Not everyone is born with a natural talent for music. There is no doubt that a lot of people make being a musician look like the most natural thing in the world, but a lot more people need years of practice, and while Slash is one of the few who could make the guitar sing with no problem, he never took those hours studying for granted.
He knew that he didn’t have some strange superpower that suddenly turned him into the greatest guitarist to ever put his hands on the fretboard. He was a student of all the great artists that came before him, and while there was a lot of rock and roll swagger that came with him whenever he played songs like ‘November Rain’ and ‘Paradise City’, it was easy for him to pull from the greats like Eric Clapton and Joe Walsh whenever he sculpted one of his solos. His guitar was meant to be a voice, but just don’t ask him to actually sing.
As much as Slash can be a madman on his guitar, he knew that he could never take on a frontman role if he tried. He was more than capable of standing in the shadows and seeing where things were going on the musical front, and while he had some fantastic vocalists at his disposal with Axl Rose and Scott Weiland during his prime, it’s not like they were always the easiest to get along with, either.
When Slash finally developed as a solo artist, though, he finally had the freedom to do whatever he wanted. His 2010 solo record was like the Wild West in terms of which singers were on every track, and while Myles Kennedy did manage to stick around, the guitarist always had the idea floating in his head about what it would sound like for him to do an album of all blues covers for a change.
After all, the blues had been a core part of every one of Slash’s eras, and he had even found time to play next to legends like BB King, but it was only a matter of finding the right singers. There were pieces of rock royalty that were no-brainers like Paul Rodgers and even AC/DC’s Brian Johnson, but some of the biggest surprises from the album came when Slash brought in some new blood to the mix.
Demi Lovato isn’t the first person to think of for a blues cover artist, but her version of ‘Papa Was A Rolling Stone’ is fantastic, and for Slash, nothing got better than hearing Chris Stapleton sing Fleetwood Mac’s ‘Oh Well’, saying, “I’m not one of those guys that listens to a lot of country music. For a Guns N’ Roses US tour back in 2016, we had Chris Stapleton open some shows. He’s one of these outrageously gifted guys with a really great voice. So when I was thinking of that song, it suddenly popped into my head that his kind of cadence delivering that lyric would be unpredictable, but it would sound really cool.”
And while Peter Green’s original version has been firmly solidified as a blues standard at this point, Stapleton’s version brings that country grit that’s missing from the original. All great bluesmen have the kind of spiritual muscle behind their singing, and Stapleton’s performance felt like it could have easily come out of the Delta blues movement if the song had significantly worse production.
Although Slash has developed a reputation as being the go-to guitar guy whenever someone needs a generic rock and roll figure these days, picking people like Stapleton is one of the reasons why he remains unpredictable. He is a student of rock, but he’s not afraid to make a play that’s not as predictable.
