Gunning For Glory

You’d think that Slash would have become pretty blasé about his back catalogue being fawned over but, nope, he sounds genuinely delighted that Hot Press has adjudged Appetite For Destruction to be the finest metal album of all time.

“What are in second and third place?” he inquires.
AC/DC’s Back In Black and Motorhead’s No Sleep ‘Til Hammersmith.
“Wow, that’s fucking amazing. You know, Appetite For Destruction’s a good record and all, but I sometimes wonder why it’s as massively acclaimed as it is. I guess it became the battle cry for a lot of kids who picked up on the fact that it was five guys just doing what they wanted to do. It wasn’t a music industry contrivance like a lot of stuff that was around at the time.
“Guns N’ Roses was an effort by the collective members to do something that we thought was missing at that time. We’d just gotten over the first half of the ‘80s, which was abysmal. G N’ R was one of the last really great rock bands.”
Does he have a favourite Appetite For Destruction track?
“I guess ‘Paradise City’, which we’re playing tonight at the Road Recovery gig, is pretty definitive Guns N’ Roses. I’m just really proud that we made one of those records that everybody who’s considered cool has in their collections.”
Who managed to snort the most Bolivian marching powder off porn models’ silicon breasts in the studio?
“The actual recording of it was pretty calm,” Slash insists. “As crazy as our reputation was, we tried to be as professional as possible when it came to playing. For me, it was Jack Daniel’s and coffee in the morning; work from noon ‘til ten at night; and then go fucking crazy!”
As for the band’s eventual post-Use Your Illusion implosion, he proffers: “Early on, I was really pissed off being forced to quit something I loved as much as Guns N’ Roses. Most of it had to do with Axl who was just trying to be a prat. His personality doesn’t function well in a sort of professional sense.
“I try not to point the finger at him anymore. It’s more like, he developed a certain outlook on things and we stayed the same. And after a while, there was no common ground to meet on.”
Slash hasn’t spoken properly to Axl since 1996, has he?
“No, I haven’t. The litigation and stuff… that’s a real fucking thorn in my side.”
The final part of his autobiography – called, funnily enough, Slash and published by HarperCollins – features a coruscating attack on Axl and his always being late for gigs.
“He just didn’t get it,” Slash rues. “He’s still doing it now that it’s just his own group. It’s one of the rudest things you can do, and drove me crazy in the early days before all the other stuff started happening. Maybe because I’m always down at street level – I’m more of a rock fan than I am a musician. I guess it’s a singer thing – having to rise to the occasion and walk out at a certain moment really fucks with their heads.
“It was because of Duff and Izzy that I was like, ‘Okay, we can make this work.’ We had a camaraderie that sort of buffered the whole Axl kind of thing. Losing Izzy and Steven later on had a lot to do with why I couldn’t hack it after a while.
“I’m attracted to chaos,” he reflects, “which is funny ‘cause I’m so laid-back and non-confrontational. It’s just the guys who have the most individualistic talent turn out to be the quirkiest!”
Also recounted in warts ‘n’ detail is the extraordinary lengths Guns went to to score heroin before they supported Ted Nugent.
“Oh, yeah,” Slash winces. “At the time it was chaos. Your biggest priority is trying to get your fix, but you also have this really big show in front of you as well. That’s just the way things were at the time. Anyway, that night we got our smack and turned up at the gig pretty much on time.”
We’ve ascertained that relations with Axl are still strained, but are there other Guns N’ Roses people besides Slash that Duff hangs out with?
“Izzy and me are pretty tight still,” McKagan reveals. “I’ve run into Steven who’s sort of in a tribute band to himself – y’know, he’s out there doing Guns songs in clubs with three or four young guys. I’ll love him to the day I die, but I can’t really relate to him any more. He’s like (adopts stoner voice), ‘Hey dude, let’s go chase some pussy!’ We have a band we used to be in together in common, but that’s about it.”
We know he’s knocked the booze and the Class As on the head, but Duff must still have some drug of choice.
“I do, and it’s called exercise!” he laughs. “My big thing is Yukita Kon, which is a real old, traditional version of kickboxing. The adrenaline pump from it is fucking amazing!”
Mr. McKagan’s other addiction at the moment is watching Obama slug it out with Hillary.
“I’m fucking glued, man. I’m not old enough to remember JFK, but my brothers – two of whom got drafted to serve in Vietnam – and sisters say that Barack is definitely made of the same stuff. Dude, we need an administration that’s going to get off this fucking Republican war bullshit. I wanna be able to go to foreign countries and not feel embarrassed about being an American.”
Velvet Revolver playing in Dubai recently reminded Duff of some of Guns N’ Roses’ foreign adventures.
“During the first Gulf War Guns flew into Istanbul and I was thinking, ‘Who the fuck’s going to come to our gig?’ Well, the answer was 80,000 brown kids with black leather jackets who sang every word and went fucking apeshit. Heavy metal, hard rock or whatever you wanna call it is a universal language.”
Amen to that!