The one band Slash wanted to live on forever: “Timeless”
Slash didn’t get into rock and roll to chase after the same kind of fame that everyone else did.
The dude hardly lifted his eyes from underneath his curly hair whenever he performed, and while everyone else in Los Angeles was playing up their looks, Slash was the one who shut the hell up and let the music do the talking every single time he kicked off a guitar riff. Because he was taught by the greatest musicians of all time that you didn’t need to go around celebrating your own music when you could kick out the jams on your own.
But looking at Guns N’ Roses as a whole, not all of them seemed to have the same musical background. Axl Rose may have had a lot more of a fixation on people like Elton John once he started working on ‘November Rain’, but Slash was listening to everyone from Aerosmith to Jeff Beck to Van Halen to the earliest punk bands when he got started. All that mattered was whether it had any attitude behind it, and that usually meant not worrying about hitting every single note in time.
Despite Slash not taking a liking to people like Johnny Thunders, you couldn’t deny that he had a ton of swagger whenever he got onstage with New York Dolls, and the same thing applied to many of Guns’ greatest live moments. Rose looked like a wild animal when they were first let loose in the late 1980s, and compared to every other hairspray rock act out at the time, this was almost the punk rock counterpart to a band like Poison.
And while Slash cared about his scales a lot more than people like Steve Jones and Joe Strummer, he could still admire the punk scene from afar. Some of the greatest hard rock acts that he heard as a kid had given birth to the genre in many ways, but while Pete Townshend made everything sound loud and Iggy Pop brought rock and roll into feral territory, there was no other band that held the title of the first punk rock act better than the MC5.
In fact, the Detroit legends are probably responsible for pioneering metal and punk rock in one fell swoop. Wayne Kramer was looking to make music that had a much more abrasive edge to it, and since the rest of the country was knee-deep in psychedelia at the time, his band was willing to break everything down to its bare essentials in the same way Jack White would do years later when he grew up.
Slash might have taken his gifts a little bit further than his heroes, but he knew that what the MC5 did was going to last long after he was gone, saying, “MC5 was the first real American punk-rock band I identified with. MC5 is timeless because of that attitude, the volume of it, and the brashness of it. [They were an] elevated level of teenage rebellion. [I] loved the idea of sticking the finger in the face of authority.”
The Guns N’ Roses guitarist clearly brought some more finesse to the way that he played guitar compared to Kramer, but when he joined forces with the band to perform tunes like ‘Kick Out the Jams’, he never felt out of place. He could make his guitar sound mean the same way that his heroes could, and there are more than a few times in his solo career where he could create that kind of feral noise, like on the song ‘Doctor Alibi’.
Most people didn’t know what to think of the MC5 when they first heard them back in the day, but they were already on the cusp of something far more adventurous than what Flower Power had to offer. They never claimed to want to go to San Francisco and wear flowers in their hair, and if they had something to get off their chest, they were going to say it as loud as they could to anyone within earshot.
