Welcome to the Jungle

Axl Rose wrote the lyrics to "Welcome to the Jungle" while visiting a friend in Seattle, describing how the city looked to him and noting that anyone coming to town could find whatever they wanted. The title phrase itself came from an earlier encounter: Rose and a friend were coming out of a bus into New York when a homeless man yelled at them that they were in the jungle and were going to die. Slash later called it a very telling lyric with a stark honesty that anyone who had lived in Los Angeles could relate to.

The music came together quickly once Rose remembered a riff Slash had played while living in the basement of his mother's house. The band laid down the foundations of the song fast, with Slash adding new guitar parts as they went, and according to the guitarist the whole thing was written in roughly three hours. It was the first track the band all collaborated on. The breakdown drew on an older song called "The Fake," which Duff McKagan had written in 1978 for his punk band the Vains, his first-ever composition and later a single for that group.

Released as the second single from Appetite for Destruction, the song reached number seven on the Billboard Hot 100 after a 1988 reissue. The music video, directed by Nigel Dick, initially aired only once around 5:00AM on a Sunday morning, yet it soon became MTV's most requested video and helped drive the album's success.