"Welcome To The Jungle" by Guns N' Roses

Birthday wishes go out today to Slash - whose work as lead guitarist with Guns N' Roses and Velvet Revolver have been rocking audiences for more than twenty years...

Welcome to the Jungle was GnR's first single, released all the way back in 1987; it initially appeared on their major label debut album Appetite for Destruction, and was co-written by the birthday boy himself!  While much of the video is a surprisingly Mötley Crüe-ish performance*, it opens with a Pat Benatar-esque bit of fun, showing Axl Rose as an innocent naif, all alone for the first time in the big city. This echoes the story of how the song came to be written when, in a similar situation, Rose and Slash were excoriated by a homeless man with the lines 'You know where you are? You're in the jungle baby; you're gonna die!' Those lines would eventually become a lyrical motif in the song, which was also inspired by Hanoi Rocks' 1984 song Underwater World.

*To the uninitiated, Slash is the one with the long curly dark hair wearing the top hat.
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