If you picture the definition of what a rock and roll guitar player looks like, chances are most of you thought of Slash without even thinking.
There is no magical formula that makes the silhouette of a curly-haired guitarist in a top hat the definition of cool, and yet there’s something about the swagger that he has that exceeds anything that any other guitarist could ever hope to achieve. But if anyone were to ask the man himself, he felt that he was merely a footnote compared to the true legends.
First of all, it’s important to know that Slash absolutely hates most of the praise that is levelled towards him half the time. He got into the business to be the best musician that he could, but there’s a good chance that he would be a little bit squeamish if anyone were to call him a genius or a god compared to the other musicians that were coming out around the same time. And sure, some of them were better, but they didn’t have the same charisma.
Even for a musician who is known for saying absolutely nothing for 95% of his job, his guitar has been telling his story for him half the time. All of his heroes can be heard through his licks, whether that’s Joe Walsh, Eric Clapton, or BB King, but whenever he’s not pulling from the best blues players of all time, he knew that nothing got better than listening to the right rock and roll riff.
He had grown up in the era that had birthed everyone from Led Zeppelin to Pink Floyd, but Slash wasn’t in it to be the most accomplished player. The blues were what kept him coming back half the time, but when Aerosmith came out of the US looking like a version of The Rolling Stones in a fun-house mirror, Slash was absolutely transfixed by what he heard when he first picked up the album Rocks.
I mean, look at the first songs on the record. If you’ve never heard anything related to Aerosmith, hearing ‘Back in the Saddle’ start off like the beginning of a horror movie before giving way to that crushing electric bass riff is one of the most epic introductions of the 1970s. Slash would eventually gravitate towards the deep cuts in their discography, but even when they were hitmakers, there was no point in anyone trying to take Aerosmith’s slot.
As far as he was concerned, they were the epitome of what rock and roll should be, saying, “Aerosmith had an aggressive, psychotic, drugged-out vibe, but at the same time they had a Stones-y blues thing going on. There was just nothing cooler than Aerosmith coming out of America at that point. I identified with Joe Perry’s image, both soundwise and visually. He was streamlined in a way that reminded me of Keith Richards, was always wasted and had a careless guitar style that was really cool.”
And it wasn’t like that kind of magic didn’t rub off on him, either. Internalising all of those riffs is enough to change even the most straight-ahead rockers, and when Guns N’ Roses first broke out on the scene, Joe Perry was outspoken about being one of their biggest fans, even claiming that he saw some pieces of Aerosmith in them that they themselves never managed to fully grasp before.
But even if Aerosmith were still having hits around the time that Appetite for Destruction came out, Slash was determined to take things to a new level. He had studied all of Perry’s moves and sprinkled in a bit of punk rock fury into everything, and with the rest of the LA rock scene catering to bands that wore lipstick and seven-inch heels, here was a guitarist who had the same flash of Jimmy Page but with the stage presence and swagger of Johnny Thunders. What’s not to love?
