“I hated with a passion”: The Guns N’ Roses show Slash was forbidden from seeing
No musician is necessarily on glowing terms with their bandmates when they decide to call it quits. They usually leave for a damn good reason, and whether that’s someone acting like a diva or them being unable to take the stress of touring and recording, there’s usually something more than annoyance that forces them off of the musical rollercoaster. Although Slash was always content with the life of a guitar-toting troubadour, his leave from Guns N’ Roses didn’t come without some lasting scars.
Then again, there’s a chance that Slash might not have been among the living had he continued to work with his old band. The last tour for Use Your Illusion had done a number on every member of the group, and since the guitarist had collapsed in a hotel and was declared dead for a few minutes before getting revived by paramedics, it’s safe to say that he wasn’t exactly happy to be going out on tour every night.
But Slash never saw the workload as the problem. He was the definition of a workaholic even at the best of times, and as long as he had his guitar strapped on and willing to play whatever he wanted, he was fine. The real problem had to do with Axl Rose, who was quickly becoming less of a lead singer and more like a dictator of the band who would occasionally bother to sing to the crowd.
Throughout the band’s massive tour, Rose would become extremely meticulous about how he wanted the show to go. Even when they weren’t onstage, Slash had complained about the amount of control that Rose had over every aspect of the tour, down to him throwing lavish parties after the show wrapped up which took a major chunk of their budget.
Since the tour was quickly turning into a sideshow that happened to feature other band members, Slash didn’t need that much of an incentive to leave, eventually parting ways in the 1990s to work on Slash’s Snakepit. When he teamed up with multiple non-Rose members of Guns N’ Roses for Velvet Revolver, though, those burned bridges may as well have been turned into a crater from Rose’s perspective.
While Slash still had love for the material that he was playing, he remembered getting major pushback when he wasn’t welcome as a fan at a Guns N’ Roses show, saying, “With all due respect to Axl, he didn’t know that I was banned from the venue. It was a manager’s thing, which actually happened to be our old manager, who I hated with a passion. He thought Axl might not react positively if he knew I was there, so he decided to take it upon himself.”
Slash might have taken the high road trying to paint Rose in the best light he could, but it’s not like the manager’s suspicions were unwarranted. During the band’s resurrection in the 2000s, Rose was known to kick out fans because they were wearing a shirt that he didn’t like, so to have someone he wasn’t on good terms with make his way backstage would have probably been enough to give him a heart attack.
Although Slash did manage to make up with Rose and bring the band back from the dead more than a few times, that doesn’t overwrite how nasty those hateful years got. He was practically public enemy number one in the Guns N’ Roses camp for a while, but considering how many times stadiums erupted when they heard his guitar, it was clear that he was far more than a fly-by-night musician.
