Slash

Slash (born July 23, 1965, London, England) is a British-American guitarist whose emotional playing, whether in melodic solos or bluesy yet heavy riffs, makes him one of the greatest rock guitarists. He has most famously played for the band Guns N’ Roses, and his signature look—a top hat and an amber Gibson Les Paul—has become inseparable from the band’s image.

From Stoke-on-Trent to the Sunset Strip

He was born Saul Hudson to Ola Hudson, an African American costume designer, and Anthony Hudson, an English album cover designer. Initially raised in Stoke-on-Trent, he moved to Los Angeles with his father in 1970 to join Ola Hudson, who had started working there. Living in Laurel Canyon, a bohemian neighborhood, Saul Hudson grew up surrounded by artists. His father designed album covers for musicians such as Joni Mitchell and Neil Young, and his mother created costumes for David Bowie, John Lennon, and the Pointer Sisters, among others. American actor Seymour Cassel, the father of a childhood friend, nicknamed the young Saul “Slash” because he was always in a hurry.

By the mid-1970s his parents had separated. While his mother was briefly dating Bowie, Slash started living with his grandmother. Repeatedly expelled from school, he felt alienated from his classmates. “I had long hair, and the schools I went to were filled with kids of bankers and real-estate agents. It wasn’t like any of them came from the same background I had,” he explained to Rolling Stone in 1991. However, one of them would change Slash’s life.

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Steven Adler met Slash in middle school. Both raced BMX bikes, and they soon became friends. In 1979, despite Slash’s lack of aspiration to be a musician, they decided to form a band. Adler proclaimed himself the guitarist since he owned a guitar, and Slash opted to pick up the bass. After seeing a guitar teacher play a solo, Slash was determined to become a lead guitarist. Meanwhile, Adler had switched to learning the drums.

Although their band never went beyond the theoretical stage, Slash stopped attending high school and instead spent 12 hours or so every day practicing guitar. His first guitar was a Spanish acoustic with only one string left that his grandmother had kept in a closet. In 1981 he started Tidus Sloan, his first band. He and his bandmates played instrumental covers of rock songs. In 1983, with most of Tidus Sloan’s members, he formed Road Crew, which featured Adler on the drums. A year later, in need of a new bassist, Adler and Slash put an ad in a newspaper to which Duff McKagan, a punk musician freshly arrived from Seattle, replied. Although Road Crew quickly disbanded, the group fleshed out the melody for “Rocket Queen,” which would later appear on Guns N’ Roses’ first album, Appetite for Destruction.

After seeing Axl Rose sing and Izzy Stradlin play guitar at a Sunset Strip club in 1984, Slash wanted to form a band with them. The result was Hollywood Rose, which included Slash, Adler, and Rose. (Stradlin pursued another project.) Although it was another short-lived band, it has been recognized as the precursor of Guns N’ Roses.

The year 1985 would be decisive for Slash. After a stint in Black Sheep, he auditioned for the hair metal band Poison. He was rejected, not for a lack of technical abilities but because he refused the heavy makeup and extravagant hair that was Poison’s dress code. By June 1985 Slash, Adler, Stradlin, Rose, and McKagan had agreed to play together. Guns N’ Roses was born.

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Guns N’ Roses

By playing the Los Angeles club circuit, the band progressively grew their following. In late February 1986 they performed at the Troubadour, a rock club near Sunset Boulevard. But it was not just any concert, as they later discovered that Tom Zutaut from the artists and repertoire department at Geffen Records was there. Almost a month later he signed them to the label.

Despite this early victory, the road to rock-and-roll stardom was full of obstacles. The band had a record deal, but they did not have a manager or a producer. “No one wanted to work with us, we had the worst reputation, we freaked everybody out who met us,” Slash told Metal Hammer in 2020. Ultimately, Zutaut found Alan Niven, who had managed the rock band Great White, and producer Mike Clink to work with them.

In December 1986 Guns N’ Roses released Live ?!*@ Like a Suicide, an extended play (EP) with two original songs, “Reckless Life” and “Move to the City,” and multiple covers, including one of Aerosmith’s “Mama Kin.” With this EP, the band aimed to give something tangible to their fans as they prepared to stop playing clubs to focus on recording their first album. Notably, Slash drew the early Guns N’ Roses logo that appeared on its cover.

Six months later, in July 1987, the band’s debut album was released to little attention. Titled Appetite for Destruction, its 12 tracks had a raw sound and brutally honest lyrics inspired by the band’s wild life on the streets. Radio stations refused to play its single, “Welcome to the Jungle,” and MTV declined to broadcast its music video. After learning that Geffen was ready to abandon the album’s promotion, Zutaut convinced the network to broadcast the video once a night for three nights at the off-peak time of 1 am in Los Angeles and 4 am in New York City.

After one play, viewers called MTV to show it again. It immediately became the network’s most requested video. (MTV claimed to a Geffen executive that it received so many calls that its switchboard exploded.) Radio stations were now ready to grant airplay to Guns N’ Roses, with their disc jockeys’ song of choice being the ballad “Sweet Child O’ Mine,” which helped the album reach the top of the charts by August 1988, more than a year after its release. The album’s outsized popularity was credited to the audience’s hunger for down-to-earth rock music in an age of radio-friendly hair metal.

Appetite for Destruction’s success was also due to Slash’s memorable riffs, such as the “Sweet Child O’ Mine” intro. His bandmate Axl Rose explained Slash’s appeal in a 1988 MTV interview that also featured the guitarist:

Slash is one of the most emotional guitar players that I’ve ever met or ever seen.…I came to L.A., and I saw all these people trying to be Eddie Van Halen, and it took five years to find somebody who played more from the heart rather than just trying to be the fastest…He’ll be very quiet most of the time and really won’t let a lot of himself out until he picks up a guitar, and then his heart and soul seems to pour out through the guitar.…A lot of times…I’ll sit down right on the stage right in front of his amp when he’s doing a solo because it just means so much to me just to hear that.

The band’s landmark album was followed by the controversial G N’ R Lies (1988). While it contained multiple songs from their 1986 EP, one of the previously unreleased tracks, “One in a Million,” featured racist and homophobic slurs as well as xenophobic rhetoric. In 1991 the band released the ambitious double album Use Your Illusion I and II in 1991. Between the recording sessions for the latter, Slash played guitar for two tracks on Michael Jackson’s Dangerous album. In the Use Your Illusion set, Slash’s melodic solos, especially for the ballad “November Rain” and “Estranged,” stood out. He was even thanked for “killer guitar melodies” in the credits. He also became one of the band’s most recognizable members because of his iconic performances in the music videos, especially a scene in “November Rain” in which he leaves Rose’s wedding to play a solo in the desert.

However, mainstream success, lineup changes, and substance abuse tore Guns N’ Roses apart. In 1994, as he gradually distanced himself from the band, Slash focused on a side project, the supergroup Slash’s Snakepit, featuring Alice in Chains bassist Mike Inez and recently fired Guns N’ Roses guitarist Gilby Clarke. “Snakepit was an outlet for me after two years of touring stadiums with GN’R and dealing with everything that that entailed. I needed a simple rock’n’roll outlet so I could reinvent in my mind why I do what I do,” Slash later declared to Metal Hammer. Reworking songs that Rose had rejected for the next Guns N’ Roses album, the short-lived band released in 1995 the album It’s Five O’Clock Somewhere, which sold more than a million copies. By 1996 Slash had formally left Guns N’ Roses.

Velvet Revolver

Following his departure from Guns N’ Roses, Slash led a number of short-lived projects. He first formed Slash’s Blues Ball, a blues cover band that toured the United States and Europe until 1998. He then briefly reformed Slash’s Snakepit, and in 2000 the supergroup released its second album, Ain’t Life Grand. In 2001 Slash was diagnosed with cardiomyopathy, a form of congestive heart failure resulting from his years of alcohol and substance use.

Although Slash was originally given between six days and six weeks to live by a doctor, he beat these odds through physical therapy, surgery, and sobriety. In 2002 he reunited with his ex-Guns N’ Roses bandmates McKagan and drummer Matt Sorum to play a benefit concert in honor of late drummer Randy Castillo, who worked with Ozzy Osbourne and Mötley Crüe. They enjoyed the experience so much that they started looking for a singer to form a new band together. By June 2003 they had found one, Scott Weiland, who had recently left the rock band Stone Temple Pilots, and they had a name, Velvet Revolver.

In June 2004 they released Contraband, the band’s first studio album. Praised for its merging of Guns N’ Roses’ and Stone Temple Pilots’ influences, the album was a commercial success, selling four million copies in the United States. Its hard rock single “Slither” won the 2004 Grammy Award for best hard rock performance, and the ballad “Fall to Pieces” instantly became a fan favorite.

In July 2007 Velvet Revolver released a second album, Libertad, which received positive reviews but did not achieve the same commercial and popular success as Contraband. The band fired Weiland in April 2008 because of his “increasingly erratic behavior and personal problems.” Although they wanted to continue playing together, the remaining bandmates never settled on a singer to replace Weiland.

A tale of two bands: Myles Kennedy and the Conspirators collaboration and a Guns N’ Roses reunion

After another band fallout due to a stormy relationship with the lead singer, Slash wanted to try something different. He started working on a solo album self-titled Slash (2010) with guest vocalists. However, for two tracks, “Back from Cali” and “Starlight,” he could not decide who should sing them. After hearing positive feedback regarding Myles Kennedy, the rock band Alter Bridge’s front man, he asked him to collaborate and sing on them. When the time came to tour, Slash asked Kennedy to join as he had the necessary range to handle songs from Slash’s solo album as well as the Velvet Revolver and Guns N’ Roses repertoires.

For Slash’s next album, their partnership became a full creative collaboration. The 2012 Apocalyptic Love album was credited to “Slash featuring Myles Kennedy and the Conspirators.” Since then they have released three other albums, World on Fire (2014), Living the Dream (2018), and 4 (2022).

In 2012 Slash was inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame as part of Guns N’ Roses. At the time the prospect of rejoining Guns N’ Roses as lead guitarist seemed unimaginable. By January 2016 it had become reality. Though the details of how Slash and Rose mended their relationship after two decades of silence and occasional attacks in the press remained unknown, the thaw reportedly began in 2014. Over the summer of 2015 Slash announced that they had reconciled.

McKagan, who was on good terms with both of them, simultaneously rejoined the band. On April 1, 2016, Guns N’ Roses, with three of its original members, performed at the Troubadour, where it all started. It was the beginning of the Not in This Lifetime tour, named after Rose’s 2012 comment regarding the possibility of a reunion, which included two dates at the Coachella festival. Since then the band has been consistently touring.

Slash has also contributed to new Guns N’ Roses material. Four new songs—“Absurd” (2021), “Hard Skool” (2021), “The General” (2023), and “Perhaps” (2023)—have been released, and Slash and McKagan have repeatedly mentioned working on a new Guns N’ Roses record.

In the midst of touring and recording with his two bands, Slash released a solo blues album, Orgy of the Damned (2024), with guest vocalists Demi Lovato, Brian Johnson from AC/DC, and Billy Gibbons from ZZ Top, among others. He promoted the album with the S.E.R.P.E.N.T Festival, an all-star blues tour.