“It was always about the rock”: the genre Slash wanted nothing to do with
Rock and roll is supposed to be a musical cornucopia in lots of ways. The entire premise behind the genre was that there were never supposed to be any rules, but that hasn’t stopped everyone from snobby fans to critics from putting parameters on what their favourite artists are “supposed” to sound like. It didn’t take a lot to figure out that Slash lived and breathed every piece of rock and roll history, but even he had his limits on where he was going to take his own music.
Going through all of his individual solos, though, Slash could justifiably be considered a walking encyclopedia for rock and roll guitar. He had his moments where he could play something flashier than anyone else, but there were also a handful of moments where he could reproduce a lick that seemed like it was ripped straight from Joe Walsh or Eric Clapton in the middle of a Guns N’ Roses song.
But for all of the fast-paced stuff in his catalogue, Slash seemed to have carefully constructed parts every time he played a solo. The breaks on tunes like ‘Paradise City’ and ‘Sweet Child O’ Mine’ are all masterpieces, and if anyone else decided to add their own bit of flair into the mix when they were playing, there’s a good chance they would get laughed out of the room for even bothering to try to improve on what he did.
Then again, it’s not that Slash didn’t have a good upbringing for what real rock music was supposed to sound like. After all, his parents had been in the rock and roll business since he was a kid, and when his mother wasn’t working on outfits for people like James Taylor, his father would be crafting album covers that would later become staples of Joni Mitchell’s catalogue. When he started growing up, though, Los Angeles looked a lot different from when he started.
“I thought the stuff coming from England and New York was really genuine, but the LA thing was mostly just a bunch of posers.”
Slash
Despite Guns N’ Roses being a bona fide rock and roll outfit, the order of the day was about wearing the tightest spandex one could find in their closets and wearing the kind of makeup that looked like it was applied by diving headfirst into a vat of chemicals. It certainly had its place among the glam stars of the world, but it also seemed to spit in the face of everything that rock and roll was supposed to be for Slash.
All of those bands may have had a rebellious nature to them the same way Guns N’ Roses did, but Slash couldn’t help but feel like they were only wearing it like a costume half the time as well, saying, “It was always about the rock: I love the [punk] attitude, and I thought the stuff coming from England and New York was really genuine, but the LA thing was mostly just a bunch of posers.”
But did they tease up their hair? You bet they did. Any band knows that they need to go with the flow to get the right spot at the table, and while there may have been a little bit of makeup in the beginning, it was always supposed to be in service to the true pioneers of the genre like Marc Bolan than anything you’d see a member of Poison wearing.
By the time the band hit the big time, though, they realised that what they were wearing was not going to define them. They were interested in making hard rock sound dangerous, and whereas hair metal did satisfy a certain kind of rebelliousness, anyone who only listened to Poison and Warrant during that decade had their DNA changed the minute they heard the opening riff of ‘Welcome to the Jungle’.
