from the LP Appetite for Destruction, Geffen Records, 1987Was there anything better than this album when it dropped!? Yeah, of course there was, but if you were a boy (or girl) with raging hormones and a taste for trouble & middle fingers, that didn’t matter: Guns ‘N’ Roses had come to save our lackluster lives. I originally had this on cassette, one of the first in my collection to be adorned with that now-familiar black & white logo “PARENTAL ADVISORY”; I wonder if Tipper Gore and that whole league of pathetic concerned parents (PMRC) would have gone through with the labeling had they known it would only wind up boosting record sales to the bands whose albums bore that branding…dumbasses. I admit, when faced with the half wax figure, half porcelain doll / botox crash test dummy that is Axl Rose these days, it’s even difficult for those of us who worshipped them back in the day to imagine him ever having been cool, but he was (plastic surgery nightmares, that could be a whole friggin’ blog unto itself). Excepting for the drummer though, everyone else in the band was still cooler than Axl even back then, and you gotta love the drug-addled backing vocals, barely laid down care of Duff & Izzy; remember…no one had even seen Slash’s face yet!!
