The hated band Slash was forced to audition for
When Guns N’ Roses first landed on the hard rock scene in the mid-1980s, Slash and the gang were deemed as the antidote to the day’s hair metal buffoonery.
It’s not quite remembered that way now. Rock lore would tell you that the Los Angeles heavy blues outfit was swept aside from relevancy following the grunge explosion that dominated the charts into the 1990s. There’s a grain of truth here.
While climbing high on Billboard, stodgy epics like ‘November Rain’ looked wildly out of place as Nirvana’s Nevermind was cleaning up the competition, contributing to the perception that Guns N’ Roses were a part of the old glam guard the Seattle underground was rebelling against.
One spin of 1987’s Appetite for Destruction revealed that Guns N’ Roses were far removed from the likes of Winger or even original Prince of Darkness Ozzy Osbourne during his peroxide blonde era. Anchored in a grubbier realm of the Sunset Strip’s metal scene, Slash and co orbited bands like Mötley Crüe and Ratt, as much for their hedonism as musical comradeship, but injected a meatier, tougher edge to their sound that showed up all the spandex MTV stars, owing much to Duff McKagan’s punk pedigree and Slash’s endless gift for arresting riffs.
Yet, long before Guns N’ Roses’ rock upending fame, Slash, Axl Rose, Izzy Stradlin, and Steven Adler all played in the infinitely more glammy Hollywood Rose, the band precursors to join forces with other Rose-fronted locals, LA Guns. In their more big hair infancy, Slash actually auditioned for one of the biggest glam metal bands of the day, Poison. While there was no doubt as to his ungodly guitar technique, for whatever reason, the band just felt they needed to keep looking.
“Slash we had known cause he was in Hollywood Rose,” Poison drummer Rikki Rockett recalled. “So Bret [Michaels] and I liked him; we all liked him. And he came and worked on some songs with us, but we continued to audition people even though he was a frontrunner… We didn’t want, like, a hotshot […] We wanted a rock, East Coast guy. And then CC [DeVille] auditioned, and he just made more sense than Slash did.”
Poison would stand as one of the day’s biggest hair metallers, and Slash would enter rock royalty with his lauded Guns N’ Roses. Years later, Slash expressed some diffidence about his Poison near-recruitment. “Matt [Smith], the original guitar player for Poison, who was actually a pretty cool guy, had gotten his wife pregnant or they were getting married or something like that,” recalled the guitarist.
“He was moving back to Pennsylvania. He added, ‘You should try out for Poison’. I hated Poison but in those days you did whatever you had to do to keep moving.”
You gotta start somewhere. It’s perhaps Slash’s half-hearted flirtation with Poison that he was able to learn what not to do, pursuing the harder, aggressive edge that would see Guns N’ Roses as rock’s saviour by the end of the 1980s.
