The guitar riff Slash considers the heaviest of all time
There has always been a debate as to whether Guns N’ Roses belong in the conversation of a heavy metal band. Although they may have had their fair share of heavy moments as a group, their aesthetic was more about being a traditional rock and roll band than doing anything too flashy. While the band were nothing but straight-up rock and roll, Slash was always a child of different influences.
When a young Saul Hudson was growing up, he had originally started out on traditional rock and roll, being brought up by parents who worked with the likes of James Taylor and Joni Mitchell. After discovering acts like Led Zeppelin and Aerosmith in his teens, Slash knew he wanted to make the guitar a core part of his life.
After gigging with various bands around California, it wasn’t until he got together with musicians like Axl Rose and Duff McKagan that everything began to gel. Documenting their lifestyle in Appetite for Destruction, each guitar break from Slash became an extension of his soul, almost like he was exorcising some demon trapped inside him.
Despite his penchant for rock and roll riffs like ‘Sweet Child O’ Mine’, some of the best licks from the album did have a metal tinge to them, like ‘My Michelle’ and ‘It’s So Easy’. When talking about his taste in metal, though, Slash always returned to the doomy sounds of Black Sabbath.
In the documentary Metal Evolution, Slash considered the band as the definitive version of heavy music, explaining, “Black Sabbath was the first band that defined heavy metal for me. It had that heavy sort of approach that made you feel like ‘These guys are for real’”.
While Sabbath’s first few records featured some haunting songs like their namesake track and ‘Iron Man’, it wasn’t until later in their evolution that Slash thinks they hit their most demented effort. Aside from the early material, Slash thought that ‘Sabbath Bloody Sabbath’ off the album of the same name was one of the heaviest guitar riffs he had ever heard, telling Matt Pinfield: “The title track, that breakdown towards the end of the song. There’s just nothing that’s ever come out that’s heavier than that. Not one band that I can think of has a riff that is as heavy as ‘Sabbath Bloody Sabbath.’”
Then again, Tony Iommi may have had extra help getting that demented sound out of his guitar. Recorded in a supposedly haunted estate, Iommi went into the bowels of the establishment and came out with ‘Sabbath Bloody Sabbath’. Although he had struggled to develop any song ideas, the atmosphere made it so much easier to channel that demented headspace.
While Slash might not have been looking to crib any ideas from Sabbath when putting together Guns N’ Roses, that heaviness bleeds through into more than a few GNR tracks. Slash is definitely a child of guitarists like Joe Perry and BB King, but when he lays into the groove of ‘Paradise City’, he’s also borrowing a little bit from Iommi’s playbook.
