“I watched him throw it away”: The Slash performance that reduced Axl Rose to tears
It’s often said that hair metal died the moment Nevermind unexpectedly topped the Billboard charts, thrusting Seattle to the capital of the alternative map overnight and MTV suddenly sporting flannel shirts over spandex. There’s a grain of truth to this — grunge did accelerate the death knell of glossy power ballads and cliché rock superficiality — but a thriving punk underground had been alive and kicking all over America by 1991. All it took was a ‘Smells Like Teen Spirit’ to finally break the grunge levee.
Usually lumped in with the likes of WASP or Mötley Crüe, Los Angeles’ Guns N’ Roses pulled mainstream rock toward a much harder terrain than is remembered. Dropped while Girls, Girls, Girls and Whitesnake were ruling the waves, 1987’s Appetite for Destruction offered something much rawer and volatile than what was on offer in the rock world. Even when at their most accessible on ‘Sweet Child O’ Mine’, Guns N’ Roses had an edge that owed to the band’s punk foundations and authentic connection to classic rock.
But grunge did indeed happen. Days before Nevermind, Guns N’ Roses released the Use Your Illusion double effort, enjoying chart-topping success and much-loved tracks including ‘You Could Be Mine’ and the soap opera epic ‘November Rain‘, but swiftly found themselves as old hats in a rapidly changing rock scene.
Limping on with 1993’s “The Spaghetti Incident?” covers album, by the end of the decade frontman Axl Rose remained the only member from the classic line-up, iconic guitar maestro Slash calling it quits in 1996 and bassist Duff McKagan two years later.
Rose soldiered on, working with a revolving door of collaborators from Moby, Nine Inch Nails’ Robin Finck and Buckethead, and worked on the long-awaited and much-rumoured Chinese Democracy project. By 2000, all members were communicating by intermediaries to assemble the tracks for the Live Era ’87–’93 retrospective, too encumbered with complicated feelings for the old gang, especially with the dead end he felt his former guitarist had lapsed to.
”I never said that I was bitter,” Rose told Rolling Stone at the time. ”Hurt, yeah. Disappointed. I mean, with Slash, I remember crying about all kinds of things in my life, but I had never felt hot, burning tears…hot, burning tears of anger. 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.”
To be fair, Cartoon Network’s Space Ghost Coast to Coast boasted Ramones, Schoolly D, and Laurie Anderson as guests, so Slash was in good company on the cult show. As for his collaboration with Jackson, he may have cast his mind back to ‘Beat It’ and thought, “If it’s good enough for Van Halen”, yet Dangerous‘ seventh single ‘Give in to Me’ is an infinitely sillier entry to the King of Pop’s canon—the worst culprit in his queasy attempts at overt sexualisation which he could never pull off.
Chinese Democracy was eventually dropped in 2008 to a contrasted critical reception of bewilderment and high praise, and eight years later Slash and McKagan were back in the fold for the massively successful Not in This Lifetime… Tour. Whatever Slash “threw away”, it’s nothing that’s robbed the former Stokie of his hard rock Hall of Fame acclaim.
