(Note: I thought it might be interesting to re-listen to classic albums and review them in the context of how well they hold up today. First in a series.)
I first purchased
Appetite for Destruction on cassette back in 1988; I remember a classmate of mine showing me the cover art and I thought it looked cool and then a day or so later I caught the video for "Welcome to the Jungle" and I was blown away. Got my mom to drive me to the record store so I could buy the tape the next day and was so enthralled by it that I played it in my Sunday School class as an example of something I found to be awesome. (Yeah, I'm not sure how that came to happen).
It wasn't too much later that GNR blew up big time and everybody loved them, etc. etc.
So how does the album hold up 20 years later?
My first impression is that the overall production values are pretty low...the album in general sounds flat and I'm sure that's for good reason: it was recorded on a shoestring budget, nobody at the time realizing how big the band would get.
Appitite kicks off with the autobiographical "Welcome to the Jungle", which is undeniably one of the great album-openers in history but has lost a lot of its punch over the years due to being played in every football stadium in America for the past decade. (Funny note: Axl claimed that when he got off the bus for the first time in Los Angeles an old black guy told him, "You're in the Jungle, baby...you're gonna die! ) "It's So Easy" introduces us to Deep Voice Axl (at the time I wondered at first if another member of the band was singing) where he complains, in a very rock-n-roll kind of way getting laid has lost some of its fun due to the lack of challenge. "Night Train" is next, a nice track about not only getting drunk on cheap wine but knowing that you'll regret it later, while "Out Ta Get Me" is a decent rocker about being paranoid which probably was an accurate picture of how Axl was feeling at the time. "Mr. Brownstone" is a clever look at heroin addiction which features some of the best lyrics on the record ("I used to do a little but a little wasn't doing so the little go more and more...", etc)
Side one ends with the album's second masterpiece, the sprawling "Paradise City" which features an extended outro jam that lets Slash go crazy with a masterful extended solo. The video for "Paradise" turned out to be perhaps the best "concert montage" style video of the metal area, with the band playing in front of massive outdoor crowds while Axl dances around like a madman (probably because he was a madman). I kind of miss the days when albums had sides because there really was an art to picking the best song to end the first side, which "Paradise" does perfectly.
The second half of Appetite kicks off with "My Michelle", a forgettable song about one of the countless lost young people hanging out in Los Angeles and moves on to "Think About You", a listenable tune that illustrates how even the filler on this album is not altogether bad.
"Sweet Child of Mine" is next, the third classic single to come from Appetite and perhaps the best power balled of the 80's. Slash steals the show here, from the song's trademark intro to the two beautiful solos and finally the amazing coda. A perfect song, really, and one that has not grown stale with repeated listenings (most recently Fergie's lame rendition at the Super Bowl).
"You're Crazy" and "Anything Goes" are fairly indistinguishable (G'NR later did a more interesting aucoustic version of the former) and while neither are terrible I get the feeling that either could have been left off the album. Appetite finshes up with "Rocket Queen, a bittersweet tune about a girl the band knew and features both the sounds of Axl having sex with drummer Steve Adler's girlfriend and a tender final verse that Rose described as "a hope and friendship note at the end of the song".
Appetite for Destruction on the whole holds up pretty well, despite the sub-par production the band sounds great, managing to come across as well-rehearsed but raw; the songs are well-crafted and intelligently written, funny at times and tragic at others. Most importantly, Appetite captures what it felt like to be in a band during the 80's L.A. metal era and is one of the most authentic discs in rock history as the listener never has reason to doubt that songwriters Axl Rose and Izzy Stradlin are writing strictly from experience.
Overall rating; 8 out of 10. My only complaints are that the sound quality could have been better and that the album runs a bit long and could have been tightened up by maybe dropping some combination of "My Michelle", "Out Ta Get Me", or "Anything Goes". It's a keeper, though, probably the best work to come out of the 80's hair metal scene.
