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This week, Guns N’ Roses will kick off the North American leg of their current tour in Raleigh, N.C. And if the current trend continues, which began last year, the prestigious setlist opener slot will go to “Welcome to the Jungle.” As one of the band’s signature songs, and the fifth-highest charting single in their catalog, it’s seemingly everywhere these days. No sporting event, professional or otherwise, would be complete without hearing the iconic, staccato riff, courtesy of guitarist Slash, followed by the building, menacing howl by frontman Axl Rose. It’s been used in movies and commercials and remains one of the most recognizable opening tracks in rock history.
Yet when Guns N' Roses released it during the last days of summer in 1987 as the lead single in the United States from their debut LP, Appetite for Destruction, it wasn't an instant hit. In fact, the track had a much different path than most people would expect from a song that’s become so woven into the fabric of culture. MTV wasn't interested. Radio balked. It took some backdoor dealings, a little persistence from the record label, and an unlikely response to an early morning airplay slot before viewers – and execs – started paying attention. Once they did, everything changed.
The Track Was the First Song Guns N’ Roses Wrote Together
According to Slash, “Welcome to the Jungle” was the first “real tune” written by the band as a whole. The riff had already been floating around, and the guitarist had played it for Rose while the two were living together. Then the singer brought it up during rehearsals one day.
“I started playing it, and instantly [drummer] Steve [Adler] came up with a beat, Duff joined in with a bass line, and away we went,” Slash wrote in his eponymous 2007 memoir. “I kept throwing parts out to build on it: the chorus part, the solo, as Axl came up with the lyrics.”
Crediting bassist Duff McKagan as being “the glue” to the track, Slash said it was finished within three hours, and that the arrangement they came up with that day in the studio was pretty much the same as the one that opens Appetite for Destruction. Still, something was missing.
“We needed an intro, and I came up with one that day using the digital delay on my cheap Boss guitar pedal board,” Slash said. “I got my money’s worth out of that thing, because as crappy as it was, that pedal provided the tense echo effect that set the mood for that song and eventually the kickoff for our debut album.”
Appetite was released in July 1987, with the song “It’s So Easy” dropped as the first single in the UK the month prior. The album didn’t sell well in the States, barely cracking the Billboard 200. And when it came time to do a video and introduce America to the band that September, “Welcome to the Jungle” seemed like the obvious choice. Unfortunately, MTV didn’t quite see it that way.
MTV Wanted Nothing to Do with the Song
After the video for “Welcome to the Jungle” was submitted in early September '87, MTV — still at the peak of its status as a tastemaker — it was swiftly earmarked for Headbangers Ball, a brand-new program dedicated to heavy metal that aired on Saturdays just before midnight and into the morning hours. The clip was dark and menacing, with footage of the group playing live to an audience interspersed with shots of a straight-jacketed Rose jerking and jolting in an electric chair-like device as he’s forced to watch disturbing footage on multiple television monitors at once.
“MTV didn’t give a damn,” Alan Niven, Guns N’ Roses' then manager, said in the oral history I Want My MTV: The Uncensored Story of the Music Video Revolution. “Didn’t care.”
“Axl was frustrated that ‘Jungle’ wasn’t getting played,” the band's tour manager and later manager Doug Goldstein added. “He and (MTV senior vice president of talent and artist relations John) Cannelli were great friends, so he couldn’t understand why they wouldn’t play it. He knew that in order to be one of the biggest bands in the world, they’d have to be played on MTV.”
The powers that be at the channel thought the programming was skewing too much toward hard rock anyway, so the last thing they wanted to do was add something so visually outrageous to the lineup from the genre. Lyrics like “I wanna see you bleed” and “Feel my, my, my serpentine” didn’t help matters. But David Geffen, head of GNR’s label Geffen Records, made a personal plea to the channel to move it into regular rotation.
“It was getting played a couple of times a week,” said Tom Freston, CEO of MTV Networks. “David Geffen called me and said, ‘Every time you guys play this thing at 3:00 A.M., our sales light up. Please leave it on.’ Normally, I would never tell the programming guys what to put into rotation. But this was David Geffen.”
Not only were sales of Appetite for Destruction spiking whenever the video was played, but the phone lines at MTV were ringing loudly enough for executives to take notice. It started to get rotated into the afternoons and, according to Cannelli, “from there it went through the roof.”
MTV Hid the Fact That They Were Playing “Jungle”
But there was still a major headache to avoid. If “Welcome to the Jungle” was given more spins on the channel, then managers and record labels for other hard rock artists would start to complain their acts weren’t getting the same treatment. To get around that hurdle, MTV’s vice president of music programming, Tom Hunter, enacted a sort of cooking-the-books strategy when logging the song’s airplay.
“I handwrote it into the programming log,” he said. “That way, the add wouldn’t appear in trade magazines. I gave it two plays a day in regular rotation. It got an amazing number of calls right out of the box.”
By then, there was no stopping “Welcome to the Jungle,” which quickly became the most requested video on the channel, landing atop the primetime Top 20 countdown show, Dial MTV, in early 1988.
The Song Got a Second Life When the Next Single Came Out
Even though Guns N’ Roses won the long, hard-fought battle to get “Welcome to the Jungle” airplay, the story of the song wasn’t quite finished. Buoyed by its success, the band was given the green light to make another video, this time for the much more palatable "Sweet Child o' Mine." MTV loved the song and the video, and it exploded on the channel, as well as on the charts.
Come the summer of 1988, "Sweet Child o' Mine" became GNR’s first – and to date only – No. 1 hit. The popularity of the group was reaching a fever pitch, so Geffen decided to re-release “Welcome to the Jungle” in the fall of 1988. Not only did its rotation on MTV significantly increase, but it finally landed on the Billboard Top 100, peaking at No. 7 on Christmas Eve 1988.
