Welcome to the Jungle

The first CD I bought was "Appetite for Destruction" when I was in junior high. My parents had given me my first CD player for my birthday that year and I ripped open the card with a homemade coupon for a CD of my choosing. I was bugging my dad to drive me to the music store a few minutes later.

I remember the old full cardboard packaging CDs used to come in. Smaller than vinyl's sleeve, but no less impressive to me, I would carefully loosen the adhesive to give me a nice, clean, flat mini-poster to be kept or placed up on my wall. Later, I'd discover the record shop a few miles away in our town's small downtown area. They had what amounted to vinyl dust covers, minus the pocket for the album you could buy on the cheap. Between the two, I'd rotate the bands I was listening to while filing the older ones away for safekeeping. I assume they are still in a box in an attic somewhere, waiting to be discovered again.

While it wasn't the first album I'd bought (a cassette of the Beach Boys Live holds that record) it was the first one that marked a sharp turn from my parents' tastes. It was certainly the first one that pissed off my dad. I'm not sure if it was the "Explicit Lyrics" sticker that turned him off or the band itself, but he was less than pleased when I returned to the car. He told me that had he known what I planned to buy, he'd have been more precise with the coupon.

What was done, was done. I now owned Appetite.

While the timeline doesn't matter, I'm sure I was introduced to the band by a much cooler friend, Jerry. Before that, I stayed close to the oldies my parents played in the car and house. Mainly Motown and old 50s and 60s rock, but never straying too far. Guns n' Roses was the first truly contemporary band I embraced.

Kids at school knew Guns. I didn't have to explain a band as "the same one that does..." to frame a lesser known song by an older artist. Guns were as dangerous as the suburbs got in the early 90s. Had our parents seen the CD's liner notes (and artwork) there's no way we'd have gotten to keep those albums.

Jerry was the one who wandered over to my stereo when "Welcome to the Jungle" started up with those iconic first notes. Just guitar and nothing else for the first few seconds. Reverb and Slash and space.

Then the basic percussion and the vocal police siren as the guitar riff sounds like it's in danger of spinning off away from the rest of the band, when it's really the force driving the beat. Everything regroups at the 28-second mark and the guitars and rhythm section both push in the same direction and then... then, it happens.

Thirty seven seconds in is a moment that forever changed my life as a music fan.

Because it's at the 0:37 mark that I saw for the first time that if you paid enough attention, if you cranked the volume loud enough and if you weren't shy about fiddling with your stereo's speaker settings, you'd find something not everyone saw.

That afternoon, Jerry didn't even ask. He walked up, turned down all the sound in one speaker on the stereo and pushed it all through the other and the descending line powered through. Independent of the main power riff, there's the secondary line and I'd never noticed it in the multiple plays I'd gone through for a few days before he called attention to it. I did not offer this information to Jerry when he asked if I knew it was there. I told him it was the first thing I'd noticed in a spectacular white lie.

It's there in the live version below as well and is perhaps one of my favorite few bar stretches in all of recorded music. That's the piece I think of when someone mentions the song (and not the "You know where you are? You're in the jungle, baby!") and is never far from my thoughts when I'm obsessively listening to something new now.

There are hundreds of little flourishes, bass parts, drum fills and hidden chips of music in the hours of materials burned into my brain. This is the one that is the common ancestor of them all.

I could go on for a very long time about what this album means to me in both very concrete and very wispy Wonder Years-y ways, but it's that tiny clip at 37 seconds that I protect at all costs. When someone talks about retaining childlike enthusiasm for something, that's the manifestation of it for me. The song (as a whole) remains an utter heavyweight culturally - it's the one I'd pick to piss off my neighbors in spectacular fashion by cranking it at full volume around 3 a.m. if I wanted to collect a warning from the homeowner's association - and is probably the reigning champ for "Song I've played full blast (by percentage of total play count) most in my lifetime."

While I can appreciate all the reasons people love this song and album, for me it's that little guitar part that stands above them all. A defending riff, tucked in behind its bigger, bombastic brother that was the first time I learned the lesson, "Listen harder. There's more there."