The solo that Slash will never get tired of: “Like having sex”
If you love what you do, then there shouldn’t be any good reason to stop doing it forever. While most people might think that playing the same lead break night after night could get a little tiresome, for Slash, this is his idea of heaven.
Now, of course, Slash is a guitarist, so that should be obvious. He’s hardly going to turn around and say that he hates doing the thing that has provided him with a rather comfy living for the last four decades, and given that he’s frequently regarded as one of the best in the world at his chosen artform, he’s probably not going to feel resentful about the fact that music and the guitar have become such inexorable elements of his life.
Granted, there was a period of 20 years where he walked away from being in Guns N’ Roses, the band that gave him his big break and allowed him to have such a platform in the first place, and from 1996 until 2016, he was distancing himself from something that had previously sparked a considerable amount of joy for him.
Now, this wasn’t a complete decision to walk away from music and playing guitar altogether, going away to form his own new projects, such as Slash’s Snakebite and Velvet Revolver, rather than focusing on the material he’d been an integral part of the creation of for most of his career. However, you could certainly make the case that at this point he was tired of being involved in Guns N’ Roses by this point, and in need of a break from it to realise exactly why he loved it.
That doesn’t mean that he didn’t miss those songs, though, and a large part of his departure from the group was probably down to him having fallen out with frontman Axl Rose; something that, according to the accounts of many other musicians and all past personnel of the band, is not exactly hard to do.
However, now he’s reunited with the band, he’s playing all of the old material again, and there’s one in particular that he doesn’t think he’ll ever tire of playing, having reignited his love for the song.
“I love playing the ‘Sweet Child O’ Mine’ solo still to this day,” Slash revealed in a 2019 interview with Metal Hammer. “Playing the actual song, when you first go into it, it comes in a certain place in the set where people react in such a huge way, it’s like having sex. That interaction where it’s a give and take thing, you can’t not enjoy that, right?”
Given how he’s clearly talking about his own sense of satisfaction that he gets from playing the part just as much as he’s talking about the response he gets from fans, the comment likening the experience of performing the song to sex comes off as being more masturbatory than anything.
However, when it’s widely celebrated as being one of the best things you’ve ever done, then there’s absolutely no reason why you shouldn’t feel a sense of joy every time you repeat it, and for Slash, to be able to reconnect with the song in a special way after having a two-decade hiatus from the band is certainly special.
