“I don’t think you could get much cooler”: the guitarist Slash considered the coolest of all time
Any rockstar must do something more than play guitar well to get noticed. Instrumental perfection has never been a priority in the rock sphere, and some of the biggest names in punk only needed to rely on their sense of swagger on most of their songs, since all of them would readily admit that they were far from the greatest musicians in the world. Although there was no doubt about Slash‘s incredible energy whenever he got onstage, he felt there was no point in anyone competing with certain guitarists when they plugged in.
But at the height of the hair metal movement, Slash was almost a necessary figure for Los Angeles. The entire appeal of rock and roll had become neutered the minute that bands started relying more on the hairspray than the guitar licks, but as soon as Guns N’ Roses hit the scene, Slash was far from anything that any club was used to at the time.
From the first licks he played, the guitarist had done his homework on rock and roll history. Although plenty of hair-metal bands would typically take a cheesy AC/DC ripoff riff, smother it in lipstick and call it a day, Slash’s heroes were always about taking the glory days of blues rock in a different direction. If you look at the way he approaches his solos, it’s like he was trying to find the common middle ground between both Eric Clapton and Joe Perry, albeit with a Johnny Thunders attitude behind him.
A lot of people could only watch on in amazement with their mouths on the floor, but Slash was far from the first guitar hero of that breed to reach Los Angeles. He was always an outspoken fan of people like Joe Walsh doing the same thing when he was working with James Gang, but there hadn’t been anyone in decades who was able to make beautiful melodies that easily whenever they played a Les Paul.
Or at least, that’s what most kids in the clubs had thought. Because years before Slash had even thought of picking up a guitar, Jimi Hendrix was laying the blueprint for what that kind of guitar hero should be. He may have been the frontman for a reason, but he did most of the talking with his guitar, being able to get angry on ‘Machine Gun’, trippy on ‘If 6 Was 9’, or absolutely beautiful on ‘The Wind Cries Mary’.
But the core element of what made Hendrix stand out in Slash’s mind was his sense of swagger whenever he played, saying, “I remember when I was a kid, probably about 13 or 14 years old, there was a Hendrix movie that used to play at weekends along with The Song Remains The Same. There’s definitely a fascination with Hendrix’s persona – his demeanour – which seemed very, very cool. I don’t think you could get too much cooler than Jimi Hendrix.”
While Slash would readily admit that he is nowhere near the same league as Hendrix by any stretch, there are a few commonalities in how they approach their instrument. Whenever they played onstage, the guitar felt like an extension of their body, and even when they were tearing up some of their greatest licks, it was done in service to the song rather than falling into the common trap of instrumental wanking.
Slash might be one of the last guitarists standing in terms of people’s perception of what a rock star is supposed to look like, but what Hendrix did during his lifetime will never go out of style. He may have been clad in that army jacket in the early days or done up with different threads during his Woodstock performance, but there was hardly anyone concerned with what he looked like so long as he could become a musical angel whenever he started playing.
