GUNS N' ROSES Trivia — 9 Entries
9 sourced facts about GUNS N' ROSES.
Trivia
The title Appetite for Destruction was not something the band came up with. According to Danny Sugerman's 1991 biography, they were stuck for one — and then Axl Rose happened to look at a postcard reproducing a painting by Robert Williams, on the back of which, in small capitals, were the words APPETITE FOR DESTRUCTION. The album took its name from a picture that already had it.
The debut exists with two different covers. Warner Brothers, Geffen's distributor, was reluctant to use the Williams painting; the band pushed it through, and the sleeve carrying the painting went out to shops. The reaction was immediate, and retail chains in both America and Britain refused to stock it. A second edition was printed with the cross-and-skulls design on the front, and the Williams painting was moved to the inner sleeve. The cover everybody now knows is the product of that substitution.
GUNS N' ROSES entered the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in 2012, and Axl Rose turned the honour down. On April 11 that year he published an open letter to the Hall and to the band's audience, saying he would not attend the ceremony and that he was declining his induction as a member of the band. He went further, asking pointedly not to be inducted in absentia and stating that nobody was authorised to accept anything on his behalf or to speak for him.
The release of Chinese Democracy once prompted a soft drink company to make a bet. In the spring of 2008 Dr Pepper announced that if the album appeared at any point during that calendar year, it would give a free can to everyone in America. Not quite everyone: two former members of the band, Slash and Buckethead, were named as excluded. The plan for handing the cans out was an online coupon system on the company's own website.
For the release of the new songs "Nothin'" and "Atlas," the band put together a collection of physical formats: a 7-inch record, a cassette made for it, and a Japan-exclusive SHM-CD. A Japan-only specification, in other words, listed as part of the worldwide package on the band's own announcement.
In 2026 GUNS N' ROSES barely stop moving. Laid end to end, the announcements on their own site give a European run called HEATWAVE, a performance at the Formula 1 Miami Grand Prix, a Singapore date, two cities in India, and on November 21 a stadium show at the Madya Stadium Gelora Bung Karno in Jakarta — with a run of stadiums across Australia and New Zealand starting November 29. The year before, in 2025, they had already been through Europe, the Middle East, Asia and Latin America. Nearly forty years on from the debut, the workload has not thinned out.
Robert Williams, who painted the original image, came to it from well outside the music business. He had been art director to Ed "Big Daddy" Roth at the centre of hot rod culture, handling everything from T-shirt designs to helping with car customisation. When Roth shut his studio in 1970, Williams moved to the underground comic Zap Comix, working alongside Robert Crumb and Rick Griffin. The painting in question is dated 1978, though reference books on the artist put it at 1979 — the sources do not agree.
Axl Rose's first idea for the cover was not a painting but a news photograph. Speaking on television in 2011, he said what he had wanted to use was a picture of the Space Shuttle Challenger exploding — the same image that had run on the cover of Time — because of how striking it was, and that he was talked out of it. The painting they used instead turned out to be contentious in its own right.
Axl Rose answered Dr Pepper quickly — and favourably enough that the company added someone back to the list. The director of corporate communications at Cadbury Schweppes Americas Beverages, Dr Pepper's parent, said they were delighted by how fast and how warmly Rose had responded, and that they supposed they would now have to extend the offer to cover Buckethead as well. A man who had been named as excluded was reinstated over a single exchange.