The album Slash called perfect for Axl Rose: “It’s very heavy”
Slash and Axl Rose have always seemed like two sides of the same coin. Despite being joined at the hip musically in their glory years in Guns N’ Roses, they both had a completely different outlook on what their music represented, whether that was Slash wanting to make dirty rock and roll or Rose trying his hand at the most extravagant music imaginable this side of Elton John. While Rose took his sweet time putting Chinese Democracy out, Slash admitted that his former bandmate didn’t disappoint regarding raw ambition.
Then again, no artist was going to have warm feelings about the bandmate who forced them to quit the group. Since half of Use Your Illusion was being dictated by whatever the hell Rose wanted to do, Slash had had enough once the tour wrapped up, eventually making his way into solo projects for Michael Jackson before landing in Velvet Revolver with Scott Weiland.
Ironically enough, half of Velvet Revolver’s catalogue actually felt like a better version of what Guns N’ Roses was than what Rose was doing. Given how long people were waiting, Rose was going to make sure that whatever came out under the ‘GNR’ banner would be unprecedented, but making fans wait over 14 years for an album’s worth of music was still pushing it.
And once fans heard it, it wasn’t like the money wasn’t in the speakers. If ‘November Rain’ was an opportunity for Rose to stretch as a creative force, this was the equivalent of making every single track larger-than-life, whether that was making ‘Shackler’s Revenge’ into a stadium-rock anthem or the devastating ballad ‘This I Love’.
Even when working on his solo outing, Slash knew that Rose was putting out the ideal version of what he wanted Guns N’ Roses to be, telling the New York Post, “It was the perfect Axl record — exactly what I would have expected from the final years of us working together, and seeing where he was headed musically. It’s very heavy, sort of a dark, depressing record. He’s f*cking phenomenal.”
But that same larger-than-life energy was the exact reason why most people fell off of the record. Despite being too little too late, what could have been a great album sounded like it had been mulled over for far too long, especially in a few spots where it sounds like a different version of Rose from different decades is singing.
Still, you can’t fault him for swinging for the fences regarding the more dramatic side of his playing. That depressing angle isn’t by accident, and considering how many people turned away from Rose during this time, it was downright tragic to see him pour his heart out, only for no one to actually see him bleed once he came up for air.
That didn’t stop Rose from touring it all around the world, with Slash even performing a handful of Chinese Democracy tunes once he returned to the fold after decades away. There’s a slim chance that the record will go down as one of the best Guns N’ Roses records ever made, but it remains an interesting case study as to the dangers of giving one artist complete control and no deadline.
