“These are complicated”: How Ray Charles’ chord charts humbled Slash
The mark of any good session musician is being able to adapt to whatever scenario is thrown at you. Even if someone has been playing country music for their entire lives, their ability to adapt to a jazz groove or be able to play amongst bluegrass players is what separates the true artists from someone who’s trying to hack their way through every studio they walk into. While Slash never needed to change a thing about his guitar playing, there were always going to be a few artists that are harder to work with than others.
If there’s another who should have ascended to a different level of collaborator, it would have been anyone working with Axl Rose. While the Guns N’ Roses frontman was still one of the best singers a rock band could ask for, hearing him get strange on Use Your Illusion was half the reason why Slash could explore new avenues, whether that’s making something more anthemic or breaking out the acoustics to make a flamenco-style solo.
Even though Slash quit his gig in the hard rock legends without knowing where he was going to go next, he was never going to be struggling for work. Throughout the 1990s, he would get the call to work with everyone who needed the right guitar part for their rock song, whether that working magic for Carole King, making faint guitar squeaks on Bob Dylan records, or managing to sit next to BB King and hold his own playing blues licks.
While performing with someone like King would be daunting for any guitar player, Ray Charles was always going to be a different beast. The R&B icon had been around long before rock and roll had even begun, and even though Slash had a history of working with any style, having to follow Charles was like learning a completely different musical vocabulary when he walked into the studio.
That’s not to say that Slash couldn’t hold his own. Hearing his guitar sing opposite Charles’s voice is still one of the most unexpectedly great combinations in modern music, but when the guitarist actually came into the studio, his problems with Charles ended up happening before he even played a note of music with him.
When talking to Howard Stern, Slash remembered running into a few stumbling blocks when he saw the charts that he was being asked to play, saying, “You know, Ray Charles’ chord charts are not like anybody’s chord charts. These are very [complicated]. The reason I had to read the chord charts was to actually remember all the different chords because there’s so many and they’re all jazz chords, which I hardly ever use.”
Even if some pieces were a bit more complicated than others, Slash made the whole thing look easy when he played. There might be a few pieces that aren’t as fleshed out as they could have been had they been done by a jazz guitarist, but hearing Slash’s take on them is far more interesting than having everything be done by someone who has been playing those charts their entire life.
But looking at where Slash went afterwards, he might have been able to shoehorn some of those musical lessons into his own playing. He was still all about following in the footsteps of Jimmy Page and Joe Perry, but only someone like Charles would be able to make Slash turn ‘The Godfather Theme’ into something cinematic.
