The Guns N’ Roses albums Slash didn’t want to revisit: “It freaks me out”
Guns N’ Roses were a band praised for their hostile style of music. The Los Angeles rock scene needed some venom, and these hot heads with an appetite for destruction were happy to provide.
That chaotic energy could be heard pretty easily in their music. When you throw yourself into their debut album, it’s pretty one note, and that note is unrelenting rock ‘n’ roll. It’s riff-heavy, with screeching vocals and pounding rhythm throughout. The closest you’ll come to any kind of soft song or slight alleviation from the heaviness of the rest of the album is their single ‘Sweet Child O Mine’ and even that was close to getting cut due to it not being hard enough.
“You know, Guns N’ Roses was always a real hardcore, sort of, AC/DC kind of hard rock band with a lot of attitudes,” said the guitarist when discussing his attitude going into that first album, “If we did any kind of ballads, it was bluesy. This was an uptempo ballad. That’s one of the gayest things you can write.”
Things changed when the bands started working on their Use Your Illusion albums, though. The venom was still there on certain tracks, but they were a lot more open to the idea of writing slower ballads, toying with various genres and allowing their sound to stretch beyond the usual hard rock style that they previously championed was left aside for songs more experimental and elongated.
The majority of people loved the albums, and still view some of their more experimental songs as the band’s very best. How many times has ‘November Rain’ been cited as the greatest rock song ever made? Not to mention this newfound range also allowed the band to explore their emotions much more effectively. For instance, Axl Rose once said that ‘Estranged’ was one of the most emotional songs he ever wrote, before adding that he felt a real release when performing it live.
“There’s something really wild, for me, in performing ‘Estranged’ ’cause all of a sudden I realized I don’t want to be sitting at the piano playing this song to keep the energy of the song moving live,” said Rose, “I need to be moving around and there’s something about being able to be up there moving around during it that’s actually a present, a gift or something.”
It would be easy for the band members of Guns N’ Roses to rinse the success of these songs for the rest of their careers and continue making money and selling out arenas. Granted, you could argue this is what they have been doing since reuniting; however, while the band might not be churning out much new music, as individuals, they are still hard at work, particularly Slash.
The guitarist is constantly making new music, for better or for worse, and putting out solo albums where he collaborates with a range of musicians. When he’s not on the road with Guns N’ Roses, he’s taking this new music to smaller crowds and constantly trying to push whatever new songs he’s put together. His attitude to making new music is reflected in his output, but also in his attitude to old music, and he’s not willing to constantly play the old stuff and would rather, where possible, let the past stay in the past.
“I don’t know which one I prefer,” he said when talking about the Use Your Illusion albums. “I haven’t listened to the Use Your Illusion albums for so long, I don’t even know what’s on each. I know people like the blue one over the red one… Or maybe it’s the other way around […] I don’t like to go back and look at stuff, because I find it mesmerising. It freaks me out. So I avoid it.”
