The moment Axl Rose said Slash lost his credibility: “I just watched him throw it away”
The main appeal of seeing Guns N’ Roses back in the day was how much Axl Rose seemed to mean every word he said.
People loved the idea of listening to hard rock and roll circa 1987, but if the heaviest thing that was tearing up the charts was bands like Poison, hearing Rose’s screeching voice over Slash’s ripping leads felt like the best band the 1970s never produced being resurrected for the modern day. But even with all that potential, Guns N’ Roses also holds the speed-run record for a band going from a legendary band to a burnt-out mess.
Because as much as people loved Appetite for Destruction, you couldn’t find a more outspoken critic of it than Rose. He knew that they had given it their all to make a classic record, but he knew he didn’t want to be defined by that one album for the rest of his life, either. He needed to improve on every single front, but Use Your Illusion is already a classic example of a band trying to grow up way too fast.
And no one seemed more upset about their new direction than Slash. The guitar slinger had always been raised on the biggest names in hard rock, and even if there were more than a few hard-rocking moments on the record like ‘Double Talkin’ Jive’ or ‘Perfect Crime’, it was a lot harder for him trying to get a word in when Rose was more focused on making a grand orchestral masterpiece on the rest of the record.
There was no way of reasoning with Rose by that point, so you can’t really blame Slash for wanting to work with other people along the way. He wasn’t feeling inspired while sitting on his hands in the studio, so if there were more people asking him to add his guitar solos to some of their tunes, he was more than happy to oblige. He never wanted to leave at that point, but for Rose, this was more than the guitarist doing a side project; it was a breach of trust.
As far as the vocalist saw it, all of the credibility that he saw in his bandmate had been completely wasted when he started working with pop artists, saying, “Basically, to me, it was because I am watching this guy, and I don’t understand it. Playing with everyone from Space Ghost to Michael Jackson. I don’t get it, I wanted the world to love and respect him. I just watched him throw it away.”
Although Rose has had a history of putting his foot in his mouth from time to time, it’s not like he doesn’t have a small point there. There were plenty of moments where Slash had started working with some strange artists, but even if fans rolled their eyes when they saw him playing guitar alongside Spongebob or Phineas and Ferb as of late, it’s not like the playing ever suffered as a result, either.
If anything, Slash has done a better job at exposing rock to a new generation than Rose has over the past few years. It’s not like Chinese Democracy was one of the most celebrated records when it came out, and judging by a lot of the music that Rose wants to put out these days, a lot of it feels like the opposite of what rock and roll was supposed to be, complete with strange industrial detours and vocal lines that sound like Rose trying to rebrand himself as a cross between shock rocker and rock god.
Say what you will about Slash being a sell-out and betraying his hard rock roots, but you can never say that he phones it in whenever he’s working with someone new. It might piss people off to no end that their guitar hero was playing right next to Ryan Gosling at the Oscars, but if there’s one kid that becomes interested in guitar from seeing the cool guy in the top hat, that makes it all worth it.
