The band that Slash said set “the goal” for a successful career
Even compared to many of the other revered rock guitar gods in the pantheon of ‘guys whose riffs are typically heard as customers test out guitars at a music shop’, Slash is sort of on his own island when it comes to a singular, thoroughly defined image.
Whereas the likes of Clapton, Keith Richards, Jimmy Page, and Eddie Van Halen went through various looks over their careers, and even Jimi Hendrix mixed up his scarves now and then, the shared public “concept” of Slash is strangely and brilliantly consistent across nearly four decades now.
If you even hear his name, one image probably springs to mind, the guitar solo from the ‘November Rain’ video; Slash wailing away on a ’59 Les Paul, standing on the edge of the Grand Canyon, shirtless, black leather jacket, cigarette dangling, frizzy hair flying under his iconic hat…, nevermind that he actually isn’t wearing a hat during that solo, and that it’s just somewhere in the desert, nowhere near the Grand Canyon. The Slash that exists in our mind’s eye is even more epic than the man, or character, himself: a genuine rock and roll superhero.
Which begs the question, what do you think of when you hear the name Saul Hudson? Maybe an accountant at his desk? An estate agent?
Saul Hudson is, of course, the rat pulling the curls under Slash’s hat, a mixed-race kid who spent his childhood in England before moving to Los Angeles and eventually forging a completely new identity for himself. By the late 1980s, Slash was one of the most famous musicians in the world. And yet, outside the leather costume and wide brims, with his hair out of his face, he could walk the Earth in relative anonymity. Stardom, it turns out, was never really the central goal, even as Guns N’ Roses were rapidly emerging as LA’s biggest band.
“If you remember when we talked back during the early Guns N’ Roses days,” Slash told Hit Parader in 2005, “I always said the important thing to me was having a long, successful career… not being famous. I always admired bands like The [Rolling] Stones who’ve done it for years and years. That’s the goal for me with any band I’m in.”
By this point, the 40-year-old was speaking about the Stones’ own 40 years of longevity in contrast to watching own band crash and burn due to creative differences, to put it mildly, with singer Axl Rose. In 2002, Slash and his remaining GnR mates, sans Rose, joined up with the ill-fated ex-Stone Temple Pilots frontman Scott Weiland to form Velvet Revolver. A few years into the project, he believed he might have found a new Stones-like brotherhood and the stability he was looking for as long-term success, he said, was “the goal of Velvet Revolver”.
“Duff [McKagan], Izzy [Stradlin], Matt [Sorum] and I have remained friends throughout everything we’ve been through,” he added, “Axl was just too high-strung and unpredictable for that. He didn’t need anybody… at least in his mind. Scott is a total pleasure, especially in comparison to that.”
Sadly, Slash’s optimism in that 2005 interview was short-lived, as Weiland’s drug problems got him fired from Velvet Revolver in 2008, and the band never properly reorganised. Instead, the guitarist found his way back to Axl Rose in 2015, as their 20-year feud was finally settled for the greater (financial) good of Guns N’ Roses’ legacy.
