The artist Slash considered his musical “father figure”
Being a musician doesn’t always mean having the best relationships with everyone in the business. It might be nice to have a tight-knit group to bounce ideas off of, but there are many instances where all anyone wants to do is use you for your talent and then go off on their own the minute they realise they got all they’re going to need from you. Although Slash is more than capable of being a stand-in guitarist and adding to any song he plays, he knew some artists would always remain lifelong friends.
But looking back on the way Guns N’ Roses worked, any type of reunion seemed up in the air for years after Axl Rose started calling the shots. Rose may have owned the rights to the name Guns N’ Roses, but the more he started to take control of the group started to irritate Slash, thinking that he had become a session musician in his own band rather than making the music that he wanted.
And no matter how much people fawn over it, Use Your Illusion was never the record that Slash wanted it to be. It contains some of his best solos and takes the band’s sound into new directions it had never been before, but there are also a handful of sections that sound too bloated, almost like they are making the kind of excessive rock record that most people used to make fun of in the genre’s glory days.
When looking at where Slash went afterwards, though, it wasn’t a big surprise to see him take things back to basics. He wanted to make records the same way that his idols did, and that meant getting down to the sleazy side of rock and roll with Slash’s Snakepit and Velvet Revolver. But the world that Slash was working in was the kind of music that Alice Cooper helped create.
Despite Cooper being known as the godfather of shock rock, he was a lot closer to garage rock in his time. Many of those early albums like Killer still have that unpolished edge to them in some places, and the fact that he was included on the track ‘The Garden’ from Use Your Illusion brought some of that signature darkness back into their sound amid the ballads like ‘November Rain.’
“It’s kind of like having that fucked-up father figure. But I absolutely love Alice.”
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Even though Slash has carved out his own spot in rock and roll history, he still views Cooper as one of the building blocks for him becoming a star, saying, “It’s kind of like having that fucked-up father figure. But I absolutely love Alice, and he’s a perfect example of someone who has been so influential and who’s been there and done it in rock’n’roll. And he was also really cool and really in control of his fame. That had a really big impact on me.”
Then again, Slash is inching closer to someone who has done it all in rock as well. Despite the genre not having its teeth in the mainstream as much as it used to, getting the opportunity to play with everyone from Carole King to Bob Dylan to Michael Jackson to Ryan Gosling at the Academy Awards is the kind of run that most people can only dream of having throughout their career.
And as Cooper continues to pump out the best rock music he can, his perseverance is both a lesson for Slash and the rock community at large. Most people might have been in the business for the money, but Cooper has always been interested in making the best record he can make whenever he starts writing.
