The one band Slash carried with him all his life: “A really amazing period”
No one gets into the position that Slash is without doing their homework on all things rock and roll.
There are many people who can try and get by learning their favourite Led Zeppelin riffs and try to emulate them as best they can, but Slash is the kind of player who always dissected what was going on in his record collection and put it all into one musical stew. He became the perfect hybrid between everyone from Eric Clapton to Joe Perry to Johnny Thunders, but sometimes the biggest inspirations are the ones that are baked into his bones long before he even picked up a guitar.
If you look at the timeline, though, it was as if Slash was destined to become a rock and roll star before he was even out of diapers. His mother had already been designing clothes for the biggest names in the record industry, and since his dad had taken up a job designing album covers for the likes of Joni Mitchell, it’s not like he was lacking in a healthy diet of music whenever he got home from school.
He was always a fan of listening to music, but it wasn’t until hearing records like Aerosmith’s Rocks that his DNA was changed. Something about ‘The Bad Boys from Boston’ struck a nerve the minute that he heard them, but if Slash wanted to get the real lessons in rock and roll, he was going to need to go back a little bit further. Because Steven Tyler and Joe Perry would be the first to say they wouldn’t be here without the blues.
The geniuses of the blues, like Howlin Wol,f had been paving the way for what rock and roll would become long before Chuck Berry had started speeding things up, but even when listening to the greatest names in blues like BB King and Robert Johnson, none of them brought the same swagger that The Rolling Stones did when Slash heard them for the first time. This was blues with a more British twist to it, and when listening to Keith Richards and Mick Taylor, he had a perfect guidebook for what he wanted to do.
Aerosmith may have started his musical journey, but Slash remembered The Stones being a near constant in the background of his life, saying, “The Stones were definitely the background music to my existence for a long time – and still are. My parents were really into the Stones, too. There was a particular period when the band put out three records that would have a huge influence on me: Beggar’s Banquet, Let It Bleed and Sticky Fingers. All of those records are great. That was a really amazing period for the Stones.”
But, really, does Slash need to say that The Stones were an influence? The band are basically a blueprint for what every badass rock and roll band was going to sound like going forward, and while a few of their tunes may have been a bit too saccharine for the average rock and roll fan, it’s hard for any guitarist to not get a shot of adrenaline the minute they listen to the opening of ‘Gimme Shelter’ or ‘Start Me Up’.
Richards might still be the model of what the consummate rock and roller should look like, but there’s a lot more Mick Taylor influence on Slash’s sound than most people realise. Taylor may have been used to being the invisible guitarist in many respects, but if you listen to the tasteful playing that he puts in on tunes like ‘Can’t You Hear Me Knockin’, you can hear a lot about where Slash got his ideas for how to structure a solo.
He had a few more guitarists to get under his belt before becoming one of the legends of rock, but The Stones are the kind of band that doesn’t really need to be praised as an influence by everybody. Because as long as there are kids willing to build their songs around bluesy riffs, the spirit of Richards is there.
