Slash’s favourite album by The Who
It’s not hard to see what kind of music inspired Guns N’ Roses guitarist Slash to pick up his instrument. The future hard rocker wasn’t exactly gravitating toward adult contemporary as a kid: big, loud rock music was always a part of his DNA.
Although he’s best known for his love of bands like Aerosmith and his early exposure to music through family friends like David Bowie, Slash has another band who helped lay out the blueprint for his style: The Who. Britain’s loudest group of hard rockers were a formative building block for Slash and his eventual embrace of all things loud, and one album proved to be the biggest inspiration for the young guitarist.
“I always loved The Who anyway, all the way up until [Who’s Next],” Slash claimed in 2010. “That record really had a sort of style to it that had a big influence on songwriting for me and my sort of approach to rhythm guitar. It’s just an overall, one of the best rock records ever.”
The Who’s legendary 1971 album only came as Pete Townshend’s original rock opera project, Lifehouse, was beginning to crumble. To salvage what was left, Townshend and producer Glyn Johns took eight songs meant for the original album, retooled them to work without the narrative of Lifehouse, and put them on Who’s Next. An additional contribution from John Entwistle, ‘My Wife’, rounded out one of the greatest hard rock albums of all time.
In the same interview, Slash made an unwitting family connection when discussing another one of his favourite albums. When Johns was one of the most popular rock engineers of the late 1960s, he was tapped by Jimmy Page to help produce the debut album for his new band, Led Zeppelin. Slash was more of a fan of the band’s second effort.
“An important record for me was Led Zeppelin II, their second record,” Slash claimed. “Because when I was a kid growing up, my parents had that record. My parents had the best rock and roll record collection of anybody I ever met. But I remember loving that record when I was a kid. Then when I started playing guitar that record still had a huge influence on me as a guitar player. So that was an important record for me,” Slash said.
By the time Zeppelin started working on their sophomore album, Glyn Johns had stepped down from his position as engineer. Instead, he recommended his brother, Andy. Andy Johns would prove to be one of Zeppelin’s most essential collaborators throughout the 1970s, helping to engineer and mix the band’s next two albums, Led Zeppelin III and Led Zeppelin IV.
Check out ‘Going Mobile’ from Who’s Next down below.
