How Aerosmith became a “template” for Guns N’ Roses, according to Slash
The year is 1987. The entire music world has become infested with the kind of “artists” that seem to hold about as much water as The Osmonds did back in the 1970s, and yet these kitschy acts are being considered the new titans of rock by genuine music fans. It’s enough to make any other rock fan sick, but Guns N’ Roses came in like a bolt of lightning to make the genre sound badass again. But if you ask Slash, they weren’t doing anything their heroes hadn’t done before.
Because listening to a lot of Appetite for Destruction, there are bits and pieces from rock and roll’s past in the way the songs are constructed. Slash was always a bluesy player, and his love for everyone from Mick Taylor to Joe Walsh is evident every time he takes a solo to this day. But there was still an element of danger in their tunes that no one was expecting coming out of the Sunset Strip.
All rock and roll is meant to be made by bad boys, but listening to Guns N’ Roses at home was enough to make parents give their children a few dirty looks. Especially considering what Axl Rose was singing about on tracks like ‘It’s So Easy’, this was rock and roll with the same kind of shock value that punk rock thrived on as if the frontman was channelling something between Mick Jagger, John Lydon, and a rabid rottweiler whenever he sang.
But there is one musical elephant in the room that the band had under their boots. Even though a lot of what they had done was a more badass version of what The Stones had done back in the 1970s, there was no way that diehard rock fans were going to ignore the first time this happened when Aerosmith started storming the charts.
From the minute that they hit the big time, ‘The Bad Boys From Boston’ were already being called Stones ripoffs, but listening back to Slash’s best solos, he practically took the model of what Joe Perry did and found some type of middle ground. Suddenly, that signature pocket from Aerosmith didn’t sound all that bad when paired with a guitarist with chops that could make Eric Clapton proud.
And Slash was normally the first one to claim Aerosmith as the key reason for why he even became successful in the first place, saying, “I don’t think this generation has a clue what classic Aerosmith was all about. But they were the template for what I do, as well as plenty of bands that came after Guns N’ Roses: Soundgarden, Nirvana, Alice in Chains and Pearl Jam.”
While Slash is far from being in the same category as the grunge acts he mentioned, it’s hard not to see some of that approach to riffs rubbing off on the biggest names in Seattle. Nirvana may have still been purely a punk band, but listening to the Zeppelin-esque side of Kim Thayil’s licks or the tight groove of ‘Even Flow,’ everyone in the alternative revolution was simply taking Aerosmith’s model and putting a more rustic approach around it.
And while Slash may have been left in the past once grunge swooped in, there was nothing that could have killed Aerosmith at that point. They had graduated to making the biggest ballads of their career, and even if that led towards a brick wall when making albums like Just Push Play, nothing was going to diminish the impact that albums like Toys in the Attic had on legions of guitar players.
