This Week in Rock History: Guns N' Roses Top the Charts

Aug 6, 1988: Guns N' Roses' Appetite for Destruction hits Number One after spending almost a year on the charts

What were we saying earlier about the Billboard charts not always being indicative of a band's success? Epic rockers Guns N' Roses know that conundrum well. Their 1987 debut, Appetite for Destruction, had a long road to Number One: Its sales built quietly and steadily from hair-metal niche circles to nationwide attention, taking almost a year to top the charts. It debuted at Number 182 on the Billboard 200 on August 29, 1987 and hit Number One on August 6, 1988 (though the album is frequently cited, incorrectly, as hitting Number One in September of that year).

The libidinous swagger of Axl, Slash, Izzy, Duff, and Steven (poor Steven came up short in the name department) has proven to have timeless appeal. Appetite for Destruction has sold over 18 million copies – not band for a band helmed by "a screaming two-year-old," as Axl put it to Rolling Stone in 1992.

Aug 5, 1983: David Crosby was sentenced to prison for cocaine possession
It's a hell of a drug, as Dave Chappelle would quip many years later. Cocaine proved the downfall of Byrds and Crosby, Stills, Nash, and Young singer David Crosby; he was so dependent to the drug, and many other rumored narcotics, that he seemed almost completely out of it throughout his criminal trial.

When Crosby was taken to court for cocaine possession and for carrying a loaded handgun into a nightclub, he was at the apex of his addiction. At his trial, he repeatedly fell asleep, right up until he was sentenced to five years in prison; he spent approximately a year behind bars in a Texas facility, a stint that included an enforced detoxification program. It wasn't the end of his legal troubles (other charges of drunk driving and drug possession were later levied against him), but the stint in jail led to a new period of creativity: He released Oh Yes I Can, his second solo record, in 1989, almost two decades after his first, 1971's If I Could Only Remember My Name.

LAST WEEK: 

• 
  MUSIC 100 Greatest Debut Albums
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  MOVIES 'Great Gatsby' Is a Crushing Disappointment
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  TV Why You Should Watch 'Happy Endings'
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  POLITICS No Price Big Banks Can't Fix

Song Stories

“All Along the Watchtower”

The Jimi Hendrix Experience | 1968

Jimi Hendrix got hold of Bob Dylan's early John Wesley Harding tapes and in late 1967 recorded a version of "All Along the Watchtower" with the Experience in London. Dissatisfied with that first development, Hendrix brought those tapes with him to New York in early 1968 when he began work on Electric Ladyland. Eddie Kramer, Hendrix's engineer at the time, told Rolling Stone that Hendrix "was still looked upon by his basically white audience as the mammoth black guitar hero. There was a constant fight within him to expand himself." Hendrix's successful take on Dylan's work has long been recognized by the songwriter. "I liked Jimi Hendrix's record of this and ever since he died I've been doing it that way," Dylan wrote in the liner notes to his Biograph box set. "Strange how when I sing it, I always feel it's a tribute to him in some kind of way."

More Song Stories entries »

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