Appetite for Destruction

Against a flat black field, a Celtic-style cross blazes in purple, gold and red, its arms knotted with interlacing bands and bracketed top and bottom by ribbon banners. The upper scroll reads GUNS N' ROSES in a fiery orange-to-yellow gradient; the lower one, with arrow-tipped ends, announces APPETITE FOR DESTRUCTION. Five grinning skulls ride the cross, each crowned with a different head of hair or hat: a top-hatted skull at the foot, a bandana, a tangle of curls, a wild mane. They are arranged like a band lineup carved in bone.

Those skulls are the band. The one at top stands for Izzy Stradlin, the left for Steven Adler, the center for Axl Rose, the right for Duff McKagan, and the bottom, beneath that tilted top hat, for Slash. The design came from Billy White Jr., who had originally drawn it as a tattoo. Axl Rose had it inked onto his right arm by Robert Benedetti at Sunset Strip Tattoo in Los Angeles before it ever became album art. White later explained that the idea of skulls resembling the members was Axl's, while the rest was his own, and that the knot work threading through the cross was a nod to Thin Lizzy, a band he and Axl both loved.

But this cross was a rescue, not the plan. The front of Appetite for Destruction, the 1987 debut released on Geffen Records, was meant to carry a painting by Robert Williams, also titled Appetite for Destruction, from his Super Cartoons series. It showed a robotic rapist about to be punished by a descending metal avenger. Axl Rose had found it through the artist's work, and the band lifted the painting's name for their own.

Williams had painted it years earlier, when he could not even get his work shown in galleries, and sold the original in 1981 for ten thousand dollars. When the band came calling, he warned them the image would cause trouble and suggested they choose something else. Axl insisted. The band framed the picture as a statement, with the robot representing an industrial system raping and polluting the environment. The aggressor robot was reportedly modeled on Robert Crumb, though fitted with something like a bear trap for a mouth.

Williams was right. Retailer after retailer refused to stock the record. Geffen blinked, moving the painting to the inner sleeve and putting White's cross of skulls out front. Even that did not end the fight: Tipper Gore and the Parents Music Resource Center lobbied against the album, and some shops asked Geffen to wrap it in brown paper. Axl's first cover idea had been no safer; he wanted the photograph of the Space Shuttle Challenger exploding from a 1986 Time magazine cover, which Geffen rejected as being in bad taste.

The rescue art had its own quiet craft. White's pencil sketch was built into a full-color design on Bristol paper using watercolor, gouache and ink, and a second artist, Andy Engel, refined it before it went onto the inner sleeve of the original pressings. The version pushed to the front is the one most people picture when they picture the band at all.

The controversy nearly never mattered, because the album nearly never landed. It drew little mainstream attention at first and only caught fire the following year, eventually selling more than thirty million copies. The painting kept haunting the catalog too: the original Williams image was supposed to return on a 2008 vinyl reissue, but executives swapped it for the skulls at the last minute. The image that scared the stores keeps losing to the tattoo that calmed them.