In my earliest encounters with images of explicit sex and violence, I would experience a physical reaction that I can remember quite clearly: my eyes would burn. I'd be staring down at some ripped-out page from Swank magazine in a friend's treehouse, and this recalescence would blanket my eyeballs. It wasn't painful--just intense enough to remind me that what I was doing was illicit, and possibly damaging to my well-being. All of which added to the thrill.
The G N' R art burned my eyes. I was about 10 when I first saw Robert Williams' painting on the inside flap of Appetite For Destruction (oblivious at that point to the existence of vinyl, what I saw looked like this). Following the initial pressing of Appetite, the band agreed to move the image from the front cover to the inside jacket, as feminist groups and MTV boycotted and created a shitstorm of bad publicity that threatened to sabotage the record's imminent success. In the end, the compromise worked in the band's favor: the album sold millions of copies with the replacement artwork (a detailed replication of the very cool and iconic tattoo Axl had gotten on his right forearm), and hiding the fucked-up picture on the interior made the whole package seem even more like porno contraband.
The "banned" image has always been interpreted as a shocking badge of the exploitative sex and violence that Appetite wears on its sleeve. Which is, of course, true. Yet, the band's decision to include a piece by this particular artist runs deeper than the critics, the fans, and even the band members themselves were able to acknowledge.
Born in 1943, Robert Williams split his formative years between sun-baked Albuquerque and Montgomery, Alabama, where his dad ran a drive-in restaurant as well as a stable of stock cars that would compete in locales across Alabama, Georgia, and Florida. Art class was the only part of school in which Williams excelled, and in 1963 he left to study art at Los Angeles City College. Within a peergroup fixated on abstract expressionism, Williams was osctracized. Jackson Pollock and Mark Rothko were in vogue; Williams' primary influences were "comic books, b-movies, girlie mags, hot rod mags, and a variety of subcultural pollution I acquired, like many other young people."
As the counterculture era took hold in the mid-Sixties, Williams fell in with the collective of underground cartoonists associated with Zap Comix, including S. Clay Wilson, Gilbert Shelton, and R. Crumb. The work was fantastical and filthy, a celebration of the wild unconscious. Anti-Rothko, anti-Kline, it was a sendup of everything they had been taught in art school and a complete affront to all mainstream elements:
While cartoons by Crumb and Shelton ended up on emblematic album covers for Bay Area hippie groups the Grateful Dead and Big Brother & the Holding Company, Williams' work was specifically steeped in the culture of Los Angeles, his adopted hometown. His employer and main influence was Ed "Big Daddy" Roth, the dean of outlandish custom car culture in Southern California, and the inventor of Rat Fink. Strewn across Williams' paintings were traces of taco stands, Chicano murals, all-night neon, endless concretes and sky blues, and lowriders.
As skateboarding and punk rock came to dominate Los Angeles youth culture in the Seventies and Eighties, Williams' designs found a whole new home. A close ally was writer-artist-surfer C.R. Stecyk; among other achievements, Stecyk was the first person to recognize and articulate the artistic achievement of some radical Santa Monica skateboarders known as the Z-Boys. In 1994, Williams and Stecyk founded Juxtapoz magazine as an outlet for what Williams deemed "lowbrow" art: in other words, everything (including illustration, comics, tattoos, car and skateboard graphics) that is rejected by museums, galleries, classrooms and other outposts of the "fine art" world.
When Axl Rose came knocking at Williams' door asking to use his artwork for an album cover, Williams thought he was a gay transvestite. "When they pulled up in front of my house and it got out of the car, I told my wife, I said 'Look, look at this girl!' My wife says, 'That's not a girl!'" Williams took them for another one of the "little, shitty punk rock bands" he had seen all over L.A.
They looked through some slides, and Williams advised against them using his painting (titled "Appetite For Destruction") but the band knew what it wanted. "And I said Well, ya know that's gonna get you in a whole lot of trouble - so he said Well we want it, and I said Well if you have the guts to use that, that's bitchin'."
Though Williams didn't know it at the time, the album to which he was lending his artwork was the musical culmination of his "lowbrow" philosophy. Like Williams before them, here was a group of young punks embracing the sleaze they loved as teenagers (Sex Pistols, Aerosmith, Johnny Thunders) and assaulting everything their society held dear: the fluff metal of Poison and Bon Jovi, the overtures of U2, the intellectualism of Talking Heads, the disposable pop of Wang Chung, Bananarama, Cyndi Lauper. Just as Williams' imagination and skill separated him for every other back seat doodler, G N' R were separated from all those "shitty little punk bands" by the fact that they could actually play. Here was a talented rock'n'roll band that reveled in the Los Angeles low life and shared Williams' values: immediacy, vulgarity, energy.
Williams got paid peanuts for his artwork, even after the band stole his title for the album (but what else could it have been called?). They should have paid him to do PR instead. In describing his own art, Williams inadvertently explains what makes Appetite For Destruction special in an appraisal that is as eloquent as any as we're ever likely to hear:
