Monday, July 30, 2007

Appetite For Destruction at Twenty

Can it really be that Guns 'N' Roses' Appetite For Destruction is twenty years old? The realization first hit me a couple of months ago when I pulled that seminal album out of my collection for the first time in a couple of years. It sounded as groundbreaking, as brilliant, as age-defining as ever, and then I realized that it was released in the summer of 1987, and for a brief, meteoric period they were the biggest, most exciting, most unpredictable, most rock and roll band in rock and roll.



It collapsed so quickly, and we've spent well more than a decade waiting for Axl Rose to release Chinese Democracy under the GNR name. Rolling Stone has a great cover piece on Appetite, which they excerpt here. It's almost impossible to believe that album could be twenty years old. It seems like just yesterday. And when the first vertiginous sounds of "Welcome to the Jungle" come directly at me from my speakers, it's the late 1980s, Axl & Slash rule the world, and the world is still ahead of me.

4 comments:

Thunderstick said...

As a 13 year old going into high school, staying up late on Friday night, I caught Guns and Roses on the Arsenio Hall Show--that was the first time I saw them. I thought they were great and the next day bought the cassette tape of Appetite for Destruction. The next day I called a friend of mine who had recently moved from New Hampshire out to San Diego and in talking to him mentioned how much I liked the album. He said "yeah, Guns and Roses isn't really big out here and if people out here don't like them, then they won't be big." It wasn't long after that that I realized my friend was a dumbass.

Anonymous said...

The album was a mind blower at a time so many Boy bands were all over the radio -- including one from Bean town -- Boston .

dcat said...

Anon --
Yes, one of the boy bands was from Boston, but I'm going to promise you that you do not want to get into a pissing contest with me about the Boston-area/Massachusetts music scene. Aerosmith . . . The Pixies . . . Buffalo Tom . . . Dinosaur Jr. . . . I could go on.

dcat

Roger said...

...Boston.