Guitar HeroAug 1, 2010
The ex-Guns N' Roses rocker is off the hard stuff and back with an album featuring an array of effing cool friends.
It's not often you get Slash on the phone but it's not easy to bring up the twin issues that most people associate with him: his fractious relationship with former band member Axl Rose and the enormous amount of drugs he's taken since he was a teen.
The former comes indirectly, especially when Slash talks about his current live band, which includes Alter Bridge vocalist Myles Kennedy on two Slash tracks.
"The main thing about the shows we are doing now and the band I am playing with is that I know that I can trust everybody to put in 100% effort into what they are doing. It's very different from other bands I've been in," he says pointedly of GNR, which he left in the '90s, and has reportedly refused to rejoin for a reunion tour, in spite of being offered millions of dollars to do so.
But Slash is also willing to take some of the blame for the disarray that trailed the legendary rock band, along with the other team-ups - Velvet Revolver and Slash's Snakepit.
"I was pretty much drunk most of the time, so it's nice to go up there on stage and know that you can remember how to play the songs," he says with a knowing snigger.
The issue of drugs also surfaces when Slash mentions them as the common factor in one of his creative collaborators on Slash, which has Black Eyed Peas' Fergie lending her voice to Beautiful Dangerous.
"We both have drug issues," he says of the singer who has been candid about how she was addicted to crystal meth. Slash says their shared drug past and love of rock 'n' roll proved a meeting point for the duo's musical collaboration.
"I heard Fergie sing a rock medley with the Black Eyed Peas three years ago and I knew instantly that she was more than one dimensional. I think working on the album has also given Fergie some credibility for those who think she's just a pop singer. I know some people were baffled when they heard we were working together but listen to the song and you can see how natural Fergie's rock voice is."
Slash - whose approach to drugs was pretty much indiscriminatory - has gone on record about being off the hard stuff for around four years. In a keynote speech he gave to this year's Canadian Music Week, he said his wife's last pregnancy had been the turning point.
"When Perla announced that she was pregnant, I was loaded on Oxycontin, going to an Aerosmith gig, and I was out-of-my-mind high that night," he said in his speech. "And I was like, 'Okay so now it's time to start taking care of this issue,' but I thought I could juggle it, which I did up until about three and a half years ago. So really the sobriety thing is relatively new, and it's almost like you could fall off any second. But I've been holding on to it because I want to be attentive to the responsibilities that I have, and also because after years and years of doing it, it starts to get old."
Giving up the coke, dope, smack, speed and weed has allowed Slash to reveal his softer side. One of his recent tweets exhorts his 230000-plus followers to sign the Stop the Sable Island Seal Slaughter. He also makes no attempt to cover up his pride at being a father, hauling his two sons along to see AC/DC last June.
It also means that the one-time heroin and cocaine abuser has been able to gather himself - enough to finally produce his first solo album after more than 25 years in the music biz. The stuff on Slash is hardly groundbreaking. It's ballsy, crunching, hard rock that aims for wall-of-sound impact. It's great to hear Fergie in full-throttle rock mode, or the restrained and radio-friendly Gotten featuring Maroon 5's Adam Levine.
There's no shortage of star rock power on the album: think Ozzy Osbourne, Iggy Pop, Ian Astbury, Kid Rock, Dave Grohl, Chris Cornell, the list goes on. His old bandmate in Guns N' Roses and Velvet Revolver Duff McKagan also turns up.
"Fortunately, about 90% of the artists I had earmarked for this record came through," he says. There was just one who didn't.
"A record company, that shall remain nameless, refused to give clearance on someone I really wanted on the album," Slash says with no small amount of spleen.
At the centre of it all is Slash's ferocious, boundless, giddy guitar playing - the kind of stuff that has earned him multiple accolades (including being ranked by Time magazine in the number two spot of the "10 Best Electric Guitar Players of All-Time" in August 2009).
This album is very much a homage to the instrument that's been the one constant in Slash's life since he was a teenager, rampaging through Hollywood's dirtier edges with his mates, trying to make sense of a life that had seen him born, as a mixed race child to a black American mother and an English father who split up when he was just a boy.
As he puts it in his autobiography Slash (one of the best rock 'n' roll memoirs around): "Finding guitar was like finding myself; it defined me, it gave me a purpose. It was a creative outlet. It allowed me to understand myself . Playing became a trance that soothed my soul: with my hands occupied and my mind engaged, I found peace . when I'm playing onstage, I'm more at home in my own skin than at any other time in my life."
http://www.timeslive.co.za/sundaytimes/article577686.ece/Guitar-Hero
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