In late 1993, Guns N’ Roses guitarist Slash was mentally and physically exhausted after the band finally got to the end of a tour that had lasted for more than two whole years.
He also feared that his relationship with singer Axl Rose was broken beyond repair.
And in that moment of crisis, Slash turned to man who knew pretty much everything there is to know about life in a famous rock ’n’ roll band with a larger than life singer.
In a 2004 interview with MOJO magazine, Slash recalled how he had returned home to Los Angeles in July 1993 after Guns N’ Roses’ Use Your Illusion tour had ended with two shows at the River Plate Stadium in Argentina’s capital Buenos Aires.
No matter how bad Slash was feeling after those two years on the road, he was at least in better shape than bassist Duff McKagan, who travelled to his hometown of Seattle after the tour and promptly had a near-fatal medical emergency when his pancreas exploded.
But Slash was not in a good place mentally. Most of all, he felt disconnected from Axl Rose, who had become increasingly isolated from the rest of the band.
Slash needed some help in dealing with it all, and that help came when he was invited to dinner in LA with The Rolling Stones’ guitarists Keith Richards and Ronnie Wood.
Slash recalled to MOJO: “The Stones were recording the Voodoo Lounge record up at [producer] Don Was’s house. Ronnie and Keith and their wives and myself and my wife at the time all went down to a very famous Beverly Hills restaurant that all the movie stars loved to be seen at.
“I was sitting at the bar with Keith and we were talking, funnily enough, about drugs. Then he asked me what I was doing with Guns, and I told him about the situation with Axl. And Keith said, ‘You never leave’. I thought a lot about what he said.”
Slash continued: “One of the things about Keith that I love so much is that he hangs in there – thick or thin, he hangs in there. He’s a hero to me because he’s one of the few people that is completely un-bendable when it comes to what it is that he does, so I look up to him.
“And so when he said that to me, I was like, ‘Yeah, fuck.’ So I got the wherewithal to be able to go back to rehearsal the next day with a fresh attitude. That kept me in there for as long as humanly possible until it finally got to a point where it’s not gonna go anywhere.”
He went on: “I don’t know what relationship Keith and Mick have, or fucking Joe and Steven from Aerosmith have, or any of the other lead singers and lead guitarists, Jimmy Page and Robert Plant. All these bands I grew up listening to. The one thing they all seemed to have in common, though, is the singer wants to do his thing.”
He claimed: “I was dealing with somebody who didn’t want to do anything in particular except to keep fucking dragging the ship down. So finally I did leave and I talked to Keith later after that, and he said, ‘There was nothing you could fucking do.’”
It was in 1996 that Slash’s exit from Guns N’ Roses was confirmed, but in that 2004 interview with MOJO he said that his decision to leave the band was made in 1994. Coincidentally, this happened as Guns N’ Roses were recording a version of a classic Rolling Stones song, Sympathy For The Devil, for the soundtrack to the movie Interview With The Vampire.
Slash told MOJO: “Axl was killing us – slowly but surely. I’d been depressed, but I used to drown that with alcohol and keep going.”
He referred to the departure of the band’s rhythm guitarist Izzy Stradlin in 1991.
“Even after Izzy left, we patched it up and kept it going. But when we were trying to get this record [Sympathy For The Devil] made, the whole process was just such hell.
“Axl wouldn’t show up at the studio until two or three o’clock in the morning. The band was spinning its wheels, and there was no way to get it back on track.”
Slash said of his decision to leave Guns N’ Roses: “Everybody thought I was nuts, but I knew what I had to do. And I can honestly say it was one of the smartest decisions of my whole fucking adult life.”
12 years after that interview, Slash was reunited with Rose and Duff McKagan as Guns N’ Roses embarked on their wryly titled Not In This Lifetime tour.
