Number 46

I was glancing at my list of my 100 favorite CDs and noticed that Number 46 has been getting a lot of press lately. A recent cover of Rolling Stone magazine no less!

Number 46 - Guns N Roses Appetite For Destruction (1987)

Without a shout of a doubt one of the greatest CDs of all time. For a few years, GNR was all anyone heard about in rock music. People thought they were going to be the new Rolling Stones. For a time, it looked like they could be.

My first exposure to this album stuck with me because I found it annoying at first. It was before they became popular, I heard this album played nonstop at my college dorm repeatedly. So much that I was tired of hearing it. But, during summer break I actually missed hearing it so I went out and bought it. That's when I really started to listen to them a lot.

In the summer of 1988 I played this album constantly. It was metal, but not polished or wussy like White Lion (not a total knock, I still love "Wait". "Wait...Wait...I couldn't get along with out you, one more ttiiimmmeeee"). Guns N Roses had nasty hard rock riffs, howling vocals screaming profanity and an authentic streetwise attitude. "Welcome To The Jungle" was and is a fantastic song filled with driving guitars, heavy percussion and frantic paranoia. "Mr Brownstone" grooved like Aerosmith (I would say like Aerosmith on drugs, but that was at least half of their career anyway). "Paradise City" always brings to mind the sights and smells of lawn seating at rock concerts, I don't know why.

My favorite song is "It's So Easy", a punky bit of jaded Los Angeles gutter rock. Sung in a lower register than the rest of the album, it's druggy, violent and misogynistic in an ear catching way!

Later that summer they hit with "Sweet Child O Mine" and unseated U2 as the top rock band in the land. It was never my favorite song of theirs, maybe because the first time I saw the video my friend intentionally turned off the tv to keep me from seeing it (he was upset I was watching HIS MTV, yet he never felt bad about borrowing money or any of my records). Anyway, GNR saturated the media which I was fine with until about Use Your Illusion era when Axl Rose started begging for people to understand him ( It was about two years before he offended so many different groups of people that he started to feel bad about it. )

Appetite is the rare album that has grown over time. As decades of artifical rock piles up, the raw raging essence of this disc feels that much more authentic. My wife got me into "You're Crazy", particularly the acoustic version from GNR Lies (1989). She also brought my attention to the catchiness of "Anything Goes". The Rolling Stone article shed new light on "Rocket Queen" which moves from raunchy sleaze to sweet optimism in the same song.

It's clear that Axl Rose will never recover enough of his sanity to regroup the original Guns N Roses and we'll be tormented with periodic updates on the loonng delayed Chinese Democracy album. The worst thing that Axl can do is release it because it's obvious that it sucks and once it's out everyone will stop caring about him. Appetite For Destruction captures one shining moment when rock music had infinite possibilities. Or at least a future.