The musician who made Slash want to quit guitar forever: “Truly one of the greats”
There aren’t many guitarists who make playing look so easy as Slash does.
He could be playing some of the most difficult songs ever conceived, and even when he’s flying off the handle and tearing through every single scale, it’s almost like the idea of him screwing up doesn’t even occur to anyone when he’s playing. His hands always found a way to craft the perfect melody on every Guns N’ Roses song, but he was aware when some artists were good enough to make him want to throw the guitar down for the last time.
Then again, Slash was almost destined to be a star based on the kind of records he was listening to. He had his fair share of training in genres like the blues every time he played, but there were more than a few records like Aerosmith’s Rocks that changed his entire brain chemistry when he heard it. Nothing sounded that cool to him when he started, and he was going to spend the rest of his career chasing after that same kind of high.
And when you look at the way that he played on many of those early Guns songs, his style is almost a love letter to the guitarists that came before him. You can hear a little bit of Jimmy Page here and there and every once in a while an Eric Clapton lick that pops out of the blue, but no matter how many times he played, the solos that he wrote felt carefully calculated. There was no room for him to improvise when he hit on something this perfect, but Jeff Beck was a much different animal than that.
Beck seemed to be playing off instinct every single time he strapped on a guitar, and even if he wasn’t the most insane guitar player in the world by any stretch, there was no one who could have imagined playing like him. He was using every song as an opportunity to test the limits of guitar, and even when he was working on some of his classic tunes, he would consciously hide his guitar playing from the rest of the band so no one could hear what he was doing.
Slash had already begun his own musical journey by the time that Beck hit his evergreen period, but playing with him was the education that the guitarist didn’t know he needed. He thought that he had his whole life figured out now that he was in Guns N’ Roses, but being able to jam with Beck made him realise that he was barely scratching the surface of what his instrument could do.
Sure, he could play scales, but the idea of competing with Beck was enough for Slash to reconsider his entire career, saying, “Jeff is truly one of the greats. I was in a jam session with him, Joe Perry, Lenny Kravitz and Gilby, and Jeff was playing all this amazing shit while simultaneously talking to me. I wanted to pack it up that day, send the amps home and find a nice, little job selling life insurance or something. I was thinking, “Hmmm, real estate-there could be a future in that.”
At the same time, it’s not hard to see where Slash was coming from. Beck was the kind of guitarist who had every base covered when it came to rock and roll guitar playing, and looking at how far he stretched himself up until the day he died, there’s no one in the entire world not named Jimi Hendrix that did more for the instrument, even if he didn’t hog the spotlight as much as someone like Page or Clapton.
Beck was just happy to have pushed himself as hard as he could go, and while Slash was content to have found a spot in rock history, it’s people like Beck that showed him that you should always do your homework when it comes to your instrument. Because no matter how much people like to showboat when playing their favourite songs, there are always more avenues to explore.
