Billy White Jr., GNR’s ‘Appetite’ Cover Artist, Reportedly Dead

Billy White Jr., the artist finest recognized for creating the quilt picture for Guns N’ Roses 1987 debut album Appetite for Destruction, has reportedly died.

White, who was an artwork scholar in Long Beach, California within the mid-’80s, grew to become buddies with the fellows in Guns N’ Roses because the band was slicing its tooth on the Sunset Strip. White was launched to the burgeoning rock stars by his cousin, and someday he acquired an sudden name from frontman Axl Rose.

“One day Axl called,” White defined throughout a 2016 interview, “and requested if I may draw him a tattoo, after he’d seen a drawing I’d completed on my cousin’s wall. I stated certain, and we talked.”

Together with Rose, White helped create the now iconic logo of a Celtic cross featuring skulls of all five members of Guns N’ Roses.

“The cross and skulls that looked like the band was Axl’s idea, the rest was me,” White recalled. “The knot work in the cross was a reference to Thin Lizzy, a band Axl and I both loved.”

Still, the design was initially supposed to be for a tattoo, not an album cover. Things changed when the original artwork for GNR’s debut LP – a controversial painting by Robert Williams called “Appetite for Destruction” – was rejected by the band’s label. The title stuck, Williams’ art was moved to the inner sleeve, and White’s cross-and-skulls design took its place on the cover.

“Axl called again, and said [my design] was going to be on the cover of everything, because the Williams painting got rejected,” White recalled. “I used to be okay with that!”

Released July 21, 1987, Appetite for Destruction grew to become historic. The LP offered greater than 30 million albums worldwide, making it probably the most profitable debut in historical past. White’s iconic paintings grew to become a part of GNR’s legacy and has remained one of the distinctive photos in rock. The artist’s pencil sketch of the unique tattoo idea offered at public sale in 2009 for $6,875 (White was not concerned within the sale).

In a put up to social media following White’s demise, Slash referred to the artist as “a long time friend of the band.”