I’ve never used the adjective “galactically” to describe anyone or anything, but as I said, any Slash related discussion typically involves a more robust attempt at expression. There is a certain largeness to everything associated with Slash and his career. I almost caught myself using the word “grandeur,” but that doesn’t capture it. His talent, his ability, his musicianship, and his performances—they’re not grand; they’re large. Enormous. Titanic.
And somehow, Slash has managed to navigate that titanic talent through all the numerous icebergs that the rock n’ roll life floats out there. The more dynamic and electrifying the talent, the larger and more deadly and jutting those objects tend to be.
Think about it. Live performance is an exhilarating experience, but usually it is least exhilarating for the audience. During the time of our fathers and grandfathers, the arbiters of morality warned that rock n’ roll was going to turn us (teenagers, youth) into amoral, nearly bestial idiots—orgiastic monsters of Id. But the most regular victims of the ecstatic aspects of rock n’ roll have been the purveyors. No matter how electrifying a live performance by a dynamic musician is for an audience, the effect on the musician himself is tenfold. The audience reflects all of that electricity back. And after a hyper-adrenalized, endorphin-gushing night of live Slash, you certainly can’t expect that artist to slip quietly off to his Hampton Inn room for some warm milk just before he brushes his teeth and tucks himself into his Sleep-Number Bed. Some energy must be dissipated. Some steam, as it were, must be blown off.
The toll of dealing with the ecstatic effects of this lifestyle is practically a cliché. Many lesser musicians have burned bright and hot and then cindered away. The more profoundly dynamic, the true adepts—well, many of them suffered the ultimate fading away, into that good night. It was more than they could endure. The extent of their talent, their creativity, their abilities was, often, more than they could endure.
But Slash has endured.
Maybe the difference is a matter of perspective. For Slash it has seemed that no matter how much the success, how great they adulation, the whole concept of “Slash” (meaning, the commodity of him, his role in the rock n’ roll culture, the Guitar Titan) has never grown bigger, more important, or more consuming than the music itself. Despite the drugs, the booze, and the outrageous opportunities and invitations to excess that such a life offers, he has never lost sight of what matters most—music. Nor has he failed to deliver.
For many of the truly dynamic musicians who have attained the commercial, critical, and peer success that Slash has achieved, surviving to play another day somewhere down the road has often involved removing themselves, remaking themselves, and return as, well, something more like an act based on their former guitar god incarnation. They become, in a way, sort of their own reunion tour. On much rarer occasions, a band, like Aerosmith, has managed to reform and pick up where they left off: older, wiser, but with the same vigor, and a cultivated sense of how better to survive the superheated environment of those world tours, those stadium shows, those endless impromptu entourages of anyone offering them anything they could possibly want or imagine.
But Slash never went away.
A lesser artist and lesser talent most likely would have been unable to emerge from that fascinating and creative miasma that was Guns N’ Roses, the gloriously dark journey of Use Your Illusion I and Use Your Illusion II, but Slash has really never missed a beat nor veered from what has seemed an almost messianic commitment to making music. Not only by quickly conjuring up Slash’s Snakepit and Velvet Revolver, but also through an incredibly prolific series of collaborations, guest appearances, compositions for film scores, and an unrivaled body of session work. He has never shied nor regretted nor even disavowed all the glorious depredations in which he indulged, the perquisites of the rock icon. His unabashed autobiography almost seems one last, heady dip into that rocker’s narcissistic pool. Or maybe he was just counting his many blessings, by virtue of which he is still here to bestow upon us his many gifts.
The first time I saw Slash, I was less than impressed. But I had only seen him, not heard him. The top hat, the hair, the dangling cigarette: he had the look of yet another anonymous rock trickster in standard regalia, another hard rock band’s requisite dark knight. (In hindsight, the costume persona is less than surprising: his mother was a designer who made costumes for the flamboyant likes of David Bowie and the Pointer Sisters; his father was an art director at Geffen Records. The blend of music and theatricality ran in the family.) Then he started to play, and all that stuff went away.
There is always a moment during a Slash performance, a recurring moment actually, during a solo, when Slash brings the neck of his Les Paul up almost perpendicular to the stage, close to his body, and a sort of communion begins. One almost feels like an intruder, witnessing a moment of personal intimacy. It is an intimate moment, but it’s more than a man and his guitar. Rather, it seems more like an artist in the embrace of the music. Fortunately for us, that’s always been the strongest, most abiding embrace for Saul “Slash” Hudson.
________________________
Thom Palmer is a writer, designer, and very amateur musician. His most recent novel, Desire, was published last year.
