The Making of 'Appetite for Destruction'

In 1986, clouds of Aqua Net hair spray hung heavy over the Sunset Strip, as the likes of Mötley Crüe, Ratt and Poison saw multiplatinum success, combining an exaggerated version of Seventies glam-rock style with pop hooks and a Zeppelin-like penchant for misbehavior.

By the end of that year, Guns n' Roses had yet to play a stadium show or shoot a video, but they were already capable of creating a major spectacle: Broke, strung out on drugs and angered by their slow progress toward a debut album, they took it all out on a rented house on the former estate of Cecil B. DeMille. An apoplectic landlord summoned the band's A&R rep, Tom Zutaut, and then-manager Arnold Stiefelto the ravaged property one day. "I almost fainted," says Stiefel, whose name was on the lease. "It was Beneath the Planet of the Apes. It was Beyond the Valley of the Dolls. It was so beyond imagining. I couldn't stop laughing." The band had torn the toilets from the floor and thrown them out the window. The scene inside was worse, recalls Zutaut: "People were defecating in the sinks. The holes in the floor where the toilets got ripped off were filled with urine. There were half-eaten Whoppers with mold on the wrappers. They would just get in these drug rages and just go berserk." Zutaut had made his name signing the famously decadent Mötley Crüe — but this was worse than anything he'd seen before. The damage totaled $22,000; Stiefel and his partner Randy Phillips submitted it to Geffen Records and then dropped Guns as clients.

Inside the house, one room was left untouched amid the madness. "There was this padlocked door," Zutaut recalls. "You go inside, and there was Axl in this immaculate, perfect room, surrounded by all this squalor. That was the dichotomy of Guns n' Roses." Rose was less interested in drugs and alcohol than his bandmates — but he had his own problems. He was diagnosed as a manic-depressive, and his associates sometimes wondered whether he actually had multiple personality disorder. "He has this very likable little-boy personality, and then he has the demon-dog-from-hell personality," says Vicky Hamilton, an early manager. "The color of his eyes actually changes when he goes into this different person."

It wasn't easy to find managers or producers willing to deal with this group — or vice versa. One rejected producer, Kiss guitarist Paul Stanley, saw firsthand just how difficult the band could be. He showed up one day at an apartment the label had rented for the band on Sunset Boulevard and found Stradlin and Slash nodded out on a couch. When they woke up, they played him some demos, including one of "Nightrain." Stanley liked it but suggested the chorus needed an extra hook. That was it: Rose never spoke to Stanley again, refusing to even look at him. Then Stanley started hearing that Slash was spreading rumors that he was gay — and that he "dressed weird," to boot. "I always thought that was funny," says Stanley. "Because their lead singer was up onstage in a woman's red vinyl jumpsuit with a motorcycle hat and makeup."