“He was just venting”: how Slash helped Jim Carrey mend his broken heart
There are few pains people can feel more acutely than the suffering that comes from lost love, but there’s much debate around the best cure for it.
Some folk will head off on holiday, others might go on a shopping spree, but if you’re wondering whether the offer to have a rock legend play a screaming guitar solo at ear-bleeding volume into your face would help, you’ll have to ask Jim Carrey.
The reason for that is some years back, Carrey suffered a break-up, not the first, it has to be said, because the bendy-faced funnyman is someone who, to put it mildly, has had a reasonably complex love life since he rose to fame in the early 1990s, and one of his famous friends, Slash from Guns N’ Roses, decided he needed cheering up.
Disappointingly, that didn’t involve taking him on a class-A powered John Lennon-style lost weekend, but did in fact involve pandering to the fact that he quite evidently is a huge exhibitionist, and so saw the axeman dragging him up on stage in order to scream out his pain over splitting from a female comedian with questionable morals.
As Slash told an Australian radio show back in 2012, “Guns N’ Roses did a cameo in a movie called The Dead Pool, and Jim Carey was in the movie, and he lip-synced to our song ‘Welcome to the Jungle’, and that was our initial meeting. But I have been friends with him since.”
Detailing the extent of the friendship, he added about how he helped Carrey out of a sticky emotional situation: “He broke up [with Jenny McCarthy], and he was having a moment, and I took him down to a club in LA called Cozy’s, and he got up and sang. We did ‘Black Betty’, and I think we did a Pink Floyd song, and he was just venting. It was pretty cool.”
Footage from the performance shows a night that is basically exactly how you imagine it might be if someone told you a heartbroken Jim Carrey got up on stage one night with Slash. The actor looks wild-eyed, like he couldn’t care less about anything, which is very on brand for someone that’s just been unceremoniously dumped, and his vocals are frankly appalling, which again is to be expected, especially if you’ve ever seen him murder ‘I am the Walrus’ by The Beatles.
The glorified karaoke session is still worse than the original time the duo got together however, for the 1988 Clint Eastwood movie The Dead Pool, which was the fifth and final Dirty Harry movie, a series which had reached the point that, rather like a dog that you loved too much to put down, couldn’t walk anymore, had gone blind and couldn’t even get excited if you asked if it wanted to go to the park.
Carrey plays a character called Johnny Squares in the movie, ironically a rock singer, who is found dead from a heroin overdose, only for Eastwood’s Harry Callahan to discover he was actually murdered (dramatic music). Anyway, Johnny Squares has a ‘rock and roll’ funeral at which Guns N’ Roses make their uncredited appearance, but things get way, way weirder than that later on in some kind of dream sequence, during which Slash is seen on the docks by the sea and fires a harpoon gun through a window. Absolutely bizarre.
