Appetite for Destruction (1987) is the debut, and it is one of the best-selling first albums any band has ever released. That is the headline. The stranger truth is how unplanned the biggest moments on it were.

The record was built to sound like a fist, fast, mean, unbothered by whether you liked it. And then the song that carried it to the top of the chart was the one that least fits that description: a love song, soft where the rest is hard, that the band almost did not commit to. One of them wrote the central part trying to be funny. Another wrote the words for a real person, long before any of this turned into a career.

So treat the tracklist as a set of trick questions. The thing you think you know about each song is usually the cover story. The real one is underneath.