been, if Alan had not brought that Les Paul in."

Derrig guitars often featured authentic 1959 Gibson pickups. It was Foote's idea to install toothier-sounding, "zebra-style" white and black Seymour Duncan Alnico II Pro pickups in what became Slash's Appetite guitar. This crucial tweak helped Slash's tone and the entire record sound simultaneously classic and contemporary. Of course, there were other factors, too: Clink's studio expertise, a customized Marshall amplifier rented for Slash, the infectious Appetite material, the band's volatile chemistry, and Slash's rare combination of virtuosic chops and bluesy feel.

Marc Canter grew up with Slash and first saw him play guitar as a teenager in a garage. Years later, he received a shoutout in the Appetite liner notes and published the early GNR concert photo book Reckless Road. Now owner of Canter's Deli, he says, "It's really more the guitar player, not the guitar, not the amp."

Canter recalls a 1992 jam session during which Slash coaxed his signature tone from a borrowed "$200 Strat" and "crappy amp": "It sounded like Slash using a Les Paul. Not just how good he was playing, but the sound. Right away you hear Slash."

http://www.laweekly.com/music/how-a-custom-guitar-made-in-redondo-beach-saved-appetite-for-destruction-6807261


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Post by Blackstar Sun Apr 29, 2018 3:27 am

This belongs here too.

Mike Clink talks about Appetite from 29:10 minute mark

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Post by Blackstar Sun Apr 29, 2018 4:49 am

Interesting interview with Robert Williams:

Dan Heching wrote:Guns N' Roses' Appetite for Destruction: 7 things you didn’t know about the racy album art

The hard rock bands of the 1980s dealt in shock like it was just another day at the Coliseum, and Guns N’ Roses, thanks to their particular brand of profane lyricism mixed with the screechy panache of frontman Axl Rose, hit music stores with a bang.

The original cover art for the band’s iconic 1987 debut, the (still) bestselling debut album of all time Appetite for Destruction, had shock written all over it: The image, from a painting by self-described “underground outlaw artist” Robert Williams, depicts the aftermath of graphic sexual assault perpetrated by a robot, and an otherworldly, ferocious metal-monster about to devour the mechanical attacker.

On the occasion of the rock album’s 30th anniversary last Friday, EW spoke with Williams, 74, who shed light on some of the lesser-known facts about this controversial, totally over-the-top image, his dealings with Rose, and the early conception of this now timeless record. Read on for highlights.

The title of this 1978 painting, “Appetite for Destruction,” is the source for the title of the album.

Williams, who gained traction while working with the likes of Ed “Big Daddy” Roth and R. Crumb and participating in the art scene of after-hours punk rock clubs in late ‘60s Hollywood, says the painting in question was not done for commission but rather a specific audience. “This was for a select intelligent group that loved this kind of s—,” says Williams. “I made it for the advanced art connoisseurs that came out of the underground in the ’60s and ’70s.”

Painted in 1978, the piece was titled “Appetite for Destruction” well before Rose and his band discovered it. After he agreed to license the image to a then-obscure Guns N’ Roses, Williams later received a call asking if the band could use the name of the painting as the title of their album. He agreed, unaware of just how huge the record would become. “They paid [licensing fees] as an unheard of punk rock band would’ve paid,” Williams remembers. “Not a whole lot at all. They were just, to me, another garage band.”

Rose initially saw the image on a postcard somewhere in Los Angeles.

As with so many perfect unions, this collaboration started off as the happiest of accidents. “[The painting] ended up on a postcard somewhere, and Axl Rose walks down Melrose or somewhere and stumbles across that f—ing postcard, and this thing blows his mind,” Williams remembers. “So he sets out to get in touch with me, and it took him a long time. No one had heard of the band before. It had no previous history.”

As explained in the video below, Rose initially submitted the image as a joke for a cover proposal, knowing full well how graphic it was. But the image seemed to capture something close to the band’s anti-institutional image, and it ended up as the major contender.

Williams tried to convince the band not to use the image.

Due to his experience creating what he terms “questionable” material, Williams was already familiar with trying to defend shocking or sensational artwork. While helping to create the counterculture Zap Comix with Robert Crumb in the ‘60s, he saw several people sent to jail, and knew that this image could be problematic if it ended up on a mainstream album. “This was not for the general public. This was never to go in people’s homes,” Williams says. “There is no sophistication in this f—ing picture. It’s an overdone cartoon for people who like underground comics and understand underground art. But that’s a very small audience.”

Still, Rose and co. were not to be deterred. “His agent called up and said, ‘We would be very interested in this picture.’ And I said, ‘Well, y’know, this is not a good idea. This is too violent. You’re gonna get in an awful lot of trouble,’” Williams remembers. “I said, ‘Why don’t you come by my house and we’ll go through a couple hundred slides and we’ll pick you something that might be a little more palatable?'”

Williams initially thought Rose was female.

“So a car pulls up in front of my house, and this guy gets out, and this other guy gets out I thought was a girl,” Williams recalls. “But it was actually Axl Rose. After I got to see he was a guy, he was a nice young fella. I always liked him. He’s very polite, shy, mild-mannered.”

Eventually, Rose won over Williams, and the artist remembers thinking, “If you have the guts to put this on a f—ing album cover, man, I’m behind you.”

Many retailers across the country refused to sell the album because of the artwork.

“The s— hit the fan. It was an enormous sensation and there was a lot of problems with it. And I’m just sitting here saying, ‘Well, I told you so!’” Williams says of the backlash over the artwork.

In response, Geffen Records prepared a tamer cover option, with Williams’ painting relegated to the centerfold of the liner notes. The alternative cover featured a tattoo-style illustration of a cross with five skulls, each representing one of the bandmates.

According to Williams, the image “has vengeance and justice in it.”

Williams reasoned that there was a story behind the action of the painting, which explained its violent imagery. “We’ve got a girl on the ground that sells toy robots that has been assaulted by another robot,” he says, “and coming up over the fence is an avenging monster to get him. So this picture has vengeance and justice in it.”

Thinking back on the painting 30 years after it caused such a stir, the artist is still happy with the result.

“I’m proud of this. This isn’t the raciest thing I ever did by any means. This is kind of tame,” Williams says. “I do artwork that you’d be nervous if you had it on the wall and your pastor came over.”

http://ew.com/music/2017/07/24/appetite-destruction-cover-art-robert-williams/
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Post by Blackstar Mon Jul 16, 2018 3:29 pm

Article on the album artwork from Los Angeles Times (1987):


Geffen's Guns N' Roses Fires A Volley At Pmrc
POP EYE
August 16, 1987|PATRICK GOLDSTEIN

Let's just hope Washington Wives' leader Tipper Gore is sitting down when she gets a gander at the cover of "Appetite for Destruction," the just-released debut album from Guns N' Roses.

The quintet of L.A.-based enfants terrible , who are signed to Geffen Records, already have a reputation for wild 'n' wooly antics--both on and off stage. Now the group has an album jacket that should stir up even more notoriety.

The cartoon-style cover drawing, by artist Robert Williams, depicts a sexy, saddle-shoed damsel who has apparently been ravaged by a mechanical monster with bear-trap jaws and zoom-lens eyes. But it's the graphic details--and how record buyers might interpret them--that may arouse the ire of the Parents Music Resource Center (PMRC), otherwise known as the Washington Wives. The girl is drawn in a position of sexual submission, with her panties below her knees and her dress split open, clearly exposing a naked breast.

This would hardly cause a ruckus on the walls at the Museum of Contemporary Art. But how will the jacket play on the album racks at K mart in Peoria? The top brass at Geffen Records aren't waiting for an avalanche of irate phone calls to find out.

In what may be an industry first, the label has issued the Guns N' Roses release with a different jacket in each format. The album may have a racy cover, but the cassette version offers relatively tame, heavy-metal style artwork while the CD package simply features the group's logo, a pair of six-guns entwined with roses (though Williams' drawing is the centerfold of the CD booklet).

And according to Geffen president Eddie Rosenblatt, while the label is happy to give its bands a wide berth of artistic freedom, it isn't taking any chances of letting that freedom interfere with record sales.

"We try to be supportive of all our bands here," Rosenblatt said. "So when Guns N' Roses came to us with this painting--and explained to us what they feel it's about--we wanted to get behind them. They see the artwork as a symbolic social statement, with the robot representing the industrial system that's raping and polluting our environment.

"We feel the cover's completely in keeping with the band's image. But since it's open to interpretation, we wanted an alternative for people who might be offended. So we told the band we'll put it out, but record store managers should have the option of stocking another version if they feel the cover might cause a problem."

With that in mind, Geffen has printed up 130,000 copies of the album--half with the uncensored cover, half with the cassette-type artwork. It's still too early to tell which version is getting the most orders. (Locally, Tower Records is carrying the uncensored version.)

In fact, it's apparent that some stores still don't even know that there's more than one version available. An assistant manager at Music Plus' Hollywood store said the chain refused to stock the Guns N' Roses album at all. "It's a corporate decision that the album cover was offensive and we won't carry it. We just have the cassettes and CDs."

When asked why the chain didn't merely stock the less-objectionable version of the album jacket, the assistant manager (who declined to give his name) replied with surprise: "If there's another version, that's news to us."

A midweek spot check of other stores found that Tower Records' West Hollywood store was selling the uncensored version while Sam Goody's West Los Angeles branch hadn't put any albums or cassettes out for sale yet.

The PMRC, which has been keeping a low profile lately, hasn't commented on the cover yet. Rosenblatt noted that the jacket offers a warning label, which refers only to the frequently suggestive lyrics inside. Rosenblatt declined to volunteer his personal opinion of the jacket artwork, saying only: "I don't have to agree with every cover from every band we have around here."

However, he refused to offer any olive branches to the PMRC. "They are still around and they blast our records all the time," he said. "But I don't run my business worrying about what they think."
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Post by Blackstar Wed Aug 08, 2018 2:07 am

Review from Kerrang!, July 23 - August 5, 1987

Howard Johnson wrote:THORN TO BE WILD

'TALKIN' 'BOUT our degeneration'

How very apt, how very, very apt! Kerrang!'s front cover feature on Guns n' Roses (issue 148) couldn't have summed up the latest swing on the musical pendulum any better.

Start licking those lips, sleaze pleazers, for rock 'n' roll is being most definitely wrestled from the hands of the bland, the jaded, the tired, the worn, and thrust back into the hands of the real raunch rebels.

Sure, there's Faster Pussycat, there's LA Guns, there's Cathouse, but it's Guns n' Roses, the five-piece, LA-based Brat Pack that's out there in front right now, ripping up tarmac and burning rubber as they hot-foot it to the top, leaving the competition gazing in awe at their tail-lights. Shooting stars? You betcha!

You got the taste for what was to come with the band's four-track 'Live ?!*@ Like A Suicide' EP and you suspected that with the backing of a major label and a major budget you'd get something pretty special at the end of the line. And did we get something special? DID WE GET SOMETHING SPECIAL? Do I wear my hair long? Do I like rock 'n' roll? Of course, we got something special and its name is 'Appetite For Destruction'!

It's amazing, really. What with their hi-profile penchant for excess and indulgence of the strictly illegal variety, I'd hardly credit the five-man outfit of guitarists Izzy Stradlin and Slash, bassist Duff McKagan, drummer Steven Adler and vocalist W. Aid Rose (real names one 'n' all, I assure you!) with having taken the time to sit down and learn to play this good, to write songs so infuriatingly catchy and yet as hard as railroad steel! How they've done it is a mystery to me, but done it they most certainly have and if I were to say this is the most exciting rock release of the past three years would you believe me? I'd say you bloody well should!

Did you notice that I said 'rock record'? Ya did? Good, because anyone who thinks they'll be getting a Heavy Metal album from Guns n' Roses is gonna be sorely mistaken, sorely disappointed! 'Appetite . . .'is so captivating, so enthralling, so Goddamn exciting, because it's so flexible, a veritable musical roller-coaster ride that dips and pivots, twists and turns and provides thrills and spills from head to toe, top to bottom. The Roses can switch from the pure balls-to-the-wall anger of' 'You're Crazy' (complete with cerebrally stimulating 'You're f**kin' crazy' chant!) to the Summery charm of 'Child Of Mine' without losing even a pinch of the band's essence. You can bet your ass that these boys have a wide and varied record collection.

But if you don't like rock 'n' roll, then just forget it. This is attitude music through-and-through, a lethal cocktail that can use as many tricks as it likes (voice box on 'Anything Goes', for example) and still come stomping out of the corner with 'ATTITUDE' etched on its musical forehead!

What these boys wanna talk about is the sleazy side of life, living in the gutter and getting by on an excessive combination of cursin' and boozin'!

The band's current single, 'It's So Easy' pays no heed to the 'necessary' niceties of being airplay-orientated, Axl yelling 'so f**kin' easy' enough to guarantee no radio exposure whatsoever, while 'Night Train' pays joyous tribute to the beauty of the bottle, secondhand Aerosmith riffs bludgeoning you into submission with elegant ease.

This is not a nice record, but when did anything worthwhile ever come along without the two necessary ingredients of pleasure and pain? Oh yeah, if it's sleazy, then Guns N' Roses put their noses on the line for it.

I've been told that 'Mr. Brownstone' is a drug-orientated opus, but illegal substances ain't slowing this troupe down none! 'My Michelle', meanwhile, recounts a sordid tale of a hot baby whose daddy works in porno after her poor mama got hooked on heroin and copped it! It's not pretty, but then again life ain't pretty and it's the X-rated stuff that seems curiously appealing!

You lot out there know that I'm hardly the most liberal man on earth when it comes to dishing out that magical Five-'K' accolade, but in the case of 'Appetite For Destruction', I have no hesitation in letting it all hang out.
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Post by Soulmonster Wed Aug 08, 2018 6:52 pm

Review of the 2018 rerelease:


Guns N’ Roses
Appetite for Destruction 2 CD Deluxe Edition
(Universal Music Canada)
3/5
When I first heard Appetite for Destruction as an impressionable pie-faced 12-year-old, it was about the only thing that made sense to me for a good nine months. The incredible fury-loaded riffs and roars in “Welcome to the Jungle” and “Sweet Child o’ Mine,” and the poetic, fast-paced beats of “My Michelle”… the album is a rock nut’s bible.  
Appetite, originally released in 1987, is now being reissued in several different formats, including the Locked N’ Loaded box set, which sells for a grand on the band’s website.
The two-disc deluxe edition contains a remastered version of the original album plus the band’s 1986 Sound City studio session and live recordings from 1987 in London.
The 1986 studio sessions are raw, fascinating audio footage, serving as an early look at one of the greatest rock bands ever. The songs are a flaw-embraced jackpot; the lead and rhythm guitars are, unfortunately, too unbalanced in the mix. Steven Adler’s drum work is legendary leadership in “Paradise City.” Axl Rose’s vocals are clear, despite sounding distant, and not without the improvisation often found in live recordings. These are studio recordings, but they feel live; even if it sounds far from immaculate at times, that’s not what it’s about.
The live recordings from 1987 are memorable, sometimes for their nails-on-chalkboard vocals and other times for when the musicians take charge, which makes for an incredible experience. AC/DC cover “Whole Lotta Rosie” is fast-paced and, instrumentally speaking, Guns at their best. The guitar solos show why Slash is regarded as one of the best guitarists ever, but, frankly, there are points where Rose’s vocals sound like they’re being sung from my cousin’s garage. At times he sounds frozen, flat, and as though he is forcing every moment of it.
Appetite is an album I’ll come back to for its flaws and strong points alike that end up making for a time capsule of one of the greatest, messiest, and morally uncompromising bands to ever rock. This deluxe edition isn’t as essential but provides a fascinating look into what created one of the best rock albums of all time.
Source: http://www.nexusnewspaper.com/2018/08/08/new-music-revue-new-guns-n-roses-collection-shows-how-a-classic-album-came-to-be/
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Post by Soulmonster Thu Nov 01, 2018 6:21 pm

Here is an advert for the album from December 1987:

Appetite for Destruction BRvfSdLrTuaFXklspR6r+scan0026
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Post by Blackstar Mon Nov 26, 2018 3:27 am

Article about the skull cross artwork:
Dan Redding wrote:The Inside Story of Guns N’ Roses’ ‘Appetite for Destruction’ Album Cover

Featuring an exclusive new interview with Guns N' Roses cover artist Billy White Jr.

June 23, 2016

The album cover of Guns N’ Roses’ masterpiece Appetite for Destruction has a complicated history. The final Appetite for Destruction cover (with Celtic cross design) was chosen after a painting by Robert Williams was rejected (more on that later). First, let’s delve into the iconic cross design featuring skulls of the five band members.

The cross design on the Appetite for Destruction cover was designed by Billy White, Jr. In an email exchange with Culture Creature, Mr. White explained that his cousin introduced him to Guns N’ Roses while White was an art student in Long Beach, California. Billy and the band became friends. “One day Axl called,” Mr. White explained, “and asked if i could draw him a tattoo, after he’d seen a drawing I’d done on my cousin’s wall. I said sure, and we talked. 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.” Irish rock greats Thin Lizzy used Celtic border elements on the cover of their 1976 album Johnny the Fox.

Mr. White described the above pencil sketch as “a rough draft that i got approval from Axl on to move forward” to a final, full-color image done on Bristol paper using watercolor, gouache, and ink. White speculates that his final painting is likely in the possession of Geffen records.

Axl then had the cross design tattooed on his arm by Robert Benedetti at Sunset Strip Tattoo in Los Angeles (Benedetti is credited for “tattoos” in the Appetite for Destruction liner notes). During a phone call, Mr. Benedetti confirmed this, and said that his friends Axl and “Duffy” were at the tattoo studio often, and “then they got signed and they were gone.”

White’s pencil sketch was sold at a Grammy awards charity auction in 2009 (according to one commenter, the drawing sold for for $6,200). “I didn’t have anything to do with the auction, and don’t know who offered it for sale,” White noted.
An artist named Andy Engel made some refinements to White’s cross design, and it was approved for use as a secondary element in Appetite’s packaging – which was planned to have Robert Williams’ painting of a hallucinatory rape scene (see below) on its cover. Williams’ painting is titled ‘Appetite for Destruction.’ The album was actually shipped to stores with this original cover design – but this original version didn’t last long.

The Robert Williams cover started harming album sales when some stores refused to sell it. “David Geffen gave me a lecture about the wrong cover,” Axl said during a 2011 interview with ‘That Metal Show,’ “the first cover gets banned, we go with the second.”

Billy White recalled, “Axl called again, and said [my design] was going to be on the cover of everything, because the Williams painting got rejected… I was okay with that!”

Today, Mr. White and photographer Robert John share the site FusedArts.com.

Early Appetite for Destruction Cover Concepts

Axl was obviously in the mood for controversy while making Appetite. During his ‘That Metal Show’ interview, he revealed that his first concept for Appetite for Destruction cover art was to use a photograph of the Challenger spacecraft exploding (he intended to use a photo that had appeared on the cover of Time magazine). That was deemed to be “in bad taste” for obvious reasons, so Axl moved on to Williams’ painting, and finally, Billy White Jr.’s Guns N’ Roses cross design.

The band referenced the Williams painting on the design of its 2016 Nightrain fan club materials.

The final ‘cross’ design works much better than Williams’ painting as an album cover; its bold simplicity has a symbolic graphic quality. The design has become iconic and was used almost like a logo by the band for decades.
https://www.culturecreature.com/appetite-for-destruction-cover-art-guns-n-roses/
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Post by Blackstar Mon Nov 26, 2018 4:32 am

Interview with Manny Charlton, who produced the Sound City demos that are included in the box set:
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Post by Soulmonster Fri Jul 19, 2019 5:44 pm

Review in Melody Maker, July 25, 1987:

"
Paul Mahur wrote:Guns N' Roses: Appetite For Destruction (Geffen)

Paul Mathur, Melody Maker, 25 July 1987

OF COURSE they're dreadful. What's more surprising is that so many members of the press, who on most other days of the week could be trusted to understand things, seemed to be surprised that Guns N' Roses aren't fun. How, one wonders could they ever have expected that five LA skinnies with tattoos and tight trousers would have offered any hope or even fear for rock? Guns N' Roses, perhaps more than any other limp cock rockers, do exactly, EXACTLY what you expect.

The inside cover has a picture of an android selling toy robots next to a rape victim with her knickers round her knees. Above them a monster that might have come from one of Hieronymus Bosch's off days waggles its tongue in what I suppose is meant to be a gesture of lasciviousness. This is Guns N' Roses' idea of depravity, the furthest they can take the sleaze towards outrage. Now obviously only someone who's been living in a small box for their entire lives would ever even feel the slightest twinge of horror at all the studied disgust. The rest of the population of the world will snicker. A lot.

The best thing about Guns N' Roses is that they have a guitarist called Slash and another called Izzy Stradlin'. The worst thing is everything else but most of all the music. 'Welcome To The Jungle' is the first song and as good a demonstration as any of what the band like to do with their noise. Basically this consists of playing all the instruments very loud and very carefully along the kick ass school of things, nodding towards sentimentality but never so much that people might think they're soft. It sounds like someone's spooning broken glass and custard into your ears. 'Sweet Child O' Mine' and 'Rocket Queen' fill other bits of the record up with pretty much more of the same, giving whole new depths to the concept of variety.
It's a gruelling business wading through their creations, trying to think of some world where what they do could be seen as having even the slightest point, looking for signs that beneath the skulls and the shades there's a suggestion they can do something to thrill. The world is probably their house and the thrill, splitting up. The rest as they say, is crap.

When the great book of pop comes to be written, Guns N' Roses will have forgotten their library ticket.
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Post by Soulmonster Fri Jul 19, 2019 5:45 pm

Review in Los Angeles Times, August 9, 1987:

Don Waller wrote:Guns N' Roses: Appetite For Destruction (Geffen) **; Faster Pussycat: Faster Pussycat (Elektra) **

Don Waller, Los Angeles Times, 9 August 1987

WHAM, GLAM, NO THANK YOU, MA'AM

IN THE WAKE of the $u¢¢e$$ of Motley Crue and — more recently — Poison, it's hardly surprising that major record labels are jumping on Los Angeles' neo-glam bandwagon by signing up every lipsticked riff-slinger whose hands can stop shaking long enough to make an X on a recording contract. Witness these two debut long-players from a pair of local quintets that, underneath their shared bad-boy image, display marked musical differences.

Guns N' Roses is the more accomplished, with a greater rhythmic vocabulary a la Led Zeppelin and a duel-guitar attack reminiscent of Aerosmith. (They wish). Although this flipped disc is remarkably consistent, this wanna-be wild bunch of Jack Daniel's-swilling guitar-slingers winds up firing blanks, thanks to a combination of stoopid lyrics, obnoxious lead vocals and the fact that these pistol-packers couldn't write a song if you pointed a rose to their collective heads.
Speaking of Aerosmith and obnoxious lead vocalists, Faster Pussycat's oh-so-cleverly named throat-person Taime Downe has to be either the world's best or world's worst Steven Tyler impersonator this side of a Las Vegas revue. (Inspirational verse: "I've got rocks in my head and in my pants.")

Meanwild, these cats on a hot tin riff are laughably derivative, all flash and no panache, suitable for consumption only by those who either missed the party the first time or wax incredibly nostalgic for those halcyon daze when we were all hanging out at Rodney's English Disco falling off our platform shoes. Sounds good on paper, not so good on the turntable.
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Post by Soulmonster Fri Jul 19, 2019 6:56 pm

Review in Creem, December 1987.

Deborah Frost wrote:Def Leppard: Hysteria (Polygram); Guns N' Roses: Appetite For Destruction (Geffen)

Deborah Frost, Creem, December 1987

WAS IT REALLY worth the wait? Four years and nearly two million dollars later, Def Leppard has finally unveiled their new "masterpiece." What Hysteria's constipated production reveals is that the worst thing that's happened to Def Leppard is not Rick Allen's accident, but success.

What's missing here is the heart of the band. Def Lep have lost their youthful kick, attitude and focus. Instead, they've slathered on the echo, effects and formulas. Buried in processing, you can barely understand a word Joe Elliot is singing — but that's OK. The lyrics you can hear ("love is a bomb," "walk this way") are either clichés or non-sequiturs. And the once biting guitar licks that helped put these guys at the forefront of the new wave of British metal now sound like Andy Summers' spacey doodle outtakes. Even the Leps' trademark harmonies have become swollen and predictable. The one guy who is doing something new is drummer Rick Allen, but only out of necessity. His parts, with or without the aid of sampling and computers, sound as good, if not better, than ever. Hysteria's real tragedy is that it has no great rock songs, merely sweetened jams ('Women', 'Pour Some Sugar On Me', 'Rocket', 'Armegeddon It'). Only the ballads, 'Love Bites' (which bears more than a passing resemblance to the more galvanizing 'Love Hurts') and 'Love And Affection' are sustained ideas and real compositions.

The sticker on the album proudly announces Hysteria has 12 songs and 63 minutes, as if it's a squeezably soft supermarket item. But it's no bargain. The whole spiel would probably take half an hour if most of these numbers weren't salted with dub sections ('Rocket' — 6:34) and Sgt. Pepper-ings ('Gods Of War' — 6:32). And the sound quality, for all the dough spent, is dirt poor. Then again, none of Hysteria is any worse than the throw-aways that filled out High 'N' Dry or Pyromania. It just doesn't equal Def Leppard's best stuff ('Foolin'', 'Photograph', 'Rock Of Ages'), or anyone else's, either. While the Leps have been caking on the studio makeup for four years, a guy from New Jersey has effortlessly stolen their hard pop thunder. Now, after straining and squeezing out their Pyromania follow-up, Def Leppard ought to get right back on the pot, like management mates Metallica, and knock off a sloppy, happy EP of covers in three weeks. Maybe then, they'll remember what rock 'n' roll feels like.

What Guns N' Roses, on the other hand, have got going for them is feel, but that's about it. They're another L.A. schmatta and tattoo band trying to walk this way on the wild side — what hath Aerosmith wrought? Begging us to feel their serpentines ('Welcome To The Jungle'), bragging of their acquaintance with cheap wine ('Nightrain') and more dangerous substances ('Mr. Brownstone'), sex ('Anything Goes') and the law ('Out Ta Get Me'), Guns N' Roses try desperately to convince us they're sleazier, nastier Hollywood mothers than the motliest crue. If it isn't especially shocking, it's because it's all been done before, and with tougher hooks and sharper lyrics — namely by the Stones, whose L.A.-based Exile On Main Street phase is an obvious model for GN'R's sound and image. But then, early Elvis, with merely the power of suggestion, was a lot more threatening than these little snots, whose idea of a great line is "It's so easy, so f***in' easy."

The guitar duo of Joe Perry clones Izzy Stradlin and the mysterious no-last-named Slash (whose street credibility might be harmed by the rumor that his family are close personal friends of that famous gutter rat David Geffen) is edgy and energetic, if not unique. GN'R's liability is their stiff drummer, who's got all of the finesse of Ritchie Valens' brother Bob in the La Bamba flick. But the band's ace is singer W. Axl Rose, who's a better Tyler mimic than the thousands who've been crawling out of their holes recently. (Question: If people want to imitate someone who can't sing, why don't they get with the program and imitate Lemmy?) Young W. not only beats Vince Neil and other L.A. pussycats, he's a better singer than the old Boston wailer himself. This guy may actually be a great talent. One cut, he comes off like Brian Johnson ('Nightrain'), the next drops down an octave to Johansen-doing-Eric Burdon level ('It's So Easy'), then turns into Janis Joplin ('Paradise City', 'Sweet Child O' Mine')! But what's even more interesting than his chameleon vocal colors is the outright sentimental streak of his 'Sweet Child O' Mine' and the strangely moralistic tone that informs his reading of the Jungle's "delights." He approaches Hollywood's sleaze the way Paul Schrader did in Hardcore as a voyeur who's horrified rather than tantalized. Maybe the fact that he comes from the same state as John Mellencamp is something Rose ought to exploit — he can't hide it. If he can get beyond the limitations of Guns N' Poses, he could become someone to take very seriously.

(This review was co-written by Blue Oyster Cult's Albert Bouchard)
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Post by Blackstar Mon Aug 26, 2019 3:24 pm

Review in L.A. Weekly, October 2, 1987:

Appetite for Destruction 1987_136
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Post by Soulmonster Wed Nov 13, 2019 10:28 pm

No. 153 - Guns N’ Roses - Appetite for Destruction
One of the most successful rock albums of all time when it comes to the charts in the U.S., Guns N’ Roses’ Appetite for Destruction doesn’t need to sell another copy to remain in the history books, and yet it does week after week. The rock outfit’s debut settles at No. 153 this frame as it celebrates four nonconsecutive years on the Billboard 200, or exactly 208 weeks. That’s a rare feat, and one the group managed before with their Greatest Hits compilation.
Source: https://www.forbes.com/sites/hughmcintyre/2019/11/12/mariah-carey-my-chemical-romance-and-guns-n-roses-5-noteworthy-moves-on-this-weeks-billboard-200/#7b0a6e8a33ed
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Post by Soulmonster Tue Feb 11, 2020 10:12 am

Review in Santa Fe New Mexican, May 13, 1988.

Appetite for Destruction Santa_12
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Post by Blackstar Mon Apr 13, 2020 6:55 pm

Article in Guitar World, March 2001:
The History of Hard Rock - The Eighties

Guns N' Roses - Appetite for Destruction


Over the years, a great deal of meaning has been ascribed to Guns N' Roses' major-label debut. Depending on your perspective, it either marked the return of "real" raw rock and roll after years of diluted, MTV-safe pablum, was the resurgence bad boys flipping the bird to the tame conventions of the mid Eighties or was one of the first and most potent chronicles of urban street life outside of the hip-hop realm. But could it be that APPETITE FOR DESTRUCTION worked simply because it kicked ass?

To be sure, hard rock had fallen into a bit of malaise by the time Guns N' Roses fired its first, combustible shot. Some groups-such as Motley Crue and the thrash and speed underground-still kept the music on an unapologetically irreverent and dangerous-sounding edge; but dolled up, deogenic acts -such as Bon Jovi, Def Leppard, Dokken and Whitesnake -were working on a poppier tip. Even Van Halen, with new frontman Sammy Hagar, was more about melody and hooks than crunch and thunder.

Enter GN'R, a bunch of transplanted street rats who had honed their sound while living in drug-addled squalor. Led by the guitar heroics of one Saul Hudson (a.k.a. Slash) and the venomous angst of frontman W. Axl Rose, GN'R developed a laudable sense of songcraft, with a vocabulary that encompassed vintage Rolling Stones attitude, Led Zeppelin muscle and punk rock urgency. It was a furious assault, with a propulsive tone of yearning and desperation that rolled over listeners in waves.

Nowhere was this more evident than in APPETITE's leadoff track, "Welcome to the Jungle," the Indiana-born Rose's impressionistic view of L.A.'s underbelly through the eyes of a teenage runaway. "You can taste the bright lights/But you won't get them for free," he growled and, indeed, it took GN'R -which almost named itself Heads of Amazon -a few years of slogging through the city's cutthroat club scene before its first EP, LIVE ?!*@ LIKE a SUICIDE, sold 10,000 copies and set off a bidding war that Geffen eventually won.

But even the gritty energy of the EP didn't prepare the world for the raucous storm of APPETITE. Riffs that would (and did) make Keith Richards proud soared alongside Rose's high-pitched wail of a vocal and over a slamming, menacing bottom, all sounding like a street gang marching toward its next rumble. "People related to the songs because they're real, they're sincere," Slash said at the time. On tracks such as "Nightrain," "Mr. Brownstone," "It's So Easy," "Anything Goes" and "Rocket Queen," Rose sang of drug-, booze-and sex-fueled decadence with visceral, cinematic detail. And then there was "Paradise City" and "Sweet Child O' Mine," breakthrough hits that expressed an almost desperate hope for something better -particularly the latter, which was Rose's love song to his then-girlfriend (and future short-term wife) Erin Everly. "It was a joke," Slash recalls of the song that took GN'R to No.1 on the BILLBOARD singles charts. "We were living in this house that had electricity, a couch and nothing else. The record company had just signed us and we were on our backs. There was a lot of shit going on. We were hanging out one night and I started playing that riff. And the next thing you know, Izzy [STRADLIN, GUITAR] made up some chords behind it, and Axl went off on it. I used to HATE playing that sucker."

But thanks to "Sweet Child," APPETITE spent five weeks a No.1 and has sold more than 20 million copies worldwide. For a time GN'R seemed poised to take over the world, but continuing substance abuse problems, erratic behavior and artistic indulgence - a four-year wait for the two USE YOUR ILLUSION albums -snatched defeat from the jaws of victory. These days, only Rose is left, expected to release the first GN'R album of new material in a decade later this year.

"All of a sudden we BECAME the norm... and all of a sudden it was no longer fun to be Guns N' Roses, 'that rebellious hard rock band,' " says Slash, who now fronts his own band, Slash's Snakepit. "We were real frustrated with being so ACCEPTABLE. We're not Motley Crue. We're not gonna do something that APPEARS a little bit dangerous so we can sell records."
http://www.heretodaygonetohell.com/articles/showarticle.php?articleid=41
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Post by Blackstar Fri Jul 08, 2022 7:08 am

Article in Classic Rock, January 2019:
Appetite For Reconstruction

Five young hopefuls called Guns N’ Roses walked into a recording studio. They walked out with one of the best debut albums ever, but Appetite For Destruction could have turned out very differently

By Paul Elliott

June 5, 1986. At Sound City studios in Los Angeles, Guns N’ Roses are recording demos for their debut album. The most talked about band on the LA rock scene have recently signed to Geffen Records following a furious bidding war between major labels. To oversee this recording session, Geffen have brought in a man who has seen and done it all – Manny Charlton, the guitarist with Nazareth, one of the great rock bands of the 70s.

For the first couple of hours, the cool air in the studio fills with cigarette smoke as the band blast through a succession of mean rock’n’roll songs. Charlton likes what he hears. As he recalls now: “They were like Aerosmith and the Stones – especially with the image they had.”

And then, halfway through the session, the group’s singer, Axl Rose, does something unexpected.

“He just sat down at a piano when we were having a break,” Charlton says, “and played this song to the band.”

The song Rose performed solo was titled November Rain. It was a piece he had written three years earlier, before Guns N’ Roses had formed, and it was unlike anything else in the band’s repertoire – a beautiful, epic love song played out over 10 minutes, with shades of Queen and Elton John.

As Rose sang it, his voice raw with emotion, Charlton was transfixed. When it was done, Charlton was convinced that November Rain would be the most important song on Guns N’ Roses’ first album. But the singer was already thinking ahead.

“It’s for the second album,” Axl told him.

At the end of the session they had 25 tracks on tape. There was a raw energy in ones such as Nightrain and Out Ta Get Me – the band sounding, as lead guitarist Slash later put it, “like angry dogs cornered”. There was a bigger reach, a classic-rock feel, in two numbers: Paradise City and Rocket Queen. The most powerful of all, Charlton thought, was a song in which Rose sang of the danger on the LA streets – Welcome To The Jungle. But for Guns N’ Roses, there was still a long way to go.

It would take another nine months, and another producer, before their debut record, Appetite For Destruction, was completed. And while Charlton’s instincts told him that this was a great band in the making, he, like so many others, didn’t sense the true potential of Guns N’ Roses.

“They were just a bunch of young guys living their rock’n’roll dreams and having the time of their lives,” Charlton says. “I never foresaw that they would become one of the biggest bands in rock history.”

Alt

Thirty-two years down the line, in June 2018, the best-selling debut album of all time was repacked and reissued in a deluxe edition, in which the fabled Sound City session – previously heard only in extracts on low-grade bootlegs – was finally presented for the first time in full, and in high-definition sound.

It revealed a classic album as a work in progress, the band rising towards a peak, and Rose reaching for something deeper with November Rain. Nine of the songs recorded in that one-day session were included, in reworked form, on Appetite For Destruction. What Manny Charlton hears in these tracks now is, in his words, “a great, raw young band”. But at the time these recordings were made, there was a general consensus among music industry insiders that this band, signed to a six-album deal, would be lucky to make one.

Guns N’ Roses had a heavy reputation as the as the wildest and druggiest band out of LA since Mötley Crüe. As Slash later recalled: “In the early days the most famous quote about Guns N’ Roses was: ‘They’re gonna self-destruct and kill themselves before they even have a record out.’ That was something that was probably sort of true.”

It was Tom Zutaut, the A&R man who took the band to Geffen, who did most to get Appetite For Destruction made. In his previous role at Elektra Records, Zutaut had signed Mötley Crüe, and his first choice as producer for Guns N’ Roses was Tom Werman, a hardened veteran who had worked with the Crüe on their hit albums Shout At The Devil and Theatre Of Pain.

Zutaut figured that if Werman could control Mötley Crüe in a studio environment, then he could handle Guns N’ Roses. In the end it never came to that. When Werman attended a Guns N’ Roses rehearsal, they were playing the song Mr. Brownstone so loud that he simply walked out, never to return.

Zutaut’s next approach was to Paul Stanley of Kiss, a band idolised by Guns N’ Roses drummer Steven Adler. But in Stanley’s first meeting with the band, his suggestion that they should work on a new arrangement for Welcome To The Jungle was rejected flat-out. As Guns bassist Duff McKagan said later: “We weren’t going to rewrite a song for anybody.”

It was left to Zutaut to inform Stanley that his services were not required. And it was Rose who led Zutaut to Manny Charlton when he said: “Get me the guy who produced Hair Of The Dog.” That album, from 1975, was the biggest of Nazareth’s career, and the first of many to be produced by the guitarist. It had also been a major influence on Rose as a teenager growing up in Lafayette, Indiana – not least in the way that his style of singing, high and gritty, mirrored that of Nazareth’s frontman Dan McCafferty.

In the mid-80s, Charlton had produced two gold albums for Canadian rock group Streetheart. But it was the earthy sound of classic Nazareth that Rose wanted for Guns N’ Roses. Zutaut travelled to Charlton’s home in Scotland with a handful of GN’R’s live recordings.

“A couple of board mixes on cassette that weren’t too great,” Charlton says. “But I heard enough to be interested.” A loose arrangement was made for Charlton to produce the band in LA. “In hindsight,” he says, “it was some kind of audition for me.” Ahead of the recording session, Charlton had only one meeting with Axl and Slash, at the Sunset Marquis hotel in Hollywood. His first impression was telling. “Axl was obviously the leader,” he says.

At Sound City, he had the band set up as if they were playing a gig, “with Axl between the two entry doors to the studio, so he could see everyone and still be isolated from the studio live room”.

His whole approach was simple. “I just asked them to play all the songs in their current set with no overdubs. I just wanted a handle on the songs.” And despite the reputation that preceded them, the band didn’t bring any alcohol into the studio, let alone drugs.

“Everyone was stone-cold straight,” Charlton says. In the 25 tracks recorded, the outline of Appetite For Destruction was traced in formative versions of key songs such as Welcome To The Jungle, Paradise City, Nightrain and Rocket Queen. There were rough takes of the four tracks – Reckless Life, Move To The City and covers of Aerosmith’s Mama Kin and Rose Tattoo’s Nice Boys – that would feature on the band’s debut EP Live ?!*@ Like A Suicide, released ahead of the album.

The remainder included versions of the Stones’ Jumpin’ Jack Flash and, more surprisingly, the Elvis Presley classic Heartbreak Hotel; a nasty little tune named Back Off Bitch that would eventually be released in 1991 along with the more sensitive November Rain; and Shadow Of Your Love, a punk-rock blaster originally written and performed in Hollywood Rose, the band led by Axl and rhythm guitarist Izzy Stradlin before they formed Guns N’ Roses.

A few days after this session, Charlton returned to Scotland to resume work on the Nazareth album Cinema.

“I told Tom Zutaut that I’d love to produce the Guns N’ Roses record if we could get our schedules together,” he says. But the call never came. “Later, I heard they had auditioned nine other people for the gig,” says Charlton.

Tom Zutaut moved fast to keep the project on track. Within a month he had set Guns N’ Roses to work with Spencer Proffer, the producer of Quiet Riot’s Metal Health, an album that hit No.1 in the US in 1983 and lit the fuse for the LA hair-metal explosion that followed.

Soon after, Zutaut also found a new manager, Alan Niven, for the band, a replacement for Vicky Hamilton who was dismissed shortly after the Geffen deal was finalised. Niven, born in New Zealand and raised in England, had become friends with Zutaut when promoting Mötley Crüe’s debut album Too Fast For Love.

In 1986, Niven was focused on managing another LA rock band, Great White, for whom he was also co-songwriter and producer. He was not looking for new clients, but took on Guns N’ Roses due to Zutaut’s persistence. When Niven heard the Sound City session, he was underwhelmed. As he recalls: “It was very punk, and Axl sounded like he had overdosed on helium at certain points.”

Niven was also not convinced that Proffer was the right fit for Guns N’ Roses. While Axl and drummer Steven Adler had the big hair that was de rigueur on the Sunset Strip, Stradlin spoke for the whole band when he dismissed Mötley Crüe as “teen metal” and stated: “We go for a more roots-oriented sound than most other bands around here.”

Niven made an equally damning assessment of Quiet Riot and their signature anthem Metal Health (Bang Your Head). “I was definitely not a fan of Quiet Riot,” he says. “Bang Your Head was ridiculous to me. Can you imagine Axl singing that lyric?”

As it turned out, Niven did not have to bang heads with Proffer. “Zutaut was expecting Proffer to produce,” he explains, “but when I asked to meet Spencer he sent his assistant instead. That was a bad move. Spencer made it easy for me to tell Tom that we needed to look for someone else.”

In the end it was a relative unknown who got the job. Mike Clink, a young guy from Maryland, near Baltimore, was just starting out as a producer, having previously worked as engineer on major rock albums by Heart, Survivor and UFO.

“Zutaut suggested Clink, and I thought it a brilliant idea,” Niven recalls. He was a great guitar engineer – his work with UFO and Michael Schenker was terrific. And Schenker was notoriously difficult to work with, but Clink had managed. That indicated to me he might be able to deal with Axl. I knew he’d be great with Slash.”

Clink was aware of the band’s reputation. “It was a little disconcerting,” he said, “that whole demeanour they had. They really were living that reckless life. But when I heard the songs I was blown away. And the beauty in it was that no two songs sounded the same.”

It was in late August that the band began work with Clink at Rumbo Recorders, a studio in Canoga Park on the outskirts of Los Angeles. The first track recorded was Shadow Of Your Love, and it was exactly how Guns N’ Roses sounded in Axl’s head.

“We cut the song over one weekend,” Clink said, “and a few days later Axl called and said: ‘I just heard it and it’s amazing!’”

With Clink guiding them, Guns N’ Roses raised their game. As Niven recalls: “A concern I had when listening to the Sound City demos was that one of the songs, which had a weak performance, be concentrated on and brought up to another level. I thought it might prove to be a big song on the record, and I loved the social sarcasm in it, because LA was beginning to lose its glitter and gloss to me. That was Welcome To The Jungle.”

Clink got so much power and intensity out of the band on this track that it became the album’s electrifying opening statement. And with Paradise City, a new intro, beautifully played by Slash, lifted a great song even higher.

Equally significant were three songs that had not been recorded in the Sound City session. Mr. Brownstone was a funky number named after a notorious LA drug dealer and reminiscent of Aerosmith at their hedonistic peak. It’s So Easy, brutal and borderline-misogynist, with a riff evoking the Sex Pistols. In both of those, Axl sang in a lower register, adding a new dimension to the sound. And in the third of these songs, Appetite For Destruction had its secret weapon.

Sweet Child O’ Mine, a ballad loosely inspired by Lynyrd Skynyrd, its lyrics written by Axl for his then-girlfriend Erin Everly, sounded to Tom Zutaut like a hit waiting to happen. As Niven puts it, indelicately: “Tom was real high on Sweet Child, and I had a major boner for Paradise City. And because we had Sweet Child we didn’t need November Rain. Axl was convinced that November Rain was his masterstroke, and that it needed even more time and attention. So it qualified as a brilliant hold-over.”

As Alan Niven saw it, the band “matured into the Clink sessions and gained a deeper and broader power. Better performances, better tones, better textures, greater confidence, more imagination, more gravitas.” And as the album took shape, the Live ?!*@ Like A Suicide EP was put together from the recordings the band had made with Spencer Proffer.

Four studio tracks – Reckless Life, Move To The City, Nice Boys and Mama Kin – were overdubbed with audience noise taken from the Texxas Jam, a 1978 festival headlined by Aerosmith. In another sleight of hand, the EP was marketed as an independent release on the band’s own label, Uzi Suicide, without Geffen’s branding. Issued on December 16, it gave the band a profile outside of LA, with Kerrang! writer Xavier Russell proclaiming Guns N’ Roses “the sleaziest band in Smog Angeles”.

The recording of the album was eventually completed in March 1987, at which point Niven was, by his own admission, a worried man.

“A lot of time and money had been spent,” he says. “The recording of Appetite cost 365,000 dollars. It was an outrageous amount to spend on a debut, and I wondered if we would ever dig out of that hole and see any meaningful income.”

Niven was not alone in feeling the pressure. As he bluntly recounts: “Clink was completely out of gas come the mixing sessions. He couldn’t get a mix done, and Zutaut was scared shitless that all that time and money was wasted.”

Niven’s solution was to mix one track with Michael Lardie, the keyboard player and rhythm guitarist in Great White. “It was my way of proving Clink had the performances on tape,” he explains.

At Total Access studio in LA, where the Great White album Once Bitten was being recorded, Niven and Lardie went to work fast. “We stripped the board and set up for a mix and told Zutaut to choose a roll of tape.”

In four hours they had a mix of Mr. Brownstone. “The band were waiting at Tom’s office to hear what we thought,” Niven says. “Had Clink got it on tape or not? ‘You’d better come down,’ I said. Only Izzy had the courage to show up. We hit ‘Play’, and by the chorus he was up off the sofa and pumping his fist in the air – a very un-Izzy-like action.”

The final mix of the album was by the team of Steve Thompson and Michael Barbiero. The remit, Thompson remembers, was to make the record sound “as loud as possible”. Niven believes they did that and more. “They utterly connected to the energy of the tracks,” he says. “I was blown away.”

It took a long time and so many changes to get there, but what Guns N’ Roses created with Appetite For Destruction was a record that shook the world. It has now sold more than 30 million copies worldwide. In October 2018 Classic Rock readers voted it the greatest debut album of all time. In the end, Alan Niven’s fears proved unfounded. He – and a lot of other people – made a lot of money out of Appetite For Destruction.

Manny Charlton was not among them. “Geffen paid for my flights but they still owe me for the hotel bill,” he says now. But there was a reward for Charlton a little later on, when GN’R recorded a Nazareth song, the title track from Hair Of The Dog, on their 1993 covers album “The Spaghetti Incident?”

And Charlton was right about November Rain. When he heard Axl play it on that day in 1986, he knew it was an important song. Thirty-two years later, the video for November Rain became the first from the 20th century to receive one billion views.
https://www.loudersound.com/features/false-starts-and-a-whole-lotta-cash-how-appetite-for-destruction-was-made


Last edited by Blackstar on Thu Jul 14, 2022 11:39 pm; edited 1 time in total
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Post by ludurigan Fri Jul 08, 2022 9:40 pm

Such a great article!
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Post by ludurigan Fri Jul 08, 2022 9:46 pm

Blackstar wrote:Article in Classic Rock, July 2022:

(...) It was Rose who led Zutaut to Manny Charlton when he said: “Get me the guy who produced Hair Of The Dog.” (...) It was the earthy sound of classic Nazareth that Rose wanted for Guns N’ Roses. Zutaut travelled to Charlton’s home in Scotland with a handful of GN’R’s live recordings. “A couple of board mixes on cassette that weren’t too great,” Charlton says. “But I heard enough to be interested.”

WOW!

So now we know that someone made board (soundboard, professional) recordings of GN'R early live shows

If those still exist, they must have a (much) better sound than the already-good-but-not-from-the-board Marc Canter's recordings, right?
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Post by Uli Mon Aug 01, 2022 6:39 pm

It's #11 on this list:

"Only 29 albums in history have sold more than 15 million copies — here they all are"
https://www.insider.com/best-selling-albums-ever-all-time-riaa-certified-platinum-2022-7

"Appetite for Destruction" was certified 18-times platinum on September 23, 2008.
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