Guns N’ Roses guitar god Slash has lived a wild life, and if he wanted to write a fun memoir with the usual themes of sex, drugs and rock ‘n’ roll, surely many publications the press would give him a gift. . Just an acoustic album GN’ R Lie – which is 35 years old this year – and its “One in a Million” argument could fill a long chapter, all by itself.
But that’s not the kind of autobiography Slash wanted to write.
“I haven’t really thought about it. I mean, honestly, to be honest, I haven’t thought about all that [scandalous stuff] Recently, “Slash muses, when asked about GN’ R Lie. “But now that you talk about it, most of all that [Guns N’ Roses] it would have caused us to be canceled in this day and age. We would do that not they’ve done well in this environment, really – I mean, on many different levels. But I mean, a lot of things from that time wouldn’t be what you would consider acceptable at this point in time. … I’m glad we didn’t have the internet back then! It would have been a completely different world. But anyway, I’m not talking about all those things. It just is what it is. ”
Instead, Slash has chosen to tell his life story in a unique way – with the back stories of his favorite guitars – a long coffee table tome. Collection: Slash, the first legal book released for Gibson Publishing. Containing 364 pages and Ross Halfin’s stunning photos of 400 axes – acoustic and electric – the beautiful hardcover book covers everything from Slash’s first instrument (guitar a single Spanish-style string that “his grandmother put in a blanket” ) on his “recording guitar” or “comfort-zone” guitar, a used Les Paul ’59 replica to Desire for Destruction and was handcrafted by the late luthier Kris Derrig.
With its photographs, interviews, and first-person essays, Collection: Slash tells the inspiring story of a man who seemed born to play the guitar. But surprisingly, despite growing up in the UK and LA surrounded by music legends – her late mother, Ola Hudson, was a fashion designer and stylist whose famous clients included David Bowie, Janis Joplin, and Ringo Starr, and his. the singer’s father, Anthony Hudson, created albums for Neil Young and Joni Mitchell – Slash tells Yahoo Entertainment that at first he “had no ambition to be a singer” and “stumbled into it.”
“It’s funny, because I grew up in that world,” the rock legend, whose real name is Saul Hudson, told Yahoo Entertainment in a previous interview. I didn’t want to be a musician, but I liked to listen to records…. I didn’t think about a particular instrument until I was only 15 years old, I picked up a guitar by accident. My 15th birthday. And then, that changed everything.
Slash now explains that before he turned 15, he was already becoming a different kind of player. “I loved the whole process and I loved going to the recording studio and watching, say, Joni doing her thing. It was an amazing experience. But I didn’t know I was to be a singer. And all of a sudden, I picked up the guitar. … We spent a lot of time there [famous Hollywood club] Troubadour and recording studios around town, so I was indeed taken with the arrangement of the equipment – before the show starts, everything to see everything – then with the actual show itself. “
A decade or so later, the Troubadour would be the site of one of the most important nights of Slash’s career – February 28, 1986 – when Geffen Records A&R specialist Tom Zutaut saw local band Guns N ‘ Roses there and decided to. they signed. And 30 years later, when GNR reunited, their epic “Not in This Lifetime” performance — the first time Slash, frontman Axl Rose, and bassist Duff McKagan had all been on stage since 1993 – they were in Troubabour. However, looking back on his first six years living in the small Midlands town of Stoke-on-Trent, Slash realizes that he was already receiving a musical education that was it will lay the foundation for the rest of his life.
He says: “I stayed in England, and I missed it when I left. “The cool thing about living there… And so, I turned on the blues, I turned on the Stones, I turned on the Moody Blues, I turned on Pink Floyd and the Yardbirds and all that stuff that was going on at the time, like. Jimi Hendrix [who first found success in Britain]. I was weaned on British rock ‘n’ roll from my early days.”
And once Slash, whose real name is Saul Hudson, and his father moved to Los Angeles to meet Ola, who had returned to the United States for work, he formed the original ideas to hang back, “kind of like a piece of furniture,” looking at his mother’s best Troubadour friends.
“There were a lot of people around – we were living in Laurel Canyon, and it was 1971 or whatever, so they worked with Joni Mitchell and a lot of David Geffen artists , or like David Crosby, who just passed away. All those people were in the Canyon, and it was a very close-knit environment. I have fond memories of being around there . ..everyone sitting around, smoking a lot of weed and being really creative and everyone being, for want of a better word, supercool.
“Everybody was uncomfortable and everybody was cool – and everybody really was. wisdom, which is a bit different from the kind of rock ‘n’ roll image that we think of,” Slash continues with a tear of emotion. “All these people were very educated, they had a clear vision of what they wanted and what they wanted to do, and they were very intelligent. So, it was very interesting for me that I was there – even though I didn’t know what I was taking at the time, looking back on it.”
However, it was Slash’s future GNR bandmate, drummer Steven Adler, and wisecracking mentor, romantic Eric Clapton – not any known friends of his parents – who finally convinced Slash to take the guitar seriously. “I went [Adler’s] one afternoon, and he picked up one of those cheap electric guitars and an amp, and a cheap stereo, and put it on. KISS Live II more, and he punched everything and just hit it,” Slash remembers. “I mean, at the time we were doing a lot of soul guitar, so we wanted to get our music out there. And I thought, ‘We’re going to put a band together!’ That naivety: ‘We’re going to start a band!’”
At first Slash thought he would play bass, but a visit to a nearby music school changed his future forever. “I went there with no instrument, and I didn’t know what I was doing, and I went in and talked to the teacher, this guy Robert Walling, who I talked to a couple of times down the road. years. So, he took me into the room and we were talking, and he was playing guitar the whole time, and he was playing Clapton licks. And I said, ‘Well, that’s what I want to do. ‘ And he said, ‘That’s not a bass, that’s a lead guitar.’ And that started. That’s where it went.”
And the rest was history – and now all that history has been edited Collection: Slash, that available to order in various versions, including a Custom edition that can be collected in just 500 copies. Watch Slash’s full Yahoo Entertainment interview above to learn about his “runaway guitar”; How GN’ R Lie and another Guns N’ Roses album celebrating a milestone anniversary this year, The Spaghetti Incident?, were loose and spontaneous projects; and Slash’s others a large collection… of snakes, including Pandora, a boa constrictor replica that appeared in GN’ R Lie-era “Patience” music video.
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