The two songs Slash refused to play for years: “I did get sick”
For some artists, there’s a real danger that comes with getting too popular. Anyone’s art should be fun for them at the end of the day, and once they start hearing their songs pop up in commercials or being used as memes, some of that initial connection that they had with their songs is lost forever. Although Slash has had to deal with many pieces of Guns N’ Roses’ catalogue getting used in football stadiums ever since the 2000s, there are only a handful of songs that he couldn’t bear to put on when he took the stage.
Granted, having too many great songs in one’s old band is hardly a bad problem to have. Most people can only hope to make an album with half as many good songs as Appetite for Destruction, and combing through the entire record, it almost reads like a diary of the band’s history together and the road that they had to take to make it out of the gutter and into the big leagues with bands like The Rolling Stones.
And while Slash was more likely to lean on the tougher rock and roll songs, the ballads were always going to be the tracks people remembered. ‘Think About You’ was the more earnest version of a love song that they had in their arsenal, but that was never going to beat ‘Sweet Child O’ Mine’ in listeners’ hearts, especially when Slash started off that signature circus melody that he came up with.
But no matter how much Slash has problems with that song, it’s still at the top of his setlist for a reason. Everyone loves it as the roaring emotional centrepiece from their debut, but some pieces of that record wear out their welcome after playing them one too many times and looking back on some of the content, ‘It’s So Easy’ was one of the songs that Slash could have done without after a while.
“The only time I think I’ve ever gotten sick of playing Guns and Roses songs.”
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This is strange because that tune should be right up his alley, considering what he loves about rock and roll. Everything is there, from the bluesy riffs to the short and sweet lyrical guitar solo, and it even had a dash of punk sprinkled in, but alongside that and ‘Mr Brownstone’, Slash saw himself becoming a caricature of that brand of rock and roll star rather than the real deal half the time.
When talking about those days, Slash said that the 2000s were the tipping point for him outgrowing those tunes, saying, “The only time I think I’ve ever gotten sick of playing Guns and Roses songs really was during – after having played them in Guns and Roses, and then in Snakepit, and then playing ‘It’s So Easy’ and ‘Brownstone’ in Velvet Revolver. Because even in clubs or whatever, where I have to go up and jam, those were like the standard songs that everybody knew and that everybody could sing. And I did get sick of playing those two songs.”
Not including makes sense given the history of that song and how Axl Rose used it against him, but it’s for the best that parts of ‘It’s So Easy’ remain in the past. The band were always supposed to be a touch controversial, but listening back to Rose slip in casual misogyny and treating the woman in the song like a sex object feels sleazy for all the wrong reasons today, even if the riffs are kickass.
But Slash’s decision to play something different also comes from wanting something more out of his setlist. For him, playing live was about not getting stuck in the past, and Slash always preferred to move forward rather than playing the role of the genre relic that most of his peers fell into.
