An unlikely combination, maybe, but former
Guns N' Roses drummer Steven Adler and Slash's
Grandma have a lot to answer for. Were it not for
them, a knackered old Spanish guitar and a copy
of Kiss Alive II, then arguably today's biggest
six-string hero might have never ended up a
guitar player. Childhood buddy and former
bandmate, Steven Adler was the first Gunner to
lay his hands on an electric guitar and amp, and
its power so impressed the young Saul Hudson that
the touchpaper for a lifelong obsession with all
things rock 'n' roll was lit. "Steve used to
put on a Kiss record, blast it at full volume and
then he would fucking bang away at this electric
guitar and amp cranked to ten," remembers
Slash. "And it was such a turn-on for me."
The young Slash wanted in on the act. He sought
out a local music school and when he happened
upon a guitar teacher noodling around with old
Cream and Led Zep riffs on a Les Paul, he ditched
his fledgling idea of being a bassist and decided
that lead guitar was for him. There was only one
problem: he needed a guitar.
"I went back home and my grandmother had
an old Spanish-style acoustic guitar with one
string in the garage somewhere. So I started on
that - everything you can possibly learn on one
string," he laughs. It wouldn't take long
for Slash to grow tired of stunted one-string
renditions of Smoke On The Water so it was back
to the music school, "I went back to same
guy who had the Les Paul and asked him how to
string the guitar, and basically he taught me a
couple of fundamental things about how a guitar
works and from there on I just started learning
from records. And I've been doing that ever since."
And along the way he also managed to make
records that thousands of people having been
copping licks from, including GN'R's Sweet Child
O Mine - whose infectious intro has remained the
scourge of the music shop since 1987. These days,
however, the single-string Spanish guitar is but
a distant memory, Slash is a confirmed Gibson Les
Paul man, possibly from the first time he spied
his former teacher playing one. "I have a
whole bunch of them," he admits. "There's
been a lot of trial and error in getting guitars,"
Slash reveals. "From the time I started to
working full-time to support the habit [Er, he
means buying guitars, okay? - Ed.]. You pick up
guitar magazines and you see advertisements for
this and that and you start going through the
gamut of trying different things out. And I ended
up playing a Les Paul." Ever since, we've
not seen Slash without three trademark
accessories: the ubiquitous top hat, the
smouldering cigarette and the thing we're most
interested in - that low slung Les Paul.
With that last item he forged a sound that was
equal parts sleazy rock riffs and ferocious solos,
becoming a true guitar hero for the late 80s.
That he arguably remains today's sole light for
rock guitar, says a lot about the current
depressingly sanitised, synth-drenched pap-pop
climate. But Slash doesn't see his new Snakepit
release Ain't Life Grand?!, an album dominated by
high-octane, bluesy-rock guitar, as a reaction
against the hi-tech, no soul material that has
left the humble rock guitar sadly marginalised.
"It's not what I would call, like,
deliberate," muses Slash, "I've just
been trying to record the same kinda shit I liked
when I got into this whole thing, you know? I've
always been on this straight and narrow path and
that's the motivation behind whatever the record
sounds like. I never really thought to do
anything differently, even when I split from Guns
N' Roses."
Ah yes, GN'R, the band that's remained sadly
dormant ever since Slash picked up his Gibson and
walked out the door. "One of the main
reasons I actually ended up leaving is because
the ideology behind Guns N' Roses all of a sudden
took up a more preconceived turn than what we
originally set out doing. I'm still working on
being a rock 'n' roll band and when I realised
that I didn't have much control over the outcome
of the way Guns was gonna sound, I went on to do
the next thing which was to start my own band,
and doing what it is I'm still trying to do -
good old genuine rock 'n' roll."
It's this authenticity of music and respect
for his chosen instrument that shines when Slash
considers today's popular musical climate. "Have
you heard the majority of stuff that's on the
radio these days? The guitar has really taken a
back fucking seat. It's become a textural kind of
thing as opposed to the stuff I was influenced by,
which was a real guitar technique and a real
human application."
Weaned on the hard rock of the early 70s, Slash
cites the Stones, Kiss, Zeppelin, UFO, AC/DC and
Ted Nugent as huge influences, players who are
miles away from today's cut-and-paste studio
technology - players who didn't have to rely on
Pro Tools to get a great guitar part down on tape
- in a nutshell, players who could actually play.
And it's a theory Slash subscribes to: "Technology
is a little bit foreign to me," he admits.
"I'm exposed to it all the time as I'm
working regularly in an environment where people
are telling me what the latest computer
development is, and I just don't have any
interest in it. I'm still trying to get the basic
hard rock guitar thing down, so that when I go to
pick a guitar up and go and play it I can
actually do it - just me and the guitar and an
amplifier," adding as a footnote, "I
have no problem with 'technological advances', I
think it's all very fascinating... but from a
distance!"
So is he The Last Great Guitar Hero, the last
player to truly matter, the last recogniseable,
world famous player? He's too modest to answer,
but we think he could be (Marr, Squire, and
Morello may be/have been great but they never hit
the heights Slash did and in terms of iconic
status, none of them would be recognised by Joe
Public). What does Slash make of the current
state of rock guitar? "In context with
everything that's going on musically, I don't
think guitar playing in the classic sense is even
all that necessary as the music doesn't lend
itself to it," he says. "That just
seems to be the trend that's been going on
because everybody's so involved with sampling
stuff and not really having a central guitar vibe.
I mean, even if you listen to something like
Green Day, it doesn't need a guitar solo, you
know?" he says, before recalling that music
has been this way before. "But the Sex
Pistols sounded great with Steve Jones playing
like he did, and that was still a very simple
approach to a guitar sound. It wasn't like Led
Zeppelin or something like that where you've got
all this orchestrated stuff going on, and I
suppose that's similar to the state of music
right now.
"And if I remember correctly, when Guns
started there was no guitar playing going on then
either. I wasn't paying attention or wasn't
influenced by what was going on in 1984 or '85 as
that was all like Cyndi Lauper, early Madonna and
all that shit. The whole Van Halen wave had gone
by and when I started playing a Les Paul and
doing leads and stuff, everyone went 'Oh yeah, I
forgot about that'. So my current approach is
basically the same. I'm not really interested in
why there are no other guitar players doing what
it is that I was weaned on, it's just not the way
the industry is right now."
But if all this sounds a bit worrying for fans of
good old-fashioned rock guitar, Slash reckons we
needn't worry. "When we were playing with AC/DC
we had me doing my thing, Angus doing his thing:
it was like a total guitar onslaught [Now there's
a good name for a magazine - Ed]. It was probably
the best fucking bill going around the States at
the time. We did 37 gigs and it was a real shot
in the arm in this day and age as far as rock 'n'
roll is concerned."
Since Slash's last album, the US has seen the
emergence of the Nu Metal scene, the voice of
disenfranchised youth. Not that he noticed.
"I wasn't aware there was a new metal,"
he laughs good-naturedly. "I'm an old school
kinda guy." And he seems genuinely
bewildered by the 'angry young man' syndrome with
which all nu metal bands seem to be afflicted.
"I really don't get it, they're just not old
enough to have that hard a life," he pauses.
"Or perhaps I've just been real lucky.
"Although I'm a really aggressive guitar
player, if you listen to Snakepit play - or even
Guns - it's totally in-your-face, but we don't
have any real issues and so don't take things too
seriously. We're not pissed off at the world
compared to most other bands today.'' One modern
player that Slash does admire is Rage Against The
Machine's Tom Morello. "At least he's trying
to do something new with the guitar, getting all
sorts of weird sounds out of it, but not relying
upon a sampler. He makes the guitar do it for him."
Countless great bands have come and gone, and
often the singer has gone on to great success
while the guitar player seemingly vanishes into
the musical ether - think of The Smiths, The
Police, and even, possibly to a slighter lesser
degree, Led Zep. Slash, however, has remained the
constant while his erstwhile bandmate Axl Rose
has all but disappeared from sight. "I've
been really lucky as a guitar player to have a
career separately from the group I was successful
with," he admits. "Whether I can be as
successful on my own, or with my own group
compared to Guns I don't know. I never really
look at it like that, it's never been my priority.
My thing was just to get through the night and to
be happy with what I accomplish that evening. It's
not like 'the Slash project' - I really don't see
it that way, we're a band in our own right. I've
always been in bands, I've never got off on
practising or sitting around to see how
technically proficient you can become - it was
always all about putting a band together, making
it work and then going out and playing in front
of an audience. I really didn't want a solo
career based on my guitar playing. I'm not
convinced I'm technically good enough and I think
that bands focused around one guitar player tend
to be a little bit boring anyway."
In the dozen or so years that Slash has been
wowing us with his guitar prowess, he feels his
playing has definitely changed for the better.
"I'm very conscientious about my intonation
these days," he explains. "It was
something that my old manager mentioned to me,
because in the early Guns days it was so
haphazard. He said, 'Just keep your ear on the
intonation', and it really stuck in my mind. So
where I'm at now is just trying to get better and
better at the original format in which I started,
as far as rock 'n' roll guitar is concerned. I'm
just a little bit more conscientious about things
when it comes to bending, or when it comes to not
playing too many notes and just relaxing.
"As I'm a very aggressive player, I play
really fast for no real reason except that the
energy level will just take me there. Within
reason, that's cool, but you don't have to go
through this whole flurry of notes - just sit on
the one, stay on the one note, it sounds good -
and then start to branch out in the next couple
of bars. I'm more aware of that now than I was
back when I was 19, 20 years old."
If his manager gave the young player some vital
words of wisdom, Slash offers some similar sage
advice to today's fledgling players. "Basically
go for what you know and strive to do whatever it
is you want to do and work at that. And also the
most important thing is to learn how to play the
guitar before you get fucking 50,000 dollars
worth of fucking complicated gear," he
laughs. "Try to apply whatever is in your
head to your fingers on just the instrument
itself before you start embellishing it with all
this other bullshit."
So take heed, as this is one guy who knows
what he's talking about. After all, we are
talking about the guitar hero who started out
playing his Granny's acoustic....
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