Array Slash - Slash

ePub edition October 2007

ISBN 9780061752353

10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

Jacket Design by James L. Iacobelli

Front Jacket Illustration by Shawn Kenney/Michael Rotondo

I’ve been asked more than a few times why I decided to do this book at all and here’s why: A few people who know me well kept telling me that I should do it—and finally I agreed with them. I was very reluctant to share my life in any way, particularly in a medium open to public consumption, most of all because I regarded a memoir as something you do when you’ve got no career left to speak of. That isn’t the case for me, and even if it were, I wouldn’t have much interest in that. It’s not natural to regard your life objectively, but once I did, I realized that my story up until now made for something pretty entertaining. I also realized that if I didn’t get it all down now, there was a very good chance that I’d forget it all. In the end I realized that this book would serve another purpose: it would put one era of my career to rest and signify the start of the rest of it.

I’d like to make one more thing pretty clear, because this is another question that haunts me almost every day, usually because it’s asked by people who don’t know me at all. I’d like to state, very simply once more why I chose not to continue on with Guns N’ Roses so that no one feels the need to ask me this ever again when they see me on the street. Here it goes: 1) the constant disrespect for all involved by going on late for no good reason night after night after night, 2) the legal manipulation that Axl forced on us, from demanding ownership of the name to downgrading us, contractually, to hired hands, and 3) losing Izzy and Steven, who were such an integral part of the band’s sound and personality… without them, the band no longer had its original chemistry.

My departure had nothing to do with artistic differences, as many people claim to know. It was not as simple as “Axl wanted synths and Slash was old-school.” It had nothing to do with Axl wanting to go digital and Slash staying analog. To think that dissolving the kind of band and the kind of musical chemistry we had over something so trivial is just asinine. It’s true, I am old-school, and I do like keeping it simple—but I’ve never been close-minded. If anything, I was more than flexible and willing to try any kind of recording technique or explore any new sound, so long as I was doing so on an equal playing field with musicians that worked together toward a common goal. I would have hung in there with Axl through an industrial record or whatever else he wanted to try if the creative vibe between us was positive. My flexibility is the only thing that kept me in the band as long as it did—that’s how a team works. Unfortunately, we stopped being a team somewhere along the way.

As for the rest of how it all played out, I learned, looking back on it all, that the people Axl hired to “represent his interests” through all of the band’s undoing could have been a bit smarter than they were. Maybe intelligence has nothing to do with it: had they cared enough about him and about Guns N’ Roses as a band to have advised him to pursue any other path than the one he did this story may have had a different ending. Anyone could have foreseen the lack of positive outcome that lay ahead on the road Axl chose to go down. But then again, maybe that is how he wanted it

MY BEST FRIEND MARC CANTER IS putting out a book that is the visual accompaniment to all that you read here. Here’s a guy who way back when I was living at my mom’s house, before junior high, always had an Instamatic in his hand and was snapping pictures. Marc came to as many of my gigs in high school, in Hollywood, and once I was in Guns as he could possibly get to. His ever-present camera was just part of Marc. I never thought anything of it and never thought that any of those pictures would ever be seen again. I never thought that a side effect of that hobby of his would be a pretty extensive and intimate chronology of everything Guns N’ Roses did prior to 1988. All of it was just sitting around Marc’s house all these years—until now. It is now a book of pictures called Reckless Road . I never would have expected my childhood buddy to be capable of such shots.

BEFORE I WRAP THIS THING UP I HAVE something important to say about my parents. In the retelling of my childhood, I emphasized the negative over the positive, because the negative aspects of how my family evolved ended up informing my decisions as a kid more than any of the positive ones did. The negative is what explains where I turned in my youth. But what was lost in my re-creation was how my parents’ positive influences taught me to be the person I am.

My parents were such a prominent, encouraging influence on me as a child during the years when I strove to find out who I was going to be. I couldn’t have asked for better guides because they are, truly, two of the most creative people that I’ve ever met—and at this point I’ve met many. Both of them are amazingly talented, and though they didn’t ultimately prove to be the right match for each other, they did see beyond their differences to raise their children in a unique and informed fashion. The way they brought my brother and me up was unconventional but infused with love and discipline that never veered into being overly domineering.

I LIVE SO MUCH IN THE MOMENT THAT I’ve never daydreamed about the future beyond tomorrow. I’ve never related to those people who plan their lives five years down the line. As much as those types think they have control of their reality, I beg to disagree, because how much can anyone really “plan” what is going to happen to them beyond the next twenty-four hours? Its not that I don’t care what happens five years from now, its just that the next twenty-four hours is the stepping-stone to getting there.

I’ve found that just being , day to day, just waiting to see what comes, and going from there is the only way to grow. It’s informed how I’ve dealt with Velvet Revolver in nothing but the best respect: we have come so far in so short a time. Whenever we’re onstage, it’s at once so familiar and exciting that it seems like our first show even though it’s our thousandth. I’m consumed with what we’re doing, I’m proud of the record we made in Libertad , and I feel that we’re in a place where we are just now capable of tapping into what this band is really capable of.

At the time of this writing, our second record is just a few weeks old, but I can’t wait to see where our next record is going to go. We’re lucky; we stumbled upon something that is just beginning to evolve and it’s doing so in such a positive way. As this book comes to a close, Velvet Revolver is about to embark on our first headlining tour of arenas and sheds. We got to that level by the end of our two-year promotion of Contraband, but this is different: we’re starting where we ended, and from there we can only build a bigger beast.

I’m happier than I’ve ever been musically. This band writes creative, earnest, complex rock and roll. It’s not quite ironic, but as far as I’m concerned, it sure is funny that I found my future by revisiting my past. After looking around and ignoring the obvious so as to avoid anything that seemed like a revisitation, I ended up locking in with the guys I’d spent the better part of my career and my life with. And once we did, the past became an afterthought. And the present has been better than it has ever been.

As for the future, aside from playing in Velvet Revolver, at some point I want to do a record with all the players I’ve played with and admired over the years. I have a list of them, which is long. At this point, all that I know is that I plan to call it “Slash and Friends.” I’m actually looking at my wish list of collaborators right now and no, I’m not going to tell you who is on it.