The musician Slash needed to stop playing with: “It was totally regrettable”
For a brief moment in time, it felt like people like Slash were single-handedly resurrecting rock and roll with Guns N’ Roses.
The kind of dangerousness that started with bands like The Rolling Stones and Led Zeppelin seemed to get lost in translation when the hair metal bands started to make the rounds across the Sunset Strip, but from the moment that those opening notes of ‘Welcome to the Jungle’ started, everyone knew they were being transported to the dark back alleys of Los Angeles. Slash could have easily been one of the reigning kings of rock and roll if he wanted to, but if the band was going to survive, they were bound to lose some dead weight along the way.
Then again, the magic on Appetite for Destruction couldn’t have happened with any other group of guys. Tracii Guns may have helped them get everything started back in the day, but once he was let go, bringing in someone like Izzy Stradlin on rhythm guitar brought the right kind of mojo to their songs. They needed that Stonesy swagger to them, but Slash was the personification of rock and roll all wrapped up into one person.
Sure, the top hat may have been an odd fashion choice, but that was beside the point whenever he started tearing up his solos. His blues vocabulary came from everyone from Joe Walsh to Joe Perry to Eric Clapton, and compared to every other rock and roll star that was trying to outshred the person next to them, Slash was the one putting a lot more feeling into his playing whenever he took a solo.
And even when they transitioned to having some of the most lush ballads in rock and roll, Slash wasn’t going to suddenly give up his solos. If anything, the fact that ‘November Rain’ still rocks as hard as it does is because of his lead licks during the breakdown section of the tune. It was practically their modern version of a song like ‘Layla’, but before they laid down a masterpiece like that, everyone needed to address the problems Steven Adler was having with drugs.
While it’s insane to think that any member of the band was “the responsible one” at this stage of their career, Adler was the only one who started to slip when it came time to make the record. GNR Lies was a good excuse for them to tone things down a little bit and make a bunch of acoustic tunes, but even after playing a few songs on the road for the new record, he wasn’t in any state to pull off the tracks when it came time to track everything.
It might have broken Slash’s heart to see one of his best friends spiral like that, but he felt that the band would have never made it to the next level if Adler had stayed, saying, “It was totally regrettable. But the band finally got to the place where we wanted to make a record, which was a hard enough place to get to… We’re talking about the span of about a year, which to us was like a lifetime, and Steven… we could not get him back to front. We were resigned to the fact that he wasn’t going to be able to do it in the time frame that we needed to get going, because we might miss the bus. We might fall apart again and take another year to get it together.”
But even if Adler had cleaned himself up in time to get the tracks done, Matt Sorum was the one really giving the entire band a shot in the arm. He had already been roadtested after performing with The Cult, but it turned out that he fit right in playing that sleazy brand of hard rock, especially when working on some of the more aggressive songs like ‘Double Talkin’ Jive’ and ‘Right Next Door to Hell’.
Adler might not have been any better or worse than the rest of the band, but his role was only the first of many casualties for the group. They may have thought they had their heads screwed on a lot better than he did, but after nearly disintegrating once they went around the world, it’s not a shocker that the entire band ended up imploding after Axl Rose started calling the shots more often.
