It’s nearly impossible to imagine a guitarist like Slash having off days whenever he goes out onstage. Although no guitarist is perfect, very few still living today have managed to have the same delicate touch as Slash does, and whenever he screws up onstage, it’s easy to see him recover from everything as if he never even made a mistake. But once Guns N’ Roses started to go through their own set of shakeups, the guitarist knew he was in for something different when he first started making his guitar parts for Use Your Illusion.
If you looked at their double album in conjunction with Appetite for Destruction, no one questioned the fact that they had got too bloated way too fast. Everyone in the group could still play the greatest rock and roll anyone had ever heard, but was anyone asking for a song like ‘Breakdown’ to be nine minutes? It was easy to excuse ‘November Rain’ since it’s a fantastic tune, but ‘My World’ was never something anyone needed to hear.
So with Axl Rose asserting his dominance over the studio with the piano, you’d think that Slash would have had to take a back seat, but that only meant his job would get harder. Both his Les Paul and the piano are mid-range instruments, so if he wanted things to stick out, he needed to play something that was a bit more outside the box compared to what he normally played.
Which is no small feat considering how chaotic his solos could get on their debut. ‘Paradise City’ might get a lot of credit for that opening guitar lick, but the outro solo is where he really gets to shine, especially when the tempo kicks up a notch and the whole thing starts sounding like an old-school punk song that happens to have an Aerosmith-style guitar lick bellowing behind everything.
‘November Rain’ may have been pure inspiration channelled on the spot, but ‘Estranged’ was a far bigger job for Slash to finish, saying, “The most challenging guitar is ‘Estranged’. Playing that live, it demanded a lot of concentration. It’s not your typical turn-up-the-volume and crank it out kind of thing. It took a lot of concentration to get the nuances throughout that whole song.”
But while it might have been a nightmare playing the solo itself, the bigger challenge would have been figuring out where the hell you were in the context of the tune. This is yet another one of Rose’s massive epics, and while it does earn every bit of its nine-minute runtime, going through every single section would have any other rock and roll band needing chord charts to figure out how everything would be set up.
That’s not even the most eclectic tune on the record, though. Compared to Rose’s antics, Slash had a field day on the record as well, like having some time to throw in a flamenco-style guitar solo halfway through one of the songs. It was bad enough trying to keep up with his normal electric playing, but even for people who listened exclusively to MTV Unplugged shows, Slash still had every guitarist beat.
Despite ‘Estranged’ being a fantastic song, it’s easy to see this as the final hurrah for GNR’s brand of rock and roll. No one was going to equal this on the LA rock scene, so it was only natural that Nirvana and Pearl Jam came out at the tail end of that year to turn the entire genre on its head.
