The live band Slash never wanted to follow: “I would hate to do this again”
Whenever Guns N’ Roses played live in their prime, all bets were off for everyone in attendance. No one gets the title of ‘The World’s Most Dangerous Band’ for no reason, and some of their shows were among the most savage displays of rock and roll to come out of Los Angeles since the days of Van Halen in the late 1970s. For all of the blood, sweat, and tears that Slash put onto that stage by the time the final notes rang out at every show, Metallica was the one band that he never wanted to go up against.
When you think about it, both Guns N’ Roses and Metallica represented the opposite end of the hard rock spectrum compared to the glam outfits. While Guns emerged out of the same clubs that bands like Ratt and Poison had been playing a few years before, you can tell that they pulling a lot more from people like The Rolling Stones than they were from The Bay City Rollers.
And if Guns N’ Roses kept their distance from hair metal, Metallica were the punks who would kick any glam band’s ass. This was the kind of music indebted to groups like Black Sabbath and Deep Purple, and no amount of posturing was going to get in the way of them delivering some of the heaviest thrash anyone had ever heard.
The metal icons may have had fans getting on their asses for “going pop” on The Black Album, but their decision to tour with Guns N’ Roses was more or less a power move. Now that glam was starting to go past the point of cliche, getting two legitimate rock bands on the same bill was too good an opportunity to pass up.
Before both outfits graduated to stadiums, Slash remembered being scared out of his mind when opening for Metallica, recounting in his book, “I remember before we went on and the second we got off, the club played nothing but Metallica nonstop. It was obvious that any American band, or any band at all, that didn’t sound like Metallica wasn’t going to go over. We got through the show, and the only thought going around in my mind was, ‘I would fucking hate to have to do this again tomorrow.’”
Once they decided to tour together, Guns ended up making the wise choice of headlining the show and having Metallica play before them. Because when you have a band like that thrashing the place to the ground, anyone who goes on right before their start time is bound to get their asses handed to them.
As it turns out, no one’s safe from Metallica when going on after them, either, with Axl Rose ending up making a mockery of himself every other show by showing up late or hardly bothering to show up at all because of his vocal issues. I mean, can you really blame the guy? The entire audience had already heard what metal perfection sounded like right before them, so what in the world did any other band have in their arsenal that could compete with that?
