“An opportunity to vent”: the album Slash wrote to attack Axl Rose
Sometimes, it’s remarkable to think that certain bands have managed to survive through clashes of massive egos and gigantic bust-ups, and to think that Guns N’ Roses are still going over 40 years on from their formation is frankly miraculous when you consider the turmoil they’ve been through.
It should have been clear from the early years of the group that there were some big personalities on board, and that this could eventually lead to some issues emerging between members in terms of there being a power struggle between these different factions. Some acts seem to be able to contain this better than others, but with Guns N’ Roses, it was only a matter of time before chaos erupted within the ranks of the rock group.
Some changes in the band’s lineup took place after a couple of albums together, with drummer Steven Adler making way for Matt Sorum in 1990, a couple of years after the release of G N’ R Lies, but the core of the group still remained intact at this point. The release of Use Your Illusion I & II, the pseudo-double album released by the band in 1991, proved to be another jumping-off point as well, with guitarist Izzy Stradlin appearing to have had enough and paving the way for Gilby Clarke to take his place.
However, four albums in, if we count Use Your Illusion I & II as one album having been born from the same sessions, both Slash and Duff McKagan chose to up sticks as well, leaving the group in complete disarray. It was easy enough for the band to survive the other personnel changes up until this point, but the rifts that had emerged between band members by the mid-1990s were seemingly too much to deal with.
There had been a lot of debate over the direction that the band should have been moving in after the release of The Spaghetti Incident, which led to McKagan’s leaving, and to Slash throwing his toys out of the pram, choosing to head off to do his own thing.
While ongoing disputes about the band’s artistic direction were the primary reason for their core members’ departing, Slash chose to put together a group of his own, Slash’s Snakepit, where he ended up making a debut record that opted to take the direction he had been keen for Guns N’ Roses to follow prior to their collapse. Given how frontman Axl Rose had been pushing against this style being adopted, he spoke pretty negatively about his former bandmate’s new venture.
However, It’s Five O’Clock Somewhere, the debut album from Slash’s Snakepit, performed exceptionally well, essentially rubbing it in the face of the frontman who had dismissed his bandmate’s ideas. What was perhaps even more galling for Rose was the fact that Slash took the opportunity to have a few swipes at Rose in the album’s lyrical content, which Slash all but confirmed was the case in his autobiography some years later.
“All of my songs are directed at one person, though no one picked up on it at the time,” the guitarist later revealed, perhaps overlooking the fact that Rose could almost certainly have detected that songs such as ‘Beggars & Hangers-On’ and ‘What Do You Want To Be’ are definite jabs in his direction. “I used that record as an opportunity to vent a lot of shit that I needed to get off my chest.”
It should have registered as a slap in the face and a wake-up call that Slash was right about the direction Guns N’ Roses should have gone in, given how he stole much of the band’s personnel to make the album. To rub salt in the wound even more, the follow-up to The Spaghetti Incident, the much-maligned Chinese Democracy that had caused a rift to form in the first place, took 19 years of pain to still get wrong. Perhaps Rose could have listened and saved himself all of the turmoil in the first place.
