The Story Of How One Video Turned Guns N’ Roses From Flops To Rock Legends, Literally Melting MTV’s Phone Lines In The Process

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Guns N’ Roses debut album, Appetite For Destruction, is the top-selling hard rock album in the history of the world, selling over 30 million copies worldwide. But when initially debuted, the album was considered a meddling flop, in large part due to MTV’s reluctance to grant any publicity to the drug-fueled, counter-cultural bad boys.

But when hard-charging Geffen Records A&R rep Tom Zutaut, who had signed Mötley Crüe and Metallica by age 24, risked his career to coerce the powers that be to play the band’s music video one time at 4 a.m., he put Guns N’ Roses on the fast track to becoming rock legends.

Our friends at UPROXX explain in the second segment to a three-part mini documentary series (first segment here) how that late-night video literally caused MTV’s switchboards to blow up. Literally.

[H/T UPROXX]