Guns N' Roses - Appetite for Destruction released July 21, 1987
This is their Debut album
It is based on Robert Williams' painting Appetite for Destruction, which is where the title also came from. It depicts a robotic rapist about to be punished by a metal avenger. Williams painted it in 1979 and it took him a while to sell which he did in 1981 for 10k.
Axl Rose saw a postcard and loved it, he pitched it as a joke thinking it was too ridiculous as a cover and Geffen went for it. After negotiations with Williams they secured the rights, but even Williams said, this isn’t gonna fly and knew it was going to be trouble.
After several music retailers refused to stock the album, the label compromised and put the cover art on the inside, replacing it with an image depicting a Celtic cross and skulls representing each of the five band members which was a tattoo designed by Axl and Billy White Jr.
The beauty of this is Alan Niven said, "Axl showed it to me and said he was joking. I, however, thought his instinct was brilliant. Tom Zutaut, who originally signed them to Geffen saw it and he knew it would create a hoo-ha. That’s why we only printed 30,000 units of the original cover and had 30,001 of the replacement cover, printed even before the record was released — we did not lose a beat in transition and we got the attention we wanted — you can count on people to grab the wrong end of the stick every now and then."
Sounds like Genius marketing and a Fairy Tale story for the real Fab 5! However, this album did not sell very well at first...like less than 200K copies in the first year, which was a paltry amount considering they spent $365,000. They were well known in and around LA, but they couldn’t get airplay and MTV wouldn’t play Welcome to the jungle. Geffen was just about to walk away when he decided to try one last ditch effort. They had David Geffen called MTV himself. The channel gave the video one shot - a 4am ET/1am PT time slot.
It worked and as they played it more, radio stations started playing it and it was off to the races. Appetite would go on to be the #1 selling debut album of all time. Stick that in you pipe and smoke it Milli Vanilli!
It took over a year to get on the charts but once it did, it spent 147 weeks there and sold over 30 million copies to date.
Axl and the boys stated early on that the original artwork was "a symbolic social statement, with the robot representing the industrial system that's raping and polluting our environment". Williams has said himself, "remember this was created before GnR was out of High School, that there is no hidden meaning in my art. There is a small subculture of people that like this sort of thing and I cater to them. It is lowbrow cartoon art."
And there’s also the fact that Axl originally wanted the cover to be the image of the space shuttle exploding from the cover of time Magazine. Fortunately, David Geffen said no.
Williams has done some other covers, Marc Almond, Foetus - slut, Several scatterbrain, and Wall of Voodoo's Ugly Americans in Australia.
I remember seeing an impromptu interview at Axl’s house with a Swedish reporter and he stated that Williams hated him because he eventually bought the original image for 600k. I don’t know why He would be mad other than he only got 10 for it.
Lastly there is an argument against censorship here. This painting was originally not a made for a record jacket. It was a postcard that you could buy in it at least one Museum in the gift shop in the late 70’s early 80’s. So why is it art when it’s in a museum and smut when it’s on a record jacket?