One would imagine Guns N’ Roses guitarist Slash encountered more than enough crazy from his band’s heyday alone.
The last massive American band untouched by grunge, Guns N’ Roses landed on the rock charts with a degree of street grit and Los Angeles gutter glitz that wasn’t to be found in the likes of Whitesnake, Def Leppard, or even the ‘Prince of Darkness’ himself Ozzy Osbourne during the arse end of hair metal’s MTV domination. While they may have partied really fucking hard with Ratt or Mötley Crüe, Guns N’ Roses, before a certain Seattle trio would unwittingly stumble to the top of the Billboard 200 a few years later, they were hailed as the saviours of rock’s authentic flame.
1987’s Appetite for Destruction would shoot Guns N’ Roses to stardom, but in a few short years, during the Use Your Illusion era, tensions between the band were already flaring up. By “The Spaghetti Incident?” covers album, relationships became intolerable, and Slash walked away in 1996 with bassist Duff McKagan following suit two years later. Frontman Axl Rose would plough on as the sole founding member, eventually releasing the long-gestated Chinese Democracy in 2008 to a clash of critical praise and bewilderment.
Even before his Guns N’ Roses departure, Slash had lent his expert guitar chops to a host of big names, from Bob Dylan instructing Slash to “play like…Django Reinhardt” on 1990’s ‘Wiggle Wiggle’, performing live with Carole King, and even playing with Jimi Hendrix’s old Band of Gypsys ensemble. Slash was busy, yet it would prove to be King of Pop demi-god Michael Jackson who struck Slash as lost in a realm of isolated, strange, too untethered to reality even for the former comrade of Nikki Sixx.
“I only knew him for the most part on a professional level,” Slash revealed on George Stroumboulopoulos Tonight in 2012. “I don’t even think when he attempted to be any closer that I even allowed it, because it’s just too crazy… there’s being famous, and then there’s being that kind of famous, and that’s a crazy world to be in because you have no sense of reality. He furthered: “You know, nobody will talk to him in a real fashion. Everybody’s sort of around him so they can gain something from him… It’s a very lonely situation.”
Jackson proved to be one of Slash’s most faithful clients. For ten years, Jackson would recruit the Guns N’ Roses guitarist for ‘Give In to Me’s lead solo and a cameo in the ‘Black or White’ video’s opening skit from 1991’s Dangerous, make another cameo on HIStory: Past, Present and Future, Book I’s ‘DS’, and make live surprises as late as 2001.
Slash’s observations of the former child star were more than correct, however. Jackson had been elevated to a plane of deified stature after Thriller, eclipsing even Elvis Presley, and suffering a lofty plane of hysterical adulation, not good for the soul or one’s mental health.
Slash was able to shift aside the celebrity bullshit and admire the artist underneath the celebrity frenzy. “He wasn’t a dictator or one of those idiosyncratic assholes that feel like they can get away with being an asshole because they’re so great,” he concluded to The Guardian in 2010. “Michael was the embodiment of music.”
