“Thought I’d got it out of my system”: the band Slash thought never got off the ground
There’s no telling whether any band is going to last for five years or five weeks out in the wild. Some people are accustomed to the touring lifestyle, but it’s a hard struggle for anyone, especially when they aren’t ready to throw down every night. Slash always took to the touring life like a fish in the water, but once Guns N’ Roses hit it big, it was a lot different from the career trajectory that he had envisioned.
Granted, it’s not like Guns didn’t start off with a lot of promise. Compared to every other band clogging up the airwaves in Los Angeles, it looked like Slash was one of the few guitarists who actually seemed to care about his roots. He was more than happy to flaunt his love for bands like The Rolling Stones and Aerosmith, whereas most bands slapped an AC/DC ripoff guitar lick on top of their teased hair and called it a day.
Appetite for Destruction was something different and more indebted to rock’s glory years, but the band’s trajectory is a case of them trying to grow up way too fast. They were always going to be big, but did they really have to go from a rootsy band to Elton John-style piano ballads within the span of only one album?
If Slash wasn’t onboard when they hit the studio, he was practically nonexistent whenever he got up onstage. By definition, there are no Slash performances that would ever be considered subpar, but compared to the lavishness of what Axl Rose was doing every time they played their massive stadium shows, it felt like the guitarist was still that gutter rat rock and roller that happened to be playing in clubs that were a bit bigger.
“To me, it’s about being close to the crowd…”
Slash
But when everyone got home and regrouped, it didn’t take Slash to realise that he wasn’t cut out for Guns N’ Roses any more. He had to return to his roots as a true rock and roll act, and Slash’s Snakepit was one of the best examples of what Guns should have been, down to the riffs sounding like they were ripped directly off of Appetite for Destruction, only this time without that trademark howl.
Slash may have had a place that he could call home for a while, but he felt that the band never went the distance like he thought they should have, saying, “Once we’d played a stadium, Axl would never go back, it was stadiums or nothing. But to me, it’s about being close to the crowd, too. I thought I’d got it out of my system with Snakepit, which was a kind of haphazard, thrown-together thing, but it never really goes.”
While the band eventually folded and Slash ended up with another supergroup in Velvet Revolver, he never exactly felt comfortable there, either. It was a lot more authentic than what we would get from Rose on Chinese Democracy, but it only took him a few years to realise that his band of old friends wasn’t going to work with Scott Weiland being out of control behind the scenes.
In fact, despite rejoining Guns N’ Roses, Slash’s current band with Myles Kennedy and the Conspirators might be the closest thing to what he saw his solo outfit being in his head. After all that time playing massive stadiums and soaking up the same attention that few other artists are able to manage, Slash was always going to feel at home playing classic rock, no matter how small the venue was.
