“An outlet for me”: Slash reveals the band he used to recenter himself
Guns N’ Roses were victims of their own success. Slash and Axl Rose’s mob were the most volatile, destructive band on the planet. A seething, seductive mess of some of the best songs of the entire 1980s and some of its worst behaviour. They were always going to be a big deal, but becoming one of the biggest pop acts on the planet within a year of their debut album, Appetite For Destruction dropping was not on the cards. In fact, it was probably the worst thing that could possibly happen to them.
After all, it meant they were stripped of the closest thing they had to a comfort zone. GNR were a sleazy rock band for sleazy rock clubs. To see them at their peak was to be close enough to see the tip of Slash’s cigarette hanging between his lips glow with every individual puff. Of course, while they absolutely did maintain their position as one of the world’s biggest bands with the dual album drop of the Use Your Illusion project, that doesn’t necessarily mean it was good.
It was successful, I guess. Successful enough to hire an actual, real-life oil tanker for the video for ‘Estranged’ and have Axl jump off it on camera. However, that was done much like every other creative choice in the Use Your Illusion era, only because Axl decreed it. This was the aspect of being in Guns N’ Roses that was starting to really piss off everyone in the group not named Axl Rose.
In the early 1990s, it may legitimately have not occurred to him that such beings existed because everything became about him and his creative vision. In fairness to him, he may not have been alone in this feeling. The band were in such a drink, and drug-fuelled haze for the Boschian depiction of hell that the Use Your Illusion tour was that Rose could more or less do whatever he liked.
How did Slash get out of it?
By 1995, though, something had to give. Once that cursed, two-and-a-half-year-long tour came to an end, Slash felt like he had to get back to his roots. He formed a new band with Guns N’ Roses drummer and guitarist Matt Sorum and Gilby Clarke, along with Alice In Chains bassist Mike Inez and former Jellyfish guitarist Eric Dover on lead vocals, just for the sheer joy of playing noisy music in dingy clubs.
He elaborated on this in an interview with Metal Hammer, saying, “Snakepit was an outlet for me after two years of touring stadiums with Guns N’ Roses and dealing with everything that that entailed. I needed a simple rock’n’roll outlet so I could reinvent in my mind why I do what I do. Snakepit was just a bunch of guys throwing some music down.” He even wanted to do it semi-anonymously, keeping his name and any connection with GNR down low.
However, this was the early 1990s, and Slash was big business, so lawyers had to be involved. He says: “I wanted to call it just Snakepit but for legal reasons I had to put my name on it and the label wanted that too because they figured they could sell a few more copies. We did a tour with it and it was really a lot of fun – and grounding too.”
Perhaps this freedom and fun led Slash to leave Guns N’ Roses a little more than a year after forming the band and stay away from it for the next twenty years.
