The instrument Slash considered too cliché: “Trying for it not to sound like”
It’s hard for any artist not to paint themselves into a corner now and again. It’s one thing to be able to make the kind of songs that you know fans will love, but if you do it too often, there’s only so many times you can do it before your act becomes a bit cliché compared to what everyone else is doing. And even though someone like Slash emanates cool from every pore in his body when he steps onstage, he thought using a sitar on any song was bound to be cringe-inducing.
But if you peel back Slash’s playing ability, there doesn’t seem to be too many stringed instruments that he couldn’t master pretty easily. While most guitarists spend hours of hard work and probably want to quit whenever they reach a stumbling block, Slash was like a man possessed when he first got the guitar in his hands.
When speaking to Rock Icons, he even said he doesn’t know where that kind of drive comes from, saying, “If I like something and I’m into it, I can focus on it 100%. That’s not to say that I have a better knack for doing it than anybody else, but I’ll apply myself as much as I have to to get it to work for me.”
Towards the end of his stint in Guns N’ Roses, though, Slash had graduated from just a badass rock guitarist to someone who could speak whenever he strapped on his instrument. Regardless of the number of times you’ve heard a screaming guitar solo, a track like ‘November Rain’ has the kind of solo most people can sing from memory from the first moment they hear it.
After trying his hand at acoustic music and a heavy dose of blues in his solo career, Slash even proved to be a pretty kickass solo artist when he hooked up with Myles Kennedy and the Conspirators. There wasn’t a chance in hell that the top-hatted guitarist would get behind the mic, so Kennedy was the perfect foil with a scream that could match Axl Rose’s and even take their music further.
When working on the song ‘Spirit Love’, though, Slash thought it would be too cliché to put a sitar on the track, telling MusicRadar, “That was the one thing I was trying for it not to sound like! That’s what happens whenever you record sitar; it just becomes that cliché. I have a real double-gourded sitar that I got from India, but I can never use it because any time I have ever even attempted to record with it, it just sounds so Ravi Shankar.”
That said, there is a proper way to use a sitar to make it sound badass that doesn’t need to go down the Shankar route. Outside of people like George Harrison, who introduced the sitar to Western audiences, hearing it in songs like ‘Wherever I May Roam’ by Metallica is actually a welcome change of pace from how people initially viewed the instrument in the 1960s.
Even in Slash’s case, the intro to ‘Spirit Love’ doesn’t necessarily feel dated or hokey by any stretch of the imagination. If anything, it provides a slightly ominous tone before the rest of the group comes screaming in. The sitar might get overshadowed by those who helped popularise it back in the day, but for Slash, it’s a tone-setter for the rock and roll avalanche you’re about to endure.
