Why Slash hated recording guitar for ‘Appetite for Destruction’
No classic album comes to light without a little bit of grunt work. It might be easy trying to write songs, but when it comes to actually putting them into the correct order or mixing them to perfection, it’s usually a headache trying even to put 30 seconds together for everything to sound finished. Slash was typically up to the challenge when it came to any kind of rock and roll song, but he was in hell when he started work on Appetite for Destruction.
This is strange, considering how easily Slash remembers the writing sessions for the songs. Compared to artists that try their hand at making one classic and failing miserably, the music was spilling out of the band in the rehearsal room, with tracks like ‘Welcome to the Jungle’ coming together in a matter of minutes when they were jamming.
Once the band started working on their various demos, the goal was simple: just play it like you do onstage. After a failed attempt to record with Kiss’ Paul Stanley, Mike Clink seemed to be the best man for the job, knowing how to make the sound leap out of the speakers. Slash had everything at his feet…he just had the wrong guitar.
If you were to not look at any picture and create a mental image of what Slash looks like, chances are there is a Les Paul in his hands. When Slash was still cutting his teeth, all he could afford was cheap guitars, which looked closer to the high-end guitars that an amateur might use in their first years of practising.
Once Slash thought he had everything down, he was mortified by what he heard coming out of the speakers, telling Rock Icons, “I went in to do basic tracks, which are scratch tracks anyway, and I listened to those guitars on the monitors and went, ‘Oh fuck, I need to get this together because that sounds horrible”.
While Slash tends to look like the kind of guy who can squeeze mojo out of any guitar, he took a lot of his anger out when not in the studio. When manager Alan Niven turned up one day, even he recalled that the guitarist had turned everything into a war zone, including putting a guitar through the windscreen of one of the band’s rental vans.
Even though Slash wanted to throw in the towel, Niven ended up gifting him the guitar that would give him his sound, a ‘59 copy of a Les Paul. Slash later recalled: “It wasn’t even made by Gibson, but it looked like the real thing. I went threw about three or four Marshall heads and found the one that sounded right with that guitar, and that was it”.
Looking at it now, the sight of a Les Paul is practically as identifiable with Slash as his signature top hat, even getting legendary guitars that used to belong to Aerosmith’s Joe Perry along the way. Although Guns N’ Roses were already hanging by a thread when they were making their debut record, the fact that Slash got that iconic sound at the 11th hour felt more like an act of God than anything else.
