The Making of 'Appetite for Destruction'

At the core of Guns n' Roses were two pairs of troublemaking childhood friends. Adler and Slash (born Saul Hudson) skipped junior high together in L.A., while Stradlin and Rose ran wild in the nowheresville of Lafayette, Indiana. Duff McKagan was a smart blond kid from Seattle with punk-rock cred — he had managed to meet Joe Strummer as a young teen and was the original drummer in the Fastbacks while still in high school. McKagan left Seattle to get away from a heavy heroin scene, only to move in across the street from Stradlin — who was both using the drug and selling it.

The musicians spent a long while circling one another on the Hollywood circuit. Slash and Adler played with McKagan in a band called Road Crew and had stints in Rose's group, Hollywood Rose. G n' R took their name from a brief merger of Hollywood Rose and L.A. Guns, a band led by guitarist Tracii Guns, who had shared a house with Rose and Stradlin. The band pushed Tracii out after a couple of months to make room for Slash — but kept his name. "Hey, man, it's just a band name," Stradlin told him.

The classic Guns n' Roses lineup came together for its first rehearsal in a Silverlake studio in May 1985. "The moment that we fuckin' slammed into our first chord, there was something, and we all knew it," says McKagan. "We were only twenty years old, but we considered ourselves real veterans. It felt like, 'This is the band, this is it. This is what we've all been searching for.'" Before rehearsal, McKagan and Stradlin had helped shape the band's sound by hiding all of Adler's extra drums, transforming his setup from cheesy pop-metal excess to punk-rock simplicity.

Rose and Stradlin already had completed some future Guns n' Roses songs at that point, including the minor Appetite tracks "Anything Goes" and "Think About You," along with "Back Off Bitch" and "Don't Cry," which the band didn't release until 1991. (Rose also had a version of"November Rain" very early — he played it for one potential producer, Manny Charlton, telling him, "That one's for the second album.") But the rest of the Appetite songs came together over the next few months. The group's first songwriting collaboration was "Welcome to the Jungle" — Slash played the main riff for Rose while they hung out in Slash's mom's basement. "I picked up my guitar, standing in front of the couch on one knee, and said, 'Check this out,' and it stuck with him," Slash says. Later, McKagan wrote the song's trippy breakdown, and Slash remembers Stradlin putting together the bridge. "Axl was very open," McKagan says. "He wasn't like, 'I'm the singer, I must write all the stuff.' It was serving the music; it wasn't serving the ego. We didn't have egos yet." "Nightrain" combined a joke chorus named after a cheap brand of wine the band favored and a rough riff Stradlin had introduced. "Izzy had this thing where he'd play, like, half the notes," McKagan says. "It was cool, it was his style. Slash and I would have to figure out what he meant to play."

Before signing their record deal, most of G n' R lived, rehearsed and wrote songs in a cramped, vermin-ridden rehearsal space with no toilet, on the corner of Sunset and Gardner Street. "I can't remember one night that we actually slept quietly there, like, 'Good night, Axl.' 'Good night, Slash,'" says Slash. "It was more like that's where our shit was and that's where you could pass out." At the time, the band got by with a little help from its exotic-dancer friends. "Strippers were our main source of income," Slash adds. "They'd pay for booze, sometimes you could eat, shit like that. Really a great bohemian, gypsy lifestyle. I have great memories of those renegade strippers that took their chances with us." In that space, McKagan and Adler would hold daily practices of their own — they'd spend hours playing along together to funk tunes by Prince and Cameo ("Word Up!"was a favorite), locking in tight and growing comfortable with swinging rhythms that were unusual for hard rock. McKagan says the groove of "Rocket Queen" owes a particular debt to Cameo.

The band signed to Geffen in March 1986, and after months of inaction finally found a manager it could stand in the tough, brainy Englishman Alan Niven, who also worked with Great White. And in quick succession, it found a producer, too: Mike Clink, a recording engineer who combined superb technical skills with an unusual amount of patience. Plus, the group had written one last song: "Sweet Child o' Mine." At the Cecil B. DeMille house, Slash was fooling around with the song's signature riff as a "goofy personal exercise," and Stradlin started playing chords along with it. Unbeknown to either of the guitarists, Rose was listening from his room upstairs and writing lyrics. Says Slash, "If Axl hadn't been there writing those lyrics, chances are that song would have never existed."