Extract from W.A.R. – my updated Kindle-only biography of W. Axl Rose – out now.
In the same way that Led Zeppelin will always be remembered first and foremost for the hauntingly balladic ‘Stairway To Heaven’, or why the Beatles’ most superior moments are still regarded as tracks like ‘Yesterday’ or ‘A Day In The Life’ – and arguably why the Rolling Stones, authors of so many classic uptempo rock songs but no similarly momentous slower compositions, are not held in the same critical regard as the Beatles – Appetite would owe its elevated place in rock history not to flagrantly provocative tracks like ‘It’s So Easy’ or ‘Rocket Queen’ but to the golden light shed by ‘Sweet Child O’ Mine’ and, following close behind, ‘Paradise City’ and, half a step behind that, ‘Welcome To The Jungle’.
Indeed, if the band had had the foresight to ditch a few of the clearly less important tracks like ‘Anything Goes’, ‘Think About You’, ‘Out Ta Get Me’ and the needlessly speeded-up ‘You’re Crazy’, in favour of the four, acoustic-driven tracks they recorded soon after for the expanded 1988 reissue of their live EP – the sublime ‘Patience’, the so-hurtful-it’s-funny ‘Used To Love Her’, the original, lengthier, utterly hypnotic ‘You’re Crazy’ and the plainly incendiary but undeniably compelling ‘One In A Million’ – they would arguably have released one of the greatest debut albums of all time, ready to stand alongside comparably titanic debuts like those of the Sex Pistols, Led Zeppelin or the Velvet Underground.
As it is, Appetite suffers because it appears to put all its eggs in one basket: the band trying too hard perhaps to live up to that spuriously flattering ‘most dangerous band in the world’ tag; all sense of quality control slung out the window; a fact which tended to obscure the fact that along with it went any attempt to fit in with the prevailing commercial trends of the existing ’80s ‘hair’ metal scene which they are still, to this day, unfairly considered figureheads for.
Certainly, if you were merely judging the book by its cover there would be plenty to put the casual observer off, the sight of Robert Williams’ disturbing vision of a post-coital robot and its aghast victim causing several major US retail chains to refuse to stock the album, even though 30,000 copies had already been pressed and shipped to their stores.
“All that people saw was a girl with her knickers pulled down – not the karmic retribution in it,” claimed Alan Niven. But Robert Williams himself had foreseen the problems the band would have by using his painting. “I told Axl he was going to get into trouble,” he says now. As soon as they’d asked him if they could use the title of the painting, Williams says “I knew there’d be a problem.” Although he admits he was thinking more of the trouble it would cause him, his main concern was that, “None of the guys in this band were too articulate, so [I knew] they would direct the media to me to defend the cover.”
In the event, Geffen circumnavigated the problem by simply moving the image on new pressings of the album from the front cover to somewhere inside; while the front was freshly adorned by another cartoon-like image – a plain black sleeve featuring Axl’s tattoo of a death’s-head cross studded with five skulls, each of which represented a different member of the band. The alternative ‘black sleeve’ was also made available to record retailers in Britain after W H Smith banned the original sleeve from their shelves and Virgin Megastore in London refused an in-store display.
Of course, those critics that could be bothered to review it – neither Rolling Stone nor any other high-profile mainstream magazine outlets in the US saw fit to comment – took the whole thing at face-value, either lavishing praise on it or dismissing it completely. This was ‘heavy metal’ after all, wasn’t it? Not the sort of thing the big boys of the music press ever took seriously; which was a shame because an opportunity was definitely missed.
Whatever one’s take on deliberately outré tracks like ‘My Michelle’ or ‘It’s So Easy’, the album as a whole so defied the conventions of rock in the 1980s that, like the Sex Pistols before them and Nirvana soon after, the sudden arrival of the sleazy Guns N’ Roses single-handedly redrew the lines upon which the rock map was until then set; the first truly potent chronicle of urban street life that had existed outside of the realm of hip-hop and rap since the decade began; and a genuine return to the raw, untamed, visceral values of rock in its pre-MTV heyday.