“Helped shape how I turned out”: the one band Slash said was too overwhelmingly great
The 1980s felt like a far cry from the decades that had come before it.
While the ‘70s largely built on the free-spirited revolution of the ‘60s, where music was a much-needed social crutch for the liberal counterculture movement, the ‘80s felt like a dynamic shift away from that.
The burning fires of the hippie movement seemed to fizzle out into its dying embers, and the liberalist utopia its legion of protestors dreamed of had been stamped out by high-paced capitalism, spearheaded by a bold new America, and suddenly, a track like ‘Lucy In The Sky With Diamonds’ or an album like Abbey Road felt like an ancient relic, reflective of a societal time gone by.
Because if art is something of a mirror to society, then it wouldn’t have been The Beatles staring back at them in the ‘80s. Thinking of the cultural landscape of that decade, it’s unsurprising that a slick brand of futuristic pop swept the globe, buoyed by the false pretence that technology and money were going to drive the world into a better place.
So rock music, particularly, was in a tricky place – sure, there was a new wave and indie rebellion that sparked on both sides of the pond, but they lurked in the shadows of hair-metal slick new brand of stadium rock that largely spoke to the opulence and ambition of this new culture. This decade ushered in the beginning of the video star, and so this new era of rock, centred around big hair, makeup, and spandex, felt somewhat appropriate.
Leaders of that movement were undoubtedly Guns N’ Roses, who, with Axl Rose and Slash at the helm, offered a charismatic proposition in that respect – the former delivered all of the stomping riffs that rock fans who worshipped Led Zeppelin in the decade before were after, while Rose built off a similar model, all while feeling like a commercial representation of a dangerous aesthetic… in other words, they were the model rockstars for this new era.
But while the hairspray felt a far cry from the bristly moustaches of the liberal Beatles era, Slash was never willing to accept his band being used as a stark point of difference. Like nearly every other great musician, the guitarist was keen to reference the Fab Four as a guiding light in his own creativity.
“I would never try and compare myself to a combo as overwhelmingly great as that, you know,” he explained, when asked about his love for John Lennon and Paul McCartney.
He continued, “I have a lot of admiration for what it is that Axl and I, if you want to call us a team, it’s really a band, you know, but for what we do as composers or writers and what we come out with. But I’ve never taken, I mean, the people that I grew up with that I really admired that helped shape, you know, the influences that helped shape how I turned out, I would never even try to compare us to them.”
Slash’s comments came after the pair laid down a cover of McCartney’s ‘Live And Let Die’, in honour of their appreciation, which the Liverpudlian later gave his blessing to.
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