The man Slash called the last “guitar hero”
Slash, the Les Paul-toting, cigarette-smoking in-house guitar hero of Guns N’ Roses, is of a dying breed. A legend of the fretboard, he is a classic lead player in the same vein as Jimmy Page and Jimi Hendrix, which comes with a mythical standing seldom seen in the contemporary age.
Players like Slash, who fuse a deeply blues-oriented approach with a penchant for high-octane noodling, are now dwindling, as modern players tend to opt for minimalism and textures and serving the song instead of stamping their character on the music. This is not a criticism, either; it’s just how contemporary music has evolved. Egotism and outlandish natures as the zeitgeist have now disappeared and been replaced by a restrained pseudo-intellectual angle.
The world might never produce a group like Guns N’ Roses again, with the adverse reaction to their headline set at Glastonbury 2023 offering another piece of evidence towards the changing of the guard. Bands who emerge in the same hard-rocking image of Guns N’ Roses in 2023 often come across as comical – despite how serious they may be. However, this does not take away from their place in rock history. This is particularly true for Slash, who always was their most important element.
From his signature track ‘Sweet Child O’ Mine’ to the underrated ‘Double Talkin’ Jive’, Slash’s highlights reel is extensive and contains much technical panache, with his grasp of a broad spread of genres something that everyone can appreciate, whether they like his band or not. A stylistic heir to the guitar-playing greats of days gone by, it says everything that Slash has continued to be lauded when his group have not.
The notion that Slash is one of the last few traditional lead guitarists is something that he is acutely aware of. When speaking to Guitarist in 2007, he was asked if he thinks the “guitar hero” lead player is a dying breed. Slash maintained that he had no idea in which direction the instrument would take in the future. However, he did concede that he believes that Black Label Society and Ozzy Osbourne guitarist Zakk Wylde is the last of this set, alongside himself, of course.
Slash said: “By the time Guns N’ Roses came, the whole LA scene had watered down guitar in the way that I understood it pretty much. Then, in the nineties, you had a lot of really great bands that weren’t really lead guitar-driven at all, then in the middle of the nineties up until now, you had this sort of potpourri of pop bands. So the guitar hero has sort of gone – luckily, Zakk is still around. I think Zakk and I are the last of the Les Paul-wielding guitar guys!”
Watch Zakk Wylde in action below.
