The Making of 'Appetite for Destruction' : Rolling Stone

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The band rehearsed with Clink for weeks, then entered Rumbo Recorders — owned by the Captain, of Captain and Tenille fame, in January 1987. It spent two weeks laying down basic tracks, with Clink splicing together the best takes with his razor blade. Clink worked eighteen-hour days for the next month, with Slash overdubbing in the afternoon and evening, and Rose cutting vocals til the sun came up. Until he finally ended up with a Les Paul copy plugged into a Marshall, Slash struggled to find a guitar sound — he got so frustrated with a rented Gibson SG that he smashed it through a van window. He spent hours with Clink, paring down and structuring his solos until they were as catchy as the vocal melodies. Rose — mostly a high screamer onstage until that point — unveiled an uncanny vocal range, adding a low harmony part to the opening of "Paradise City" and an unearthly, police-siren-like wail at the beginning of "Welcome to the Jungle." "We had to channel all these voices and figure out what worked," says Clink. "With the intro to 'Welcome to the Jungle,' he didn't just open his mouth and that happened; we tried multiple, multiple takes to make sure it was the right growl." The total budget for the album was about $370,000 — an extravagant sum for a debut at the time.

Five months after its release, by December 1987, Appetite for Destruction had sold about 200,000 copies, with minimal radio airplay. Geffen execs told Zutaut and Niven that the album had done well for a baby band's debut, and it was time to pull Guns off the road and have them record a follow-up. Zutaut pleaded with company founder David Geffen to use his clout to push MTV to add the "Welcome to the Jungle" video. The network ended up playing it one time, at 4 a.m. on a Sunday. The result was an A&R man's wet dream: MTV's switchboard flooded with requests for the clip — and, seemingly, every angry kid in America drove to the mall and picked up a copy. When the "Sweet Child o' Mine" video came out about six months later, female fans came in by the millions. "I remember looking at my monitor and thinking, 'This sucks, this is really ordinary,'" director Nigel Dick says of that shoot. "And there were some girls from the label who were peeking over my shoulder, and one said, 'This is so fucking cool.' I quickly readjusted my opinion, because obviously, they thought he was really hot, and the rest, as they say, is history."

In its final verse, the raunchy "Rocket Queen" suddenly turns sweet: "No one needs the sorrow/No one needs the pain/I hate to see you/Walking out in the rain," Rose wails, his voice vaulting up an octave, and Slash kicks in with a weeping solo that feels like a benediction. The idea, Rose has said, was to give the album a happy ending after all of its darkness.

Though they reigned for the next four years as the biggest band in the world, the story of the original Guns n' Roses had a messier conclusion. Adler was the first to go, fired in 1990 by his bandmates, who accused him of heroin use that was out of control even by their standards.

The Cult's Matt Sorum replaced him. Adler never got over what he saw as betrayal and suffered a drug-induced stroke in 1995. "The thing that hurt me the most was that Slash didn't stick up for me,"says Adler, who now plays in a band called Adler's Appetite. "We were blood brothers. "But last year, Slash flew in from Europe to Adler's Las Vegas home to stage an intervention, trying to get him off cocaine. "That was friendship," says Adler. "That was love."

Stradlin quit in the middle of the tour for the band's second album, Use Your Illusion I and II — in part because he had gotten clean and couldn't be around his bandmates anymore. And in the mid-Nineties, as Axl Rose started pursuing industrial-rock experiments in the studio, the old band began to fall apart. Rose — who owns the rights to the band name — assembled a new G n' R, spending more than a decade recording Chinese Democracy, an album that has yet to be released. "It's because of Appetite that it's so hard for him to let go of Chinese Democracy," says Zutaut, who briefly worked with Rose on the album-in-progress. "He made it clear that he was trying to put out a record that would change the world as much as Appetite, and be better than Appetite."

Slash is more comfortable with the legacy of Appetite for Destruction. "When I was a kid, there were these be-with-you-forever albums that represented something in your life," he says. "Whether it was the background music of your childhood or your puberty or whatever — Dark Side of the Moon or Sticky Fingers or Aerosmith's Rocks or Led Zeppelin IV. And we made one of those records, which is all I could ever have asked for. It gives me goose bumps. That's something no one ever can take away from me."

[From Issue 1032 — August 9, 2007]