From his earliest days with Guns N’ Roses, it was clear that’s Slash’s lead guitar style – be it the direct, deep-in-the-pocket pentatonic licks and gritty double-stop bends of Welcome to the Jungle or the emotive, vocal-like phrasings that characterized Sweet Child O’ Mine – was heavily steeped in the blues.
And yet, he came up in a time and place – 1980s Los Angeles, to be exact – when hard rock had largely eschewed those stylistic hallmarks in favor of an acrobatic and highly technical approach that emphasized speed and flash over feel and, sometimes, taste.
Or, as Slash puts it, “There were a ton of, you know, tremolo-bar fucking fiends going around,” he laughs. “But that never really spoke to me. I was just doing my own thing because that’s what I wanted to do. I wasn’t really interested in all that other stuff.”
That said, Slash also emphasizes that there were plenty of guitarists in the scene that he appreciated and admired.
“Lately I think about it and I go, ‘Oh, yeah, there were some really great guitar players,’” he says. “Like, Paul Gilbert is an amazing fucking guitar player. Jason Becker was insanely good. Joe Satriani and Steve Vai, who’ve been around forever, they have their own unique personality, just the same as Stevie Ray Vaughan or Johnny Ramone.”
In Slash’s estimation, good guitar playing is about having your own style, whether you’re a blues man or the most high-octane shred demon.
“No matter what type of playing it is, the really good ones that stand out are the ones that have their own unique personality,” he says.
“That’s what I’ve always been attracted to. It doesn’t matter whatever technique it is that they’re using, as long as it’s theirs,” he laughs. “I mean, Yngwie? Yngwie means it. He fucking owns that shit, whether you like it or not.”
As far as using the blues as a launching pad to create something wholly unique, Slash turns to the man largely credited with kickstarting the Eighties shred craze – Eddie Van Halen – and makes the point that, even as he was rearranging the rock guitar landscape, he was also a blues aficionado at heart, acknowledging the influence of players like Billy Gibbons, Jeff Beck and, most prominently, Eric Clapton, at every turn.
“That was the coolest thing about Eddie for me,” Slash says. “All the great ideas he had that were uniquely his own, all these left-field kind of things, underneath all that was a really tasty blues guitar player. He just added all these other ways to branch out his expression on top of that. And that’s why nobody could ever touch him.”
- Slash's inaugural S.E.R.P.E.N.T. Festival is under way – see here for dates and ticket details.
