The singer Slash called the ultimate rock and roll icon: “He’s had a major influence on everybody”
The entire aesthetic of rock and roll could probably be summed up in a single picture of Slash with a guitar in his hand.
There’s nothing about the genre that exactly brings to mind someone in a top hat playing guitar licks, but there’s some sort of magic that comes out of him whenever he starts the intro to ‘Paradise City’ or when he’s playing simple blues licks, that’s pretty much the epitome of cool. But in the grand history of rock and roll, Slash was one in a long line of people trying to preach the good word of what three chords and the truth was capable of.
If you were to ask him directly, though, Slash would be the last person to consider himself a rock and roll genius. He was more than happy to play the best licks that he could every single time his band needed a solo, but his strong suit was being able to apply himself to what a song needed rather than try to deliberately make one of the finest guitar passages anyone had ever heard. Because for him, the true legends had already come generations before.
Listening through all of his classic licks, you can hear bits and pieces of the greatest blues and rock and roll guitarists that have come before him. There’s hardly a day that goes by that he doesn’t talk about the inspiration from everyone from Joe Perry to Jimi Hendrix, and yet when looking back on his career, he’s probably going to be considered a disciple of rock and roll the same way that Eric Clapton considered himself a disciple of the blues.
But rock and roll has taken on various shapes and sizes since Slash first started Guns N’ Roses. He knew that what he was doing was not going to be anywhere close to what the hair metal kids were doing on Sunset Strip, and while he was in the same stomping grounds as bands like Poison or Warrant, there was a lot more edge to the way that Guns played that was more indebted to punk rock.
Keep in mind that Duff McKagan came out of the punk tradition and would always rock the CBGBs merch wherever he went, so that was bound to rub off on Slash at some point. He could definitely relate to the attitude that he heard coming out of Sex Pistols and New York Dolls, but long before punk rock was even a proper genre, The Stooges were already showing the entire world what could happen when someone completely let themselves go.
Iggy Pop was a true madman behind the microphone, and even after decades in the business, Slash felt that few frontmen compared to what Pop could do, saying, “Iggy Pop I met when I was about seven. I’ve worked with him a lot over the years and he is one of the ultimate rock and roll icons. He’s had a major influence on everybody, even inadvertently.” And when working with Slash, he hadn’t lost an ounce of that controlled chaos that he had back in the days of Raw Power.
While ‘We’re All Gonna Die’ doesn’t get anywhere close to Slash’s best songs or anything, it does scratch a certain itch that he would never have the chance to do in Guns N’ Roses or Velvet Revolver. Everything’s still precise from his perspective, but with Pop being an absolute madman on top of the backing track, the whole song feels like going back to those same sweaty clubs in Detroit when Pop was first discovering himself.
But maybe that’s often what Slash needs to offset the kind of star power that he didn’t want. He was content to hang in the background and play guitar until his fingers were raw, but sometimes having someone like Pop in the room might take some of the edge off when flying off the handle behind the fretboard.
