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Slash hasn't totally lost his appetite for self-destruction -- but he has curbed it.
"Left to my own devices, I'm actually fairly mellow," claims the 45-year-old guitar hero from his Los Angeles home. "I mean, put it this way: Everything's basically the same -- it's just that I am way more present and aware of my surroundings than I normally have been."
That's gotta be a good thing, considering how fast and frequently his world moves. Since leaving Guns N' Roses in the mid-'90s, the corkscrew-haired, top-hatted rocker born Saul Hudson has seldom been idle for long. He's released five albums -- two each with Slash's Snakepit and the Scott Weiland-fronted GN'R reboot Velvet Revolver, along with a self-titled (and star-studded) solo album earlier this year. He's recorded and played with everyone from Alice Cooper to Rihanna. He's published his autobiography. He's been named the second-best guitarist in history after Jimi Hendrix. Just within the past two weeks, he was honoured at the Sunset Strip Music Festival -- which proclaimed Aug. 26 Slash Day -- and filed for divorce from his wife of nine years Perla Ferrar.
Slash's perpetual motion should carry him and his latest touring band -- which includes Alter Bridge vocalist Myles Kennedy, along with Canadian bassist Todd Kerns and drummer Brent Fitz -- across most of the country this month. Thankfully, before hitting the road, he sat still long enough to talk about being his own boss, recruiting guest vocalists and Revolver's next round.
How do you like being in charge? You seem like a guy who might prefer to just play guitar.
Actually, I'm very proactive. Always have been. One of the things I'll give myself credit for is that even in the Guns N' Roses and Snakepit days -- and no matter what I was taking -- I've always been very responsible about what the band was doing. I always was very hands-on. So doing what I'm doing now is not very different -- except the buck stops with me. There's nobody else. But I still ask the other guys what they feel like doing -- I've been part of a democracy for so long, that's just part of my nature. I don't like to be the dictator.
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You've had enough of that?
Well, let's just say I've been around that kind of power trip. Everybody in my band knows what they're there for, and they're having a great time doing it. I don't really have to tell them anything. All I do is write a set list and see if it's cool with everybody. And you know what? It's something I haven't really experienced before. I always have been in a group where there's one loose cannon that always made things difficult. In this situation, everybody just wants to do it. And it's interesting how smooth it goes when everybody carries their weight.
Speaking of set lists, I see you're playing a lot of material -- solo songs, GN'R songs, Velvet Revolver songs, even Alter Bridge songs.
Right. For me, it's fun to do stuff from my whole catalog. I don't have the freedom to do that in Velvet Revolver because Velvet Revolver is its own band; I can't do a s---load of Guns N' Roses songs or Snakepit songs. So this is sorta cool. And with Myles being in the band, we have Alter Bridge to draw from, which is great. We can just pick and choose whatever we want to play. We could do a whole set of covers if we felt like it.
You had a whole roster of guest vocalists on your latest CD. How did you decide who would sing what?
It was real simple, actually. I had just got off the road with Velvet and I had started scoring a movie. I was working with Velvet as well, writing new music for the next record and looking for a singer. And I realized I wanted to do something on my own. I'd had the idea that I'd like to have people guest on my record, as opposed to me guesting on everybody else's record. So I just started casually writing music -- whatever I felt like writing, without any real end game in mind. And I realized certain people would sound good on certain pieces of music. One of the songs was an Ozzy song for sure. Another one was an Iggy Pop song, and another was Kid Rock. Every song I wrote, I imagined who the perfect vocalist would be. And once I got the material done I sent demos to all the different people and it all came together.
You're probably sick of being asked, but what's going on with Velvet Revolver?
We started out looking in earnest for a singer after the tour was over. We auditioned a bunch of people and listened to countless demos and stuff. Then I started making my record, and now Duff (McKagan) is in Jane's Addiction, and so on. (Note: Jane's announced earlier this week that the bassist has left the band.) But we've all been keeping an ear to the pavement in case anybody really good comes along. Last time, we spent 10 months looking for a singer, six days a week in a rehearsal studio. And we ended up with Scott, which was fine and everything, but at the end of 10 months, we were all so desperate to do something it's hard to say where our judgment was. So this time I don't want to rush it. I just want to make sure that if anything good comes up, we hear it. Because as soon as we find the right guy, we can figure out when we're going to make a record. I think we'd be going crazy right now, had we not found anybody and were just sitting around.
darryl.sterdan@sunmedia.ca