Geffen's president Eddie Rosenblatt told the LA Times that the band saw the artwork as 'a symbolic social statement, with the robot representing the industrial system that's raping and polluting our environment'. They couldn't come up with a name for the album, I guess, so that's how Appetite for Destruction came into our vernacular.'īilly White Jr's design for a GNR tattoo that later ended up as the cover for Appetite For Destruction. 'A few weeks later, they called me up and asked if they could use the name. 'I gave them a four-by-five transparency and the price that I'd give a sh*tty punk-rock band,' Williams told Revolver in 2010. When Williams was approached by Rose about using the painting as Guns N'Roses' debut album cover, the artist suggested they pick another, more palatable example of his work, but Rose and his agent were undeterred: they wanted Appetite For Destruction. 'It's an overdone cartoon for people who like underground comics and understand underground art.' This was never to go in people's homes,' the artist explained to Entertainment Weekly. Williams was a veteran of the underground Zap Comix of the 1960s and his painting ended up on a postcard that was seen by an up and coming musician called Axl Rose. The controversial Appetite for Destruction album cover featuring art by Robert WIlliams. Meanwhile, another mechanical figure looms up into the sky, presumably about to extract terrible vengeance on the criminal, who looks up to see his nemesis approaching, which causes his electronic brain to explode. Produced in 1978, the picture sees a woman selling toy robots on a street she has been sexually assaulted by a humanoid robot, dressed in a dirty raincoat. If you bought GNR's debut album upon its release in July 1987, your copy would feature this painting by American artist Robert Williams, also titled Appetite For Destruction. Guns N'Roses - Appetite For Destruction.

Album cover canvas art