Axl Rose always wanted “incredible” Dave Navarro in Guns N’ Roses: “The world’s gotta see”
Guns N’ Roses were always going to be a ticking time bomb in many respects.
As much as they loved playing off each other in the early days, it wasn’t clear that the band was going to implode or one of them was going to fall victim to their own demons after a while. Despite every member of the band thankfully still being among the living today, Axl Rose knew that there were bound to be some people that he needed to lose along the way.
Then again, not many fans envisioned that those people meant restructuring the entire lineup. Because before Slash and Duff McKagan rejoined the group in the past few years, there was a wilderness period where every single member had been changed except for Rose. He had a firm idea of what the band was supposed to sound like, and if the rest of his fellow musicians couldn’t get onboard with that, it made sense for them to jump ship and start following their muse somewhere else.
But when looking through some of the band’s wild lineups, it’s not like some of them didn’t have merit. Before Slash even left, there was talk of getting Ozzy Osbourne’s guitarist, Zakk Wylde, into the mix, but even with the idea of having two bluesy masters of rock and roll, Wylde even admitted that he needed to pass on the opportunity because the band was taking too long to get to work.
That didn’t stop Rose from bringing in every guitarist he could think of for the group. Bumblefoot did have the kind of zany virtuosic energy that was needed to fill Slash’s shoes in the 2000s, but Buckethead was always going to be a strange pairing. Rose was among the finest singers of his time, but given how much he wanted to include on Chinese Democracy, getting one of the most eccentric guitar geniuses of the era in the group felt like two musical legends working in completely different directions.
Before Slash even exited the picture, Rose had already started looking at the up-and-coming bands coming out of Los Angeles. There was no way he was going to convince any of the grunge heavyweights to join the ranks of Guns N’ Roses, but Jane’s Addiction looked promising after they broke up. Dave Navarro was a hell of a player, and Rose felt that his chops would have worked perfectly with Slash.
Although it never came to fruition, Rose was still thinking about the potential they had with Navarro years later, saying in 2005, “I still put on Jane’s Addiction and it always seems brand new, no matter how many times I hear it. I’d like to try to achieve a fusion of what they were trying and what GN’R is doing. I think that blend, if taken seriously and patiently, could be amazing. It could be a fuller thing than anyone’s done before. Dave and Slash together could be incredible – two guys very ‘out there’ on their own, working together. It’s like the first time I met Slash, I said, ‘The world’s gotta see this guy.’”
But even if Navarro wasn’t as greeted as warmly with Red Hot Chili Peppers fans when he joined them, it’s not like his chops didn’t work there, either. One Hot Minute might be getting its praise nowadays, but it’s insane to think that laying down some heavy solos on the funk rockers’ usual sound wasn’t the biggest detour of their career.
While Guns N’ Roses have yet to bring in Navarro as a full-time member since their reformation, it would be a match made in heaven hearing what he and Slash could do when playing off each other. The era of ‘November Rain’ may have catered to more downtempo material, but anything else that they created would have made for the friendly guitar battle of the century.
