The ending of Guns N’ Roses in the 1990s is a rock and roll circus. Their tour around the world was already massive, but things would only get more dire when they came home, and when Slash found his friends missing, he saw no point sticking around.
Then again, Slash was always one-half of what made the group so eye-catching back in the day. Every band usually revolves around that one superstar frontman who’s impossible to look away from. But Axl Rose definitely had some competition onstage from the ferocious ball of energy that was the guitarist underneath that curly hair, whenever he tore into the back of a song like ‘Paradise City’. But as much as they seemed to have a Lennon/McCartney relationship, nothing could have been further from the truth.
Sure, they were friends back in the day, but the real friendship in the band came from Rose and Izzy Stradlin. Rose had followed Stradlin to Los Angeles back in the day when they were both living in Indiana, and while Slash and drummer Steven Adler had their own bands at the time, there was bound to be some magic when combining them under one roof. But right after Appetite for Destruction, things began to change a lot.
The nucleus of Slash, Rose, and Duff McKagan seemed to be working fine for a while, but once they fired Adler due to his drug abuse, the band’s tour was no longer fun for a newly sober Stradlin. He had written some of their greatest tunes, but he figured it had become too big for him, ultimately leading to them working with Gilby Clarke when they went on the road for Use Your Illusion.
And for what it’s worth, Clarke wasn’t that bad a replacement. He plugged in and played all of Stradlin’s parts, and since he had a make-or-break shot at clicking with Slash, hearing him play off him perfectly was all they needed to ensure everything was OK. However, by that point, Rose’s ego grew unchecked half the time, and when Slash got back home to find out that Clarke had been sacked, he started to think that maybe it was time for him to leave.
He was devoted to the band up to a point, but looking at how Rose was working, Slash felt like it was becoming more of a dictatorship, saying, “When Gilby and I first hooked up, it was because he comes from the old school, and I can relate to that. Unfortunately, when he got fired from Guns…that was the beginning of when I left Guns, because I felt that Axl was losing touch with where I was coming from, and it sort of snowballed after that, on the downside.”
While Clarke eventually found some time to play with Slash on the first album by Slash’s Snakepit, he wouldn’t be sticking around for that long. In the years that followed, the guitarist would look back on his Snakepit years as one of the most uneven periods of his life, and it would take him a while before he started to feel in control of everything again after Velvet Revolver fell apart.
Clarke had one thing above everyone else during Guns N’ Roses’ prime: he was reliable. Most other artists in their position would spend their time living the rock and roll lifestyle, and while he and Slash certainly weren’t choirboys in that respect, they both respected the craft well enough to give the audience their best show no matter what state they were in.
