An idol’s idol: The guitarist Slash called “otherworldly”
Nothing comes from nothing. If you want to get fancy about it, you can trace that concept back to the Ancient Greek philosopher Parmenides. His grand idea concerned the making of the world, but it applies equally to musicians. Everybody is influenced by what came before, even the greatest of the greats. When Time Magazine drew up its list of the best electric guitar players in 2009, Saul Hudson, professionally known as Slash, ranked in second place. His major influence and the man who took the top spot was Jimi Hendrix.
“Hendrix was just otherworldly,” Slash once said. “To me, his style was indicative of his personality, because him and the guitar were sort of one.” This idea of a player being personified by his instrument had been around for some time, at least as far back as the 1920s, when the great Louis Armstrong put together his Hot Five and Hot Seven groups.
Armstrong was the first jazz player to place emphasis on soloing. Before then, jazz musicians in the old New Orleans style concentrated on group aesthetics. When Armstrong came along, he added long passages which highlighted a single player. This allowed them to express themselves in an entirely new way.
Hendrix was arguably the first to elevate and popularise this ethos in a rock setting, and Slash grew up listening to Hendrix’s sound. “He had a way of just knowing where these notes were,” he adds, “and he draped his fingers over the strings in such a way that he knew exactly what note he should be hitting and shouldn’t be hitting. If you look at the way he formed chords, they were sort of unique to him.”
Slash was born in Hampstead, London, in 1965, at a time when Hendrix was just emerging onto the scene. Twenty years later, after a family relocation to Los Angeles, he joined Guns N’ Roses, a band formed from members of two other groups: Hollywood Rose and L.A. Guns. Slash had played alongside Guns N’ Roses’ founding members Axl Rose and Izzy Stradlin in Hollywood Rose.
He replaced Tracii Guns in this new outfit. The Guns N’ Roses debut album, Appetite for Destruction, was released in 1987 and initially failed to make any significant impact. Things changed drastically the following year. The band began touring, and singles ‘Welcome to the Jungle’, ‘Paradise City’, and ‘Sweet Child o’ Mine’ charted highly in both the US and the UK, the latter giving the band their only US number one single.
A large part of the record’s appeal lay in Slash’s extraordinary guitar work, which veered in the space of a song between cutting and angular and high, keening, expressiveness. The band provided an impressive bedrock, and the combination of solid songwriting with Axl Rose’s distinctive vocals and Slash’s guitar propelled Appetite to the Billboard number one spot. Over time, it would become the seventh best-selling album in US history. Things might have been different if Slash hadn’t discovered Hendrix, but Hendrix’s big break was also a matter of chance.
In the early 1960s, when the Isley Brothers found themselves without a guitarist. They hunted down a young man about whom they had heard good things. Hendrix couldn’t oblige them with a performance, as his guitar was in the pawn shop. The Brothers paid to retrieve it. There was another problem. The guitar was lacking strings. The Brothers supplied new ones. As Hendrix strung his guitar, he told the watching musicians how much he liked their song, ‘Twist and Shout.’ Then he began playing the tune. It was probably the shortest audition in rock history. As soon as Hendrix’s fingers hit the strings, the Isleys knew they were onto something special.
After 40 years in the business, Slash has little left to prove. He was part of one of the defining rock bands of the 1980s and 1990s and has guested on works by Michael Jackson, Bob Dylan, Carol King, The Yardbirds and Ray Charles. You can be sure he would have had no disappointment about being ranked second behind his idol.
