Billie Joe Armstrong names “the best debut album” in rock
Every artist releasing their debut usually has nothing to lose. While the odds might be stacked against you, there’s usually not as much pressure as a band that’s been in the game for so long, leading to artists taking many more chances on their first outing than they would on their third or fourth. This is normally the basis for any good rock band, and for Billie Joe Armstrong, the best debut in history comes back to Appetite for Destruction by Guns N’ Roses.
Before Guns N’ Roses had officially begun, the hair metal movement was already undergoing a major change. As much as bands like Def Leppard and Van Halen may have kicked the door down for the genre in the early 1980s, the next wave of bands were making the entire movement look like a joke, especially with the glittery spandex and cheap hairspray in their hair.
Guns N’ Roses never played by those kinds of rules. Despite having the same neighbourhood as bands like Poison, Slash never claimed to put on any kind of facade for the cameras, pulling his hair down when he played and walking the walk just like every other rock and roller that came before him.
After slogging it out on the streets of Los Angeles, Appetite for Destruction became a way for Axl Rose to talk about the demons they were facing every day. Across 12 tracks, every song reads like a personal story of one of the band members, from frontman Axl Rose showing his sensitive side on ‘Sweet Child O’ Mine’ to Slash and Izzy Stradlin talking about their dependency on heroin on ‘Mr Brownstone’.
For an aspiring Armstrong, this was something completely alien to what he had seen. Although he would soon be listening to punk acts like Dead Kennedys and The Clash, Armstrong remembered being blown away the first time he heard Appetite for Destruction, needing a breath of fresh air for the millions of Van Halen copycats on MTV.
When inducting the band into The Rock and Roll Hall of Fame, Armstrong said that the band’s debut record was one of the most important records for rock and roll, saying, “The first time I saw Guns N’ Roses, I thought one of these guys could end up dead or in jail…This ride wasn’t about parties, glamour or power ballads. It was about the seedy underworld of misfits, drug addicts, paranoia, sex, violence and anger in the cracks of Hollywood. It was a breath of fresh air. Appetite for Destruction is the best debut album in the history of rock and roll”.
While Appetite for Destruction established Guns N’ Roses as one of the major power players in the rock scene, they would not survive the next few years intact. Immediately following the band’s release, Rose made it his personal mission to bury everything that the band had worked towards, making the polar opposite turn on the album Use Your Illusion.
Even though the rest of the band would dissolve around him following the tour for the album, Appetite for Destruction never lost its shine, continuing to influence generations of musicians wanting to hear something more dangerous than what they were used to. Green Day would eventually make their own epic stories of rock and roll debauchery, but Armstrong still couldn’t hold a candle to what his heroes had done.
