The Guns N’ Roses song Slash was never comfortable with: “Very unsettling”
Guns N’ Roses’ entire MO was about disrupting the mainstream. They were meant to be the antithesis of every single rock band on the block, and if you said that they were making a mockery of proper rock and roll or were providing a bad example for kids, chances are they would have taken that as a compliment in their prime. There was a line as far as Slash was concerned, and Axl Rose went way too far over it when he started work on ‘One in a Million’.
For a band that was known for being dialled in all the time, the idea of them putting together an all-acoustic EP of material was actually a bold move. There had been many hair metal ballads that came out around their time that had soppy low-tempo ballads, but works like ‘Patience’ were some of the most heartfelt songs to ever come out of the late 1980s, making the ballad stylings of Poison look like The Partridge Family by comparison.
Though Slash could probably turn in any good solo as long as it had decent music over the top of it, ‘One In a Million’ isn’t the kind of piece that anyone would want to be involved in. Rose may have been taking on a character in the song, but his way of playing up the sounds of a bigoted asshole talking about the supposed lowlifes of the world was never going to work.
It would be one thing if Rose stuck to just harsh language, but his use of racial and homophobic slurs was too much for Slash to take in the studio, telling Behind the Music, “It hit home for me on a bad level because I’m half-black, so to have him saying words like [the N-word] around me was very unsettling.”
Rose did eventually clear up the controversy by saying that those words weren’t directed at only black people, saying, “It meant basically lowlifes, people who turned to stealing to supply their drug habits.” It’s one thing to say that after the fact, but if you have to read an interview to understand that someone isn’t a monster, the song probably didn’t do its job the best.
That didn’t stop Rose for a second, though. Throughout the group’s next endeavours, Rose ensured that his vision was exactly what he thought it was supposed to be, almost like he was using several of his fellow musicians as session players when making songs like ‘November Rain’ and ‘Estranged’.
In fact, maybe it was the fact that Slash turned the other way on ‘One in a Million’ that gave Rose permission to go in different directions. If you really think about it, if he got away with saying some of the filthiest words that any rock star has ever said, is it really a shock that he ended up covering a song by Charles Manson later in his career?
Then again, Slash was done playing games with Rose at that point, only limping to the end of the recording of their cover of ‘Sympathy for the Devil’ before washing his hands of the group for good. Guns N’ Roses were the epitome of a rock and roll street gang at the start of their career, but when someone makes you as uncomfortable as Slash was on ‘One in a Million’, you know you’re not meant to go the distance.
