The bands that Slash and Axl Rose agreed were appalling: “Better removed”
There’s a reason why rock stars are some of the most opinionated people in the music industry, and, for the most part, it’s because they have a very specific idea of what authenticity means. Axl Rose and Slash, for instance, are on the same page when it comes to those who are genuinely worth your time, and those you should write off as mere “posers”.
Part of this hostility comes from competitiveness, of course. After all, any band rising to the top as part of the same pool as Guns N’ Roses had to fight tooth and nail to be respected and taken seriously, and many were regarded as poor imitations of older, better rock groups. Or worse, people accused them of selling out to seem the part and make a quick buck.
This is why bands like Kiss found it difficult to gain credit where it was due. At the time, most people took one look at their image and dismissed them as simple fads, not understanding the fact that they did actually know what they were doing and, more importantly, what they were doing would be more significant to the culture of rock and roll than most other bands at the time.
In many ways, Guns N’ Roses received a similar treatment. While credited with injecting some much-needed anarchy and grit into the LA music scene, the band were also seen by some as nothing more than a hair metal marketing move, a band who appeared more myth than musical genius and offered nothing that significant to the over-polished array of metal bands at the time, like their animalistic counterparts, Mötley Crüe.
In reality, however, they offered something more real, a band rooted in its own genuine love for good ol’ rock ‘n’ roll in a way that felt both simplistic and culturally sophisticated. And, of course, it helped that the members of the band saw themselves as rock’s greatest outliers, especially Axl Rose and Slash, whose opinions on the broader scene were especially telling.
Both of them sort of despised Poison, for example. Slash’s reasoning had more to do with their sound, it seemed, even though he once auditioned for them before taking up the gig with Guns N’ Roses. As he once said, “I hated Poison, but in those days you did whatever you had to do to keep moving.” Rose, on the other hand, said they “fucked it up for all of us” because they said “everybody was following a trend”, a pesky categorisation that Guns N’ Roses constantly got lumped into.
This competitiveness is also why neither of them liked Metallica. Although they toured with them, this only served to highlight their own shortcomings, with Slash realising that any band that wasn’t Metallica wasn’t going to “go over” in America. Rose also seemingly struggled with Lars Ulrich because he wanted to be on top, but Ulrich was already there, and Rose felt frustrated by having someone else take his crown.
When Slash left Guns N’ Roses, he explored a handful of other projects with other well-respected musicians. One of them, Snakepit, emerged as an effort to calibrate his musical offering with like-minded people. However, both Slash and Rose were also in agreement that the whole thing was a bit of a mess. According to Slash, this was because of the excessive lifestyle and working with people who didn’t really know what they were doing.
For Rose, on the other hand, anything Slash did outside of Guns N’ Roses was quite literally poison to him. As he rather scathingly put it once, “Personally, I consider [Slash] a cancer and better removed, avoided. And the less anyone heard of him or his supporters, the better.”
