‘The punk scene in West Hollywood was just fluff’ T ’
IT WAS THE unexpected highlight of the Oscars. Ryan Gosling was performing I’m Just Ken from the Barbie movie – surrounded by an all-singing, all-dancing platoon of Kens and cut-outs of Barbie’s face – when up popped leather-clad rock god Slash to unleash a blistering guitar solo. It was a show-stealing moment, glorious but surreal, I tell the Guns N’ Roses legend.
“It was a little surreal,” Slash allows.
“But more surreal for me was sitting in the audience beforehand. I knew some of the actors, but most of them I’d only ever seen in movies.”
He’d played on the soundtrack version at the request of its co-writer, producer Mark Ronson.
Then the movie went wild, scooping six
Golden Globes and becoming “a cultural phenomenon,” he says.
Slash was touring South America when he was asked to play at the Oscars.
“I had said no because I was going to be in Asia, but they found the money to fly me from Korea to LA and back on the same night.”
After a 16-hour flight he went straight to the ceremony – “unprepared for the massive chaos of it, the craziness and pandemonium backstage.
“I did the bit and then went straight back for my next gig in the Philippines.”
Slash, a cultural phenomenon in his own right, is one of modern rock’s most recognisable icons, rarely seen without his aviator sunglasses and belted top hat perched above those cascading curls.
A guitar giant, he is acclaimed for the fluid brilliance of his playing, and his ability to wring raw emotion from his Les Paul.
He’s also smart, selfdeprecating and open.
The La-raised Londoner, born Saul Hudson, has been clean of drink and drugs since 2006. His only addiction is performing.
“I’m excited by what I do,” says the father-oftwo, who at 58 is as busy as he’s ever been. “I love playing, so I’m either touring or I’m recording.”
Or making films and TV shows. He has just exec-produced his second movie, the independent cabin-fever horror flick, The Breach, and composed its score, and is currently producing a TV horror series.
As well as his two bands, GNR and the Conspirators, Slash has just recorded his second solo album, Orgy Of The Damned, consisting largely of lovingly interpreted blues covers – the music he’s adored since his turbulent teens.
The Hampstead-born star spent his first five years in the Stoke-on-trent suburb of Blurton.
He then moved to LA with his father, Anthony, a graphic designer who worked on LP sleeves for Joni Mitchell and Neil Young. There they joined his African-american mother Ola who designed costumes for stars like Diana Ross, John Lennon and David Bowie (who she dated).
His parents divorced when he was eight. At 15, his grandmother gave music-mad Saul his uncle’s abandoned flamenco guitar.
“It had one string, so I learnt a bunch of riffs like Aerosmith’s Sweet Emotion and Led Zeppelin’s Dazed & Confused on that one string.”
Guitar tutoring followed. “The deal was I’d play an elementary scale and he’d play one of my records and figure out what they were playing in front of me.
“I thought, I can do that! So I didn’t go to lessons for long, but that teacher, Robert Wolin, was one of the best guitar players I ever met.”
Slash’s biggest influences were British bluesmen. “Everything about their approach was different. There was a real appreciation for soul and blues and emotion. Peter Green, Jimmy Page, Mick Taylor, Clapton…they understood what made blues guitar so special. Rory Gallagher and Mike Bloomfield too. Then rock got commercialised and a little deluded.”
His first gig was in Al’s Bar in Downtown LA “jamming with my dad’s friend’s blues band. They were playing old blues standards, and songs by the Stones and Creedence.
“I jumped up and flew by the seat of my pants. I’d only been playing a year.”
In 1985, aged 19, he formed Guns N’ Roses with maverick singer Axl Rose from the ashes of their previous band Hollywood Rose. Two years later their first album, Appetite For Destruction, would conquer the world. With classics like Sweet Child O’ Mine, Welcome To The Jungle and Paradise City, it sold over 30million copies and established GNR as the biggest rock band of the era. They went on to sell more than 100million albums.
Infused with punk attitude, GNR played the LA “hair-metal” scene, typified by bands like
Poison. “We all hated it… we were the antithesis of the bands on the bandwagon. We were the only five guys who could’ve made up that band. “We did our thing, we fought tooth and nail, and we succeeded. I’m proud we never made concessions. We wrote good songs and some of the lyrics spell out what life was like. The integrity and truth of it hit a nerve.”
THE MADNESS surrounding GNR, the feuds and fall-outs following their stadium-filling success and self-harming excess, is welldocumented. The lifestyle continued in Slash’s next band, Velvet Revolver, formed in 1996.
He also became Hollywood’s most wanted guitarist, working with everyone from Dylan to Michael Jackson.
Before the twice-divorced star kicked drink and drugs in 2006, he was diagnosed with a form of congestive heart failure caused by chronic narcotics abuse. At one point he technically died for eight minutes in San Francisco after an overdose. Slash quit smoking after his mother’s death from lung cancer in 2009.
Los Angeles was alive with music when he
first arrived. The Doors blared out of every radio, chased by the singer-songwriter era of Joni Mitchell and co.
“Punk rock kicked in just as I was starting to pick up my own musical personality.
“Punk was good, but the punk scene in West Hollywood was a lot of fluff.”
Blues rock trumped it, he says.
“I’ve always been a hard rock guy, but blues orientated, rooted in 1-4-5 chord progressions.
All of us in Guns N’ Roses had similar influences.
“I’d go off and join local blues bands when we were on tour, especially in New Orleans and Chicago.”
In the 90s, he formed Slash’s Snakepit, followed by Slash’s Blues Bar doing covers.
“It’s taken all these years to do the album,” he chuckles. It’s out in May, with guests ranging from ZZ Top’s Billy F Gibbons to former Disney pop princess Demi Lovato, a fellow former addict.
Slash also recruited ex-free star Paul Rodgers who sings Albert King’s Born Under A Bad Sign.
“Paul is the greatest white blues man alive. He was the only person I thought of for the song and it’s a sublime version.”
He’d played with Rodgers in Band Of Gypsies, recording a Hendrix tribute album with Jimi’s surviving bandmates Billy Cox and Buddy Miles.
Gibbons joins him on Muddy Waters’ Hoochie Coochie Man.
“He was a little reluctant, because as far as he’s concerned, I’m still a young whippersnapper. So I made a demo to show him it was the cool E version. His vocal is amazing.”
There are two soul songs – Stevie Wonder’s Living For The City and an atmospheric take on The Temptations’ Papa Was A Rolling Stone, which Snakepit used to play.
OCCASIONAL guests will join his regular band on his UK tour starting next weekend. After that, there’s a new Conspirators album, and a strong chance of Guns N’ Roses activity…
While Slash has previously spoken out about the decline of LA’S once vibrant music scene and the record business in general, he says: “There is an undercurrent of really exciting music with kids right now – everybody is into making music for the sake of music again.
“I know about this because I have kids” – his sons, drummer London, 21, and guitarist Cash, 19 – “and I’m exposed to it. It’s a different more creative scene, much more from the heart. It’s substantial again.”
Welcome to the new jungle?
Slash tours the UK starting in Birmingham on Saturday March 30. Details www.slashonline.com