The 1987 album Axl Rose has always wanted “to outdo”
Everyone wants their debut album to land well with audiences, but not everybody can expect to have a debut album up their sleeves that outdoes what Guns N’ Roses managed to achieve with Appetite For Destruction.
While they’d have been thrilled that they were able to capture a moment in time where they were at the peak of their powers, making a hard rock and metal album that reflected what the masses were after, it came with a lot of tougher aspects that the band had to deal with in the years immediately following its release.
When you’ve set yourself an impossibly high benchmark to reach again, you’re constantly going to be chasing this high, and perfection can only come as a result of hard work and endless amounts of toil. If you’re prepared to put that in, then there ought to be less difficulty in repeating such an impressive feat, but when record labels and fans alike all think that you’ve got it in you to do it over and over again in quick succession, the pressure begins to ramp up significantly.
In a 1989 interview with Rolling Stone, frontman Axl Rose opened up about the difficulty of being required to follow up with something that hits all the right notes with an audience and being able to handle such a high demand. By this point, the band had already quickly followed up their debut with the slightly more underwhelming G N’ R Lies, but were adamant that their next album, which they were taking much more time to complete, would hopefully see them hit the same peak.
“We have two records out, both of them in the top ten, and everybody wants another record immediately,” he said, acknowledging how much people seem not to understand the difficulty of pumping out something of the highest order on cue. “They all say, ‘Let’s milk this sucker.’ It’d be nice to outsell that album. A lot of groups are trying to outsell it.”
Rose then expressed just how tough the feat of overtaking Appetite For Destruction in terms of sales. “For a debut, it was the highest-selling album in the history of rock and roll,” he reminded the interviewer. “Definitely in America, but I’m not sure that’s true worldwide.”
Guns N’ Roses are far from the only act in the genre who have struggled to surpass a record of theirs that hit astronomically high sales figures, with him citing Bon Jovi’s similar concerns about never being able to make another album that would reach the same level of ubiquity as 1986’s Slippery When Wet.
“Of course, you’re gonna want to outdo it,” Rose surmised. “What I want to do is just grow as an artist and feel proud of these new songs.”
While Bon Jovi couldn’t overtake Slippery When Wet, only achieving half the number of sales with New Jersey two years later, that didn’t damage their popularity or hurt them long-term. For Guns N’ Roses, it has always been a similar story; their hardcore fans haven’t forgotten them, and they’re still able to ride on the success of their debut and the singles that were also successful, but they have to accept that nothing they ever release is likely to sell the 18million copies that their debut shifted in the US.
