“It depends on your taste”: The band Slash thought were terrible live
When you’re constantly regarded as being one of the greatest players of your instrument, sometimes you’ll attempt to brush it all off to remain humble and keep the public on your side. Other times, you’ll let it all rush to your head, and it’ll become a bore for you to listen to anything else that’s inferior to your own output. It can’t be easy being in the position of a guitarist of Slash’s calibre, but for the most part, he’s managed to remain grounded enough to pay respects to the up-and-comers of the rock world.
That being said, he’s also allowed to express his opinions and be brutally honest about music that leaves him dissatisfied. If a certain band or artist comes along and leaves him feeling repulsed by their sub-standard output, then let him air those views. Not everything will stun the Guns N’ Roses guitarist, and around the early 2000s, he was feeling particularly jaded about the state of affairs in the music business.
Having departed his most famous act in 1996 when tensions boiled over and resulted in the band not being able to work together to record a follow-up to “The Spaghetti Incident?”, Slash’s main focus became his side-project, Slash’s Snakepit. While well-received by existing fans for attempting something different to what they had become used to from his former project, it didn’t garner the same degree of success that Guns N’ Roses had done in the past, and a sense of frustration at not having a fulfilling creative outlet began to materialise.
Nothing else was proving to be a great source of inspiration for the guitarist. In 2001, while appearing on an episode, The Howard Stern Show, his boredom with modern music’s direction was more than apparent from his complaints about having briefly tuned into the MTV Video Music Awards ceremony. Very little was taking Slash’s fancy, and he couldn’t wait to clarify his position to the host.
“There’s nothing in the MTV medium that’s going on right now that I can really relate to,” Slash confessed to Stern, having spoken about the appearances of Britney Spears and NSYNC at that year’s awards ceremony. While it’s understandable that there would be little appeal in the pop music of the period for someone best known for his contributions to the hard rock and heavy metal genres, Stern offered up one act that had appeared at the awards that may have been more to his tastes.
Asking the guitarist, “Staind, do you like them?”, Stern was met with a rather muted response that neither confirmed or denied any feelings towards the alternative metal group. “Staind is okay,” Slash began, before then tearing into their forgettable live performance. “I saw them play live last night, and I was thinking, ‘nah’ – you know, they didn’t sound that great.”
While Stern was quick to jump to their defence, stating that they sounded good when he had them on his show, Slash retorted with a snide jab at the host’s personal preference. “Well, you know, it depends on your taste.” Slash admitted that he liked the band but couldn’t help but compare it to the live performances of Guns N’ Roses, which they seemingly had a long way to go to live up to.
“When Guns N’ Roses played the first time on MTV, we were the first rock ‘n’ roll band to go up there and play actually with just our own equipment,” he said. It might be a matter of taste, but Slash certainly didn’t want to hold back his true feelings on how far away Staind were from impressing him.
