The Slash song that defeated Guns N’ Roses: “It was too far”
There weren’t many bases of rock and roll that Slash couldn’t cover on one guitar.
Guns N’ Roses may have firmly fit in the hard rock category, but rarely has one guitarist been able to work with everyone from Bob Dylan to Carole King to Michael Jackson to Ray Chalres and yet still sound like he’s playing effortlessly. Even if he saved his best stuff for his main band, even Slash knew when the band couldn’t pull off the kind of riffs that he had in his head when they walked into the studio.
Because regardless of his image, Slash could do a lot of different things than the bogstandard hard rock riffs. That was where he thrived most of the time, but if you listen to what eventually turned up on his 2010 solo record, there are a lot more facets to what he could do. There was the acoustic side that had been lying around since GNR Lies and even elements of heavy metal in how he played, but that was never going to satisfy what Axl Rose wanted to do.
Then again, if you look at what they were working on circa 1994, it’s a safe bet to think that most things couldn’t satisfy Rose when it came to new music. He had a very specific idea in his head of what he wanted Guns to be, and even if the rest of the group wanted to make it a reality, Chinese Democracy didn’t spend time in development hell by accident. Rose was a perfectionist by nature, and if he felt that something wasn’t good enough to make it on the record, he wasn’t going to simply sidestep it.
It’s healthy for anyone to want to experiment like Rose did, but that’s not what Slash had in mind. He knew that Guns N’ Roses thrived being a badass rock and roll band, and if the massive piano ballads were already a stretch in the early 1990s, bringing in one new genre every single time they worked on a song wasn’t going to go down well with a guy that wanted to make riffs in the same vein as Led Zeppelin and Aerosmith.
And when the guitarist eventually left to form Slash’s Snakepit, he finally seemed happy working on music again. Not everything had the same hooks as Appetite for Destruction on albums like It’s Five O’Clock Somewhere, but even when his new outfit put together Ain’t Life Grand in 2000, Slash still was pulling from the well of classic riffs that Rose refused to even acknowledge a few years before.
‘Speed Parade’ had all the makings of a great hard rock song, but Slash remembered getting shot down because of how aggressive it sounded in his old band, saying, “’Speed Parade’ is the oldest song in the album. I wanted to do it with Gn’R, but the relations between members was terrible. It was too far to finish up the song. I didn’t have a chance to do that song on the other project.”
While the song does feel stuck in a musical purgatory of sorts, it does feel somewhat at home in this side project. Despite It’s Five O’Clock Somewhere being the better record, this album sounded like the epitome of the sleaze that came out of Los Angeles, so it helps to have a song like this that sounds part way between punk and a hard rock band that seemed to climb right out of the gutter.
After all, that was always what Guns N’ Roses was supposed to be, but by this point, that band was practically dead and gone. Rose still had all the rights to the name and could do with it whatever he wished, but it’s not like anyone was looking at the latest incarnation of the group with Buckethead in the 2000s and assuming that they were going to get the same band that made ‘Welcome to the Jungle’.
