The album that turned Slash on to “hedonism, excess and drugs”
The nine-to-five isn’t for everybody is it? Never mind it’s more like nine-to-six with an unpaid 30 minutes for lunch to smash, still chained to your desk these days, but some people enter the world with the day job simply not an option. It’s hard to see Iggy Pop, Keith Richards, or Ozzy Osbourne chasing promotions at an insurance firm or dutifully rising to assistant manager in some service work hellhole.
Morrissey said it best on BBC’s The One Show in 2009, justifying his time on the dole in the early 1980s with the frank admission “I didn’t want to have a job”. Fair play. He would go on to front The Smiths and offer the world a greater service than he ever could behind a till at C&A.
Whether for the pursuit of debauchery or simply an avenue to avoid daily toil, rock and music in general, was, in years gone by, before the cost of living and the erosion of the welfare state, an enticing option. London-born, Los Angeles-raised guitarist Slash was no exception. While no idler—displaying impressive BMX chops as a teen who nearly saw a professional future—hearing his music teacher play The Rolling Stones’ ‘Brown Sugar’ altered his life course, inspiring the young Beverly Hills High School student to take up the guitar and play for as much as 12 hours a day.
Several glam outfits followed across the early 1980s, and combining the forces of bands Hollywood Rose and LA Guns plus nicking a felt black top hat from a Melrose Avenue thrift store, the decade’s biggest hard rock act was formed. Often lumped in with the hair metal of the day, and suffering from some later stadium stodge in light of the Seattle explosion in the early 1990s, it’s easy to forget how much danger Guns N’ Roses injected into a rock scene suffering from power ballads and cartoon buffoonery.
Fusing the classic riffs of Aerosmith with the volatile urgency of Bay Area punk, 1987’s Appetite for Destruction debut violently pulled rock’s MTV escapism firmly into Sunset Strip’s seedy gutter.
Despite offering a tougher and more explosive sound than was heard in the mainstream rock charts, Guns N’ Roses shared an affinity with hair metal’s reputation of partying really fucking hard. Routinely hanging out with the likes of Mötley Crüe and Ratt across Hollywood’s clubs, Slash was a keen devourer of alcohol, cocaine, and heroin during the band’s heyday, and long after.
A taste for decadence beckoned off the back of one formative album in the guitarist’s youth. “I remember getting the first Zeppelin record early on,” he told Metal Hammer in 2020. “They opened the door for everything that the ’70s was about: hedonism, excess and drugs. Their music made me just want to bang girls!”
Pop culture’s former fascination with classic rock’s “groupie” culture rightfully feels ever more distant as the abusive actions of the bands of the day have been scrutinised in contemporary political discourse, but it’s true that girls have indeed been a powerful motivator for many teens to pick up the guitar in history. Setting a template that would be followed for years in the world of rock hedonism, 1969’s Led Zeppelin would stand as an enduring rock landmark while also ushering in a new era of music whose excesses would be celebrated and reviled in equal measure.
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