“A period of unknowing”: The era Slash called the lowest point of his career
The rock and roll lifestyle is usually defined by a fair bit of ups and downs. No one can stay on top of the world forever, and even if they remain in the spotlight, there tend to be a few controversies that get someone in hot water and make fans start to question the kind of person they are dealing with whenever they play one of their songs. Although Slash could claim to have seen everything during his stint in Guns N’ Roses, he admitted that one of the lowest periods of his career came later on his career.
Granted, Guns N’ Roses would never be the easiest band to manage at the best of times. The group carried themselves like a street gang every time they went onstage, and even if they were dialled into the music whenever they performed, they looked like they could easily kick your ass if you moved one step out of line.
Then again, the massive bloat they got on Use Your Illusion made them grow up way too fast, which meant that everyone not named Axl Rose got pushed to the side. By the time the group finished the tour for the album, Slash knew that he was not in a healthy creative relationship, and so started one of the strangest musical detours in history, whether that was with Slash’s Snakepit or his blues cover band Slash’s Bluesball.
But Slash wasn’t the only one sick of Rose’s antics. Everyone else in the band was more inclined to play rock and roll than stay in studio purgatory waiting for Chinese Democracy to take shape, so why not get the band back together with a completely new singer like Scott Weiland?
Although Velvet Revolver did have some of the better riffs that Slash came out with during the 2000s, it’s not hard to see those old habits coming back into the mix. Outside of the same vices lying around from the old days, Weiland would get into his own set of antics, leading to the band having to play the same game of waiting that they did with Rose, including Weiland coming to the studio for one of their albums after spending time in a halfway house.
There were still plenty of good times to be had, but Slash felt that this era of his career was among the lowest he ever felt, saying, “I was going through struggles with getting sober from 2000 through 2006. There was a lot of topsy-turvy shit going on during that time. Trying to sort your life out. That was definitely a period of unknowing.”
Then again, you would hardly have noticed anything was wrong based on how Slash was playing. That period of his life covers the band’s first album, Contraband, and yet it still sounds like the version of Guns N’ Roses that everyone recognised from back in the day, whether that was the swagger of ‘Sucker Train Blues’ or the shimmering guitar chords that run throughout ‘Fall to Pieces’.
While Slash had always thought of Velvet Revolver as a band that had unfinished business, it’s hard to blame him for not wanting to go back to that kind of mindset again. I mean, no athlete wants to relive the years when they were hardly functional, so why should the rock and roll lifestyle be any different?
