Guns N’ Roses – Welcome To The Jungle

The first four and a half minutes of Appetite

Welcome to the Jungle is the first track on Guns N’ Roses’ debut album, Appetite for Destruction, released by Geffen on 21 July 1987. The single came out in Britain on 21 September 1987, with a live Whole Lotta Rosie on the B-side. A US release followed in October 1988, backed with Mr. Brownstone, and that issue reached number 7 on the Billboard Hot 100. The song runs 4 minutes and 31 seconds. Mike Clink produced it. The writing credit names Slash, Axl Rose, Izzy Stradlin and Duff McKagan. Steven Adler played drums.

Slash has said the main riff, the one that walks downward, started at his house one afternoon when he played it for Axl. Later, at rehearsal, Duff came up with the slow middle section, and Slash added the opening, built around a pedal that repeats the note, which he had just bought. He remembers the pieces locking together the same day. The words were Axl’s picture of Los Angeles. He has said he wrote them in Seattle, where the city felt smaller and more spread out, and the contrast made Hollywood look like a place that would sell a newcomer anything, if he could pay. The spoken break in the middle, the one that asks if you know where you are, is that arrival said out loud.

The band recorded the album with Clink after a meeting with Paul Stanley of Kiss that did not fit what they wanted. Duff has described Clink’s first test: he set up microphones, recorded them simply, and played it back. At Rumbo Recorders in Canoga Park, with further work at Take One and Can-Am, Clink kept the sessions from wandering. The two guitars sit up front, Slash’s lead and Izzy’s rhythm, with Duff’s bass and Adler’s drums under Axl, who moves from a talk to a shout inside the same verse. The clip that ran once MTV took the album on is still the picture most people mean by the song.