Legendary Rock Songs: WELCOME TO THE JUNGLE: GUNS AND ROSES.
Hello my people how are you, I wish you all a happy Wednesday, today friends I want to talk about one of the most legendary songs in rock and above all one of my favorite bands. So I hope you like this editorial.
Theme:WELCOME TO THE JUNGLE.
Disc:Appetite For Destruction.
Year:1987.
"You know where you are. You're in the jungle, baby. You're gonna die." As Axl Rose belted out this eerie and menacing phrase live, the audience literally went wild knowing what was coming at them. For the remaining four and a half minutes rock was in celebration listening to one of the most direct and powerful songs ever written.
Undoubtedly, a good way to open the million-dollar debut album of the “pistols and roses”, not to say the best. The piercing and incisive guitar creates an overpowering crescendo that leads to a spectacular adrenaline explosion. “Welcome To The Jungle” was the second single (September '87, one month after the album) of that vinyl bombshell called “Appetite For Destruction” (15 million copies sold only in the USA), a capital of the future of rock, and the first one for which the Guns recorded a videoclip.
The video perfectly reflected the whole Guns And Roses universe starting with Axl's arrival to the dangerous streets of Los Angeles, Slash could be seen lying in the street with a bottle in his hand disguised with the typical packing bags, all the dirt and filth of the Sunset Strip was in the air and to top it off, you could enjoy the band in its purest form unloading on the stage of a small Hollywood club, with Axl still sporting his crepey red hair.
It was the perfect definition of the L.A. scene, the most representative snapshot of that appealing hard rock that came to be called “sleazy”. In one fell swoop, the Guns ate up all the up-and-coming hair metal stars who combined their outlandish hairstyles with a radio-friendly bent and took the lead on the scene. The song, one of the toughest of their output, was soon reigning supreme on MTV, with Axl Rose giving an accomplished performance of himself as an unbalanced psychotic suffering a full-blown hysteria attack in a straitjacket.
With an honest and angry lyric about frustration and various fears and at the same time survival in extreme situations, the song was a true “Welcome to the asphalt jungle” that in those days were the streets of Los Angeles. It is said that the famous phrase with which the eccentric vocalist introduced the song in the concerts, and which was played again in the intermediate fragment, was nothing more than the warning that a black man had given Axl himself upon his arrival in Los Angeles on a Greyhound bus from his native Indiana.
The legend also says that this “beautiful” phrase reached Axl's ears while he was sleeping behind a big fence in a schoolyard, although part of the text was written by the vocalist in Seattle with his colleague Izzy Stradlin imagining what the wild city they were heading towards would be like. Those experiences “at the limit” would shape this and many other songs of the quintet, as well as the controversial “One In A Million”. And life was not easy for those first and misguided Guns And Roses, because until fame came to them, they lived in miserable conditions in a small room in which the five of them “lived”, instruments and amplifiers included, and which they affectionately called “Hellhouse” (the house of hell)...
That's why when they took the stage at the MTV Awards in '88 they carried that aura of authenticity and that venomous and aggressive character forged by survival that led them to become the great band they were. In that performance and with “Welcome to the jungle” as a throwing weapon, the Guns demonstrated their ability to wipe off the face of the earth any other band that got in front of them.
Friends I hope you liked all this report about one of the most legendary songs of rock music and especially of this incredible band like Guns and roses. Thanks for reading. Blessings.
