84. Appetite for Destruction - Guns N' Roses (1988) 98/100. Whenever I think of Appetite for Destruction, I think of lines from the movie Casino, "but in the end we fucked it all up. It should'a been so sweet, too. But it turned out to be the last time that street guys like us were ever given anything that fuckin' valuable again." How could a band as big and as popular as Guns N' Roses blow it so badly over the course of six years? They were like the Brewster's Milliions of music.
I had recently read Watch You Bleed: The Saga of Guns N' Roses by Stephen Davis which, more or less, showed a lot of what I already knew - Axl was, and still is, a bipolar, primadonna, control freak and Slash was, and still is, pretty cool. What I didn't know is the type of control that Axl had on the entire band and his threats to fire people repeatedly kept the band going and failing over time (probably when they shouldn't have seeing as the amounts of drugs some of them were doing). Well that coupled with Axl's inability to get on the damn stage anywhere near show time led to their failure.
As for Appetite, well it still holds up as one of the best rock albums of all time. Some things I learned from the Davis book, Patience was originally going to be on Appetite but they (smartly) decided against it leaving Sweet Child O' Mine to be the only pseudo ballad on the album. My Michelle was written as an homage to a friend of the band supposedly similar to My Song by Elton John. While she later claimed to appreciate its honesty, she was looking for, "...and you can tell everybody this is your song" and got, "...your daddy works in porno now that mommy's not around". The sex acts that can be heard in Rocket Queen were real from drummer Steven Adler's girlfriend who spent some time with Axl during the recording session. Apparently, this act, brought a rift between Adler and his woman causing her to get heavily into drinking and drugs and also added fuel to a fire between Adler and Axl. Speaking of Adler, if you have ever watched Celebrity Rehab on VH1, the whole Guns N' Roses experience wasn't exactly good for his drug use. In retrospect, you could easily make an argument that the loss of Adler played a burden on the Use your Illusion albums as they switched from a predominant punk drummer to an old fashioned, hard-rock drummer. The drumming alone on the Illusion albums set a completely different tone than those of Appetite or Lies.
Anyway, I can spend hours discussing the problems with Guns N' Roses and the members of the band (both that era and current) but it is a moot point. These days, Chinese Democracy ended up being an ok Axl Rose solo album (but listed as a Guns N' Roses album), Slash and the others are working on side projects after Audioslave disbanded and we are stuck to look at the memories of a once great album.
Welcome to the Jungle in a lot of ways is the low point of the album for me. Not that it isn't a good song, it is - just overplayed almost to a fault. It's so Easy, Mr. Brownstone, My Michelle, and Rocket Queen are all favorites of mine but there isn't a song on this album I don't enjoy and appreciate. They went from the most dangerous to the most decadent to the most destructive band in the world in six years and, in the end, Appetite for Destruction stands as their only true accomplishment. Listened: 3/29/2011
Favorite Tracks: All of it.
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