Debut album Appetite For Destruction Guns N’ Roses went to No.1 in the US. It spent 57 weeks on the US chart and sold over 5 million copies. Three singles from the album were the US top 10 hits. (‘Sweet Child O’ Mine,’ ‘Welcome to the Jungle’ and ‘Paradise City’). Today, worldwide sales are over 28 million, making the album the best-selling debut album of all-time in the US. This defeated Boston’s debut album Boston, which has gone 17x platinum.
This killer debut, like Led Zeppelin, The Clash, and Jimi Hendrix before them, was as strong as they happen. The mix of Rose’s lyrics and screeching vocals, the twin-guitar interplay of Slash and Izzy Stradlin, who rolled out riffs and solos better than any band since the Rolling Stones, produced this the strongest metal record of the late ’80s.
In 2011, Axl Rose said that his initial concept for the cover design had been the image of the Space Shuttle Challenger exploding.
This image was on the cover of Time Magazine in 1986. Geffen refused, stating it was in poor taste.
The album’s original cover art was based on Robert Williams’ painting called Appetite For Destruction illustrating a metal avenger about to punish a robotic rapist.
After several music retailers refused to stock the album, the label compromised and put the controversial cover art inside, replacing it with an image depicting a cross and skulls of the five band members (designed by Billy White Jr., originally as a tattoo), each skull representing one member of the band.
Appetite For Destruction became a turning point for hard rock in the late 1980s.
