The warning in the title was real. In 1987 Axl Rose told MTV where he first heard it: "About six years ago I hitchhiked the country and on part of that trip I ended up kind of stranded in the Bronx." A man came up to him by the freeway and said, "You know where you are? You're gonna die, you're in the jungle, baby!"
The city in the song, though, is Los Angeles. Rose wrote the words in Seattle, about Los Angeles. "I just wrote how it looked to me," he said. "If someone comes to town and they want to find something, they can find whatever they want."
The music came together the way Guns N' Roses worked in 1985. Slash started the riff, Steven Adler found a beat, and Duff McKagan brought the breakdown, which he said came from a song he had written at about 14 for his first band. Slash remembered the song coming together in about three hours.
It was their first video, and the idea came from their manager, Alan Niven. "I came up with the idea of stealing from three movies: Midnight Cowboy, The Man Who Fell to Earth and A Clockwork Orange," he told Rolling Stone. Nigel Dick, a British director who had moved to Los Angeles, turned it into a treatment.
The story follows a newcomer. Axl gets off a bus in Hollywood with a piece of straw in his mouth. The band turn up along the way. Izzy Stradlin plays the drug dealer, and Slash sits against a shop wall drinking from a bottle in a paper bag. Axl watches violence on a wall of television sets, ends up strapped to a chair with his head held in place, the scene from A Clockwork Orange, and in the end he is the singer on stage.
Dick filmed it on 1 and 2 August 1987 at 450 South La Brea Avenue in Hollywood and in the ballroom of the Park Plaza Hotel. The money was tight. Niven said Geffen gave them $75,000, so he shared the shoot with Great White's video for "Lady Red Light", with the same director, crew and equipment. In the chair, Dick said, Axl "went nuclear", screaming without being asked to. Slash, by Dick's account, tried to drive off with the motor home they were filming in.
Then MTV was not interested. The record company's founder, David Geffen, called MTV himself. "Just play it in the middle of the night," he remembered saying. "Don't report it, just play it and let's see if there's a reaction to it." The famous version says it was played once, early on a Sunday morning, and the phones lit up. MTV's Tom Freston remembered it differently: the video was already on Headbangers Ball, and Geffen called to say that every time it ran in the small hours, sales went up. Both versions agree on what happened next. The requests came in, MTV put the video into regular rotation, and the band took off.
In Britain the single had reached only number 67 in 1987. Released again in America in October 1988, it reached number seven on the Billboard Hot 100 that December. By then the video had already won Best New Artist in a Video at the MTV Video Music Awards in September 1988. Dick went on to direct "Sweet Child O' Mine", "Paradise City" and "Patience."
The band appear briefly in the 1988 Dirty Harry film The Dead Pool, which uses the song, and it plays in Jumanji: Welcome to the Jungle in 2017. The Cincinnati Bengals play it before kick-off.
The video still works as a short film about arriving. A boy gets off a bus with a piece of straw in his mouth, and by the end he is the one singing.
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