In a sea of countless hard rock acts in Los Angeles in the 1980s, it was easy to spot Slash from a mile away.
Every other band may have had spandex and looked like one of the coolest artists to ever set foot on a stage, but judging by the massive top hat and the reckless playing onstage, there was no doubt that Guns N’ Roses was going to leave the rest of the Sunset Strip in the dust once they finally hit it big. It wasn’t going to be an easy road to the top, but the band did get one thing that many of their contemporaries didn’t: longevity.
Think about it for a second: what were the other bands that were up and coming circa 1987? Sure, there were the established acts that were tearing up the charts like Whitesnake and Def Leppard, but when looking at the bands bubbling up from the underground in Los Angeles, it’s not like everyone’s looking at the back catalogue of Winger and thinking that they wrote absolutely timeless music.
Whereas with Guns, they already felt like the perfect trip through rock and roll’s past in a way. They weren’t “retro” by any means, but their way of approaching their songs felt like the natural extension of where rock and roll had been going. They had taken the same blues riffing of The Stones and the boogie of Aerosmith and combined it with the first generation of punk, but right as they were at the top, a new flavour of American punk was about to take over.
And while grunge couldn’t be labelled as punk in the broadest sense, it’s important to look at it through the punk ethos as well. The entire point behind a band like Nirvana was to upset the establishment and not play by the rules the same way that Joey Ramone and John Lydon had been doing, but Slash was gravitating more towards the sound of acts like Alice in Chains half the time.
Most Seattle bands wouldn’t have been caught dead being classified as a “metal” band, but Alice in Chains were the one group that seemed to warm up to the idea. They had those beautiful harmonies from Layne Staley and Jerry Cantrell, but the true power came from the passion they put into each musical flavour they worked with. Whether it was a ballad like ‘Nutshell’ or a heavy tune like ‘Rain When I Die’, you can tell that they were prepared to go to bat with any other band when they played.
Even if grunge can feel like a product of its time in lots of ways, even Slash had to admit that nothing excited him in the same way as Alice in Chains ever since, saying, “There’s stuff here and there – there hasn’t been one thing where I’ve just been like: ‘Wow!’ Like when I first heard Alice In Chains, say. There hasn’t been a movement like that, but there are cool things that are starting to happen that are rock & roll based. Hopefully in the next of couple years as things develop, there will be more of that happening.”
But maybe the biggest similarity between Alice and Guns was their inherent love of the blues. Even though Cantrell probably wouldn’t classify himself as a blues artist in the traditional sense, his fascination with the old guard of music and the fact that he had a song on the soundtrack to Sinners was bound to go over well with someone who followed in the footsteps of everyone from BB King to Eric Clapton.
Then again, it’s not like rock and roll was dead after grunge rose and fell. The guitar had taken a back seat for a while, but even if the modern incarnation of rock is stuck in the land of nostalgia, there are always going to be people like Slash and Cantrell that manage to make those old songs sound like new compositions all over again.
