Description

Guns N' Roses took their album title from a painting, and the painting nearly sank the record. Robert Williams's Appetite for Destruction shows a robotic assailant who has just attacked a woman being punished by a metal avenger leaping over a fence, a lurid piece of lowbrow art that the band wanted on the front. When the album came out on 21 July 1987, several music retailers refused to stock it.

Geffen found a compromise. Williams's painting moved inside the sleeve, and the front became a design the band already wore on their skin: a Celtic cross with five skulls, one for each member. Izzy Stradlin sits at the top, Steven Adler on the left, Axl Rose in the centre, Duff McKagan on the right and Slash at the bottom, each skull styled with the musician's hair and look. The image came from a tattoo by the artist Billy White Jr., who said, "The cross and skulls that looked like the band was Axl's idea, the rest was me."

The replacement turned out to be the better emblem. It worked as a logo, a tattoo and a T-shirt all at once, and it fit a band that looked like a gang. Appetite for Destruction became the best-selling debut album in US history, and the skull cross outlived the controversy that created it.

Credit

Cross design by Billy White Jr.; original cover painting by Robert Williams