Original subtitles

(rock music)

I just loved the Sunset Strip,

because it was fun,

and there were a lot of things going on,

and there was a lot of music going on.

And I loved to come down here with my parents,

especially my dad, and go to gigs

and watch them set up.

And then there was something very exciting

about that moment before the band actually walked on,

where all the gear was just sitting there waiting to go.

(police sirens)

(soft music)

My dad was telling me,

"Yeah, well, you were conceived in Paris."

(laughs)

And I guess my mom and him met there

and then went to England,

and I was born in Hampstead.

But my family, my British side of my family lives in Stoke,

so I lived there.

And grew up there for a little while

and went to school and hung out in Stoke,

and I think that was the last years of stability I ever had.

(laughs)

And then moved to Los Angeles with my dad.

My mom was living in L.A. at the time,

and I've been here ever since.

At the time, you know, 1969, 1970,

it was an interracial couple, the hippie thing,

it was a lot of interesting things going on.

I first met Slash in 1976 while I was in the fifth grade.

What I first started noticing special about Slash,

was his talent for art.

It was pretty exciting,

and at that point we were living in Laurel Canyon,

so we were right in the thick

of that huge sort of Bohemian creative scene

that was happening there.

And my dad was doing album covers

for Jackson Browne, and Joni Mitchell,

and a lot of people up there in the hills,

and then my mom was doing

clothes for all these different entertainers.

So, I mean, it was like Linda Ronstadt

and Joni Mitchell were one of them,

but then she was also doing

like the Pointer Sisters, and she was doing Flip Wilson,

and all these different kind of entertainers,

so I was, it was a lot of fun, sort of being

raised in that chaos.

I don't remember him as a little kid,

even though I do know his dad, yeah.

His dad, I remember his dad

actually did a lot of our photography.

So that was kind of a tight-knit

bunch of people back there in Hollywood back then.

When you look back at the '60s and stuff,

a lot of these individuals that I was sort of raised around

were really astute, very intelligent, smart,

very cool people.

And it was a very inspired time.

I think that's the best way to put it.

A lot of creativity going on,

a lot of just brilliant thinking happening.

And, yeah, I enjoyed that a lot.

All these young comedians, you know,

I mean Steve Martin and Albert Brooks,

all these guys were kids.

They were all writing for the Smothers Brothers show.

I lived right next door to Micky Dolenz, for the Monkees,

and Frank Zappa lived right under us.

So all those writers, it was like a pretty tight-knit

kind of thing.

But that's when I first met his dad

and everything like that.

My mom was doing Bowie's wardrobe

for a while there, and then they became

sort of an item, in that sort of,

in those days, in that loosey-goosey kind of way.

(laughs)

He mentioned that his mom had done

some things for David Bowie

and different people like that,

so she was in the industry.

Soon after that, we started riding,

fooling around with BMX bikes,

and instantly he was a star.

I took the bike thing, the BMXing, pretty seriously,

but there was a funny dynamic to BMX,

because we also used to do a lot of freestyle

and ride around, well, all over Los Angeles.

We would race our bikes in the Valley on weekends,

and when he'd go off a jump,

there'd be flashes going off from everyone,

because he just had more style,

he was a little quicker,

and usually won his races.

And then on the weekends,

we would tow over Laurel Canyon into the Valley,

you know, just grab the sides of cars and go over the hill.

And there'd be, you know, any time, anywhere

from a half dozen to a dozen of us all in traffic,

and it was pretty insane.

And then we'd ride all the way out

to Van Nuys, I guess it was,

and compete, and they had the weekend races,

and then we'd ride all the way back

in the middle of the night

and come home from Laurel Canyon again.

So part of it was very sort of professional,

and the other part of it was just simple hell-raising.

(laughs) Yeah.

I was a skateboarder, he was a BMX bike rider.

Well, we met in junior high school.

I was running around in my classroom.

I ran in his classroom, and his teacher had his finger

in his face and was telling him

he was going to be a loser and a bum all his life.

And that instant, I realized I had somebody else

that was just like me.

I met Steve Adler at the school one day,

and he fell off a skateboard,

and he looked like he bit it pretty bad,

and nobody was concerned about him, (laughs)

He was just laying flat on his back,

so I went over to see if he was okay,

and he and I struck up a friendship,

and it turned out that his mother

had kicked him out.

He was living at Chatsworth,

and his mother kicked him out,

and he had been relocated to his grandparents'

in West Hollywood, so that's why

he suddenly turned up.

And I went over to his place.

His grandparents worked in a bakery,

so they'd leave early in the morning,

and we'd ditch school and go hang out at his place.

And he had a Kiss Alive II record,

and he'd put that on this little

piece-of-shit stereo that he had,

and he had a cheap little electric guitar and an amp,

and he would crank that all the way to ten,

turn the stereo to ten and just bang on this thing.

And that was exciting.

He came over to my house for the first time,

and I put on my Kiss record,

and I had a little guitar, and I started playing it.

I was actually doing like two chords and one scale,

and I just did all my Ace Frehley positions

and playing it really loud, and he loved it.

And he went from riding BMX bikes to guitar.

And my grandmother had one in the closet

at her apartment, and she pulled it out,

and it was a Spanish acoustic,

and it had one string on it, and that was it,

and I started learning riffs on the one string.

A guitar with one string, no less.

You know, no wonder he can master

each string so amazingly.

(electric guitar music)

And that was really it.

All of a sudden, I was just completely

absorbed in a guitar, I mean, like a crazy person, you know?

There was nothing else in life

that was important at that point.

How old were you then?

I was 14, 15 years old.

That's quite old, actually.

Well, like I said, prior to that,

I had no inclination to pick up an instrument, you know?

And his name, let's start off with his name,

how he got his name.

He's been Slash since we were 13 years old.

An actor, a friend of ours, his dad is a big actor,

and he is the one who gave him his name.

His name was Seymour Cassel.

His son was my best friend.

And when we were in the last year of junior high,

the summer before high school and stuff,

we used to hang out at Matt's all the time,

and I guess Seymour would see me,

I mean this was a very sort of old-school

sort of rock and roll household, you know?

Very liberal. (laughs)

And, I mean, we could ditch school

and hang out at Seymour's,

and as long as we prune his pot plants,

it was okay, you know?

So I guess, you know, he'd see me running around,

and at some point I had started playing guitar,

and I was putting bands together and this and that,

and so I was always in a hurry,

always sort of, you know, never had time to sit and talk,

and so he just got into the habit of calling me Slash,

because he always saw me as this (whooshing sound)

That went by, you know?

So he said as a joke, "You're like a slash.

"You're here and then you're there."

And he just like, "Wow," you know?

He just like picked up on this, said, "That's cool,"

and came up with, just started saying

that would make a good stage name,

and he started calling himself Slash.

And he's been Slash ever since.

Everybody called him Slash except for his grandmother.

There was this great little music book that I found

that had, it was like, I think it was just

“"How to Play Rock Guitar", you know,

which seemed pretty intriguing at the time,

and it had a little disc in it,

and there was a picture of Hendrix in there,

there was a picture of Clapton in there,

and Mike Bloomfield, Jeff Beck,

like all these guys that I was really into.

And I remember looking at the tablature in there

and figuring it out,

and all of a sudden putting these three notes together

that sounded like rock and roll to me,

and it was like, you know, that moment

when the skies part and, "Ahhh."

(laughs)

You know, I mean I'll never forget that.

(guitar music)

Of course, loved Motorhead.

Went to see them at the Hollywood Palladium, me and Slash.

All I ever wanted to do after I seen Elvis

was to be a rock and roll star.

And whereas the circumstances have somewhat changed,

I still love it.

I love doing that.

All my dreams came true now.

Not many people can say that.

Most people have to work at a job

they fuckin' despise all their lives, right?

And then you get a frickin' wristwatch if you're lucky.

I was very lucky to get out of that.

I worked in a factory for a while.

My stepfather got me the job so he could

keep an eye on me, you know?

So he grew me there till they fired me.

(laughs)

Fuck you, you know?

I mean, he's more excited than me,

because I'm old now, you know?

Tough to be an old fuck, you know?

But he's still really enthusiastic.

And I'm enthusiastic about it,

but like, he's still a kid in his enthusiasm, you know?

At the same time, there was the whole scene going on

here on Sunset and on Santa Monica,

and that's what Steven was into,

and at this point I think he'd switched over to drums.

And neither of us had any money,

so he didn't have a drum kit,

and I was, I think the first electric guitar I got

was a cheap Memphis Les Paul copy.

So I was already onto the Les Paul from day one.

And then finally Steven and I ended up

hooking back up together.

He'd finally got a drum kit, and at that point

he started dragging me over here and checking out bands

and it started to become sort of a habit.

Well, we used to hang out at this pizza place

on Santa Monica and Sweetzer,

and they had a juke box there,

and we would play Van Halen over and over.

Over and over we played Van Halen,

Aerosmith, that was pretty much it.

Van Halen and Aerosmith over and over and over. (laughs)

(guitar music)

Well, he told me a story, that was funny,

the first time we met actually.

He saw me, when he was 13 years old,

saw me play at the California World Music Festival

at the Coliseum here when my band's first record came out,

and we had a hit song called Hold On,

and he was in the audience, and he remembers seeing me,

and I thought that was very amusing.

And that was kind of a starting point of our friendship.

There were these girls in the class

that were full-on sort of glam rocker chicks,

and they were sort of hot, you know?

Too much makeup, leather jackets, fingernail polish,

jet-black hair, and they were raving about this band

Motley Crue.

And so one day, and they had flyers,

and they would go out and they would pass flyers.

And I was like, you know, a little bit jealous.

I was like, "Fuck, why can't I get some chicks to fuckin',"

And I don't even have a functioning band, you know.

But anyway, so one day they met Nikki Sixx and Tommy Lee

outside the school giving them flyers,

and they came down in their full, sort of "rockstumes"

(laughs) you know I guess you call them.

And that was the first time I ever saw Nikki Sixx,

and I actually went to the gig that that flyer was for

and saw Motley Crue at the Whiskey,

and they were just phenomenal.

They were like, Nikki knew how to take everything

that was every kid's fantasy, you know,

as far as what they wanted to see in a rock show

from Alice Cooper to New York Dolls

to Marc Bolan and, you know, to name a few.

But Hollywood was the place to go,

because there was a scene.

It was a scene, whether it was punk

or this kind of the whole thing

with like Rodney Bingenheimer's English Disco

and then you had Kim Fowley,

and I started hanging around with him.

It was such a scene in Los Angeles, you know,

different eclectic types of musicians,

and I've always loved the Los Angeles history,

if you know what's happened on Sunset Boulevard.

And when I felt I was ready,

I called Slash up, and I said,

"Why don't you meet me Sam and Sydney Park

at like 8 o'clock," and I went down there,

set my drums up, and he came down.

I played for him, and we said,

"Okay, we're going to make it."

You know, at some point,

I remember him saying there's this band called Rose

or Hollywood Rose, and the singer Axl,

or Bill at the time, he was going by Bill and Izzy,

really love to get them in my band.

And then I had an ad in the paper

looking for a bass player at one point,

and it turned out to be Duff.

And somebody told me about

the Recycler Newspaper, that's where you look

for other musicians.

But I went and met Slash and Steve at Canter's.

So we're sitting at our booth,

and we're sort of watching the front door

to see who this character's going to be

when he walks in, and eventually,

this literally 6'7" or 6'6" guy

in a black and red leather trench coat

walks in with like spiky, up-to-the-ceiling blonde hair,

and I'm like, "That's got to be him."

I met them at Canter's.

And they had long hair,

and I had like short blue hair,

but they were really like, Slash had a girlfriend,

that was really like, sweet to me,

and we hung out for probably two hours at Canter's

and just talked about music.

And then we went back to Slash's Mom's house,

and he lived in the basement,

and he had a snake, and he picked up

an acoustic guitar and started playing.

And I'd never, like, I'd played with a lot

of guitar players, good ones, but Slash had

like this, he was 19 years old, and he was playing

like kind of a really smooth old blues guy.

It like played with so much age, so much depth

to his musicality.

I was kind of stunned, you know?

And, so really, I mean, Slash and Steve were

the first two guys I met here in L.A.

(Slash): We went up to the bathroom

and polished off a bottle of vodka,

and we've just been friends ever since, you know?

Yeah, it was just, you know,

there was just a lot of different people

coming together then.

Punk rock was over.

There was sort of a, probably a first wave of metal,

Motorhead kind of changed everything in 1980.

Like, a lot of things that weren't okay before 1980

were suddenly okay.

Slash took me to my first Sunset Strip show, I guess.

It was at the Troubadour.

And it was Axl.

It was L. A. Guns with Axl.

Ironically enough, Duff was living

across the street from Izzy

in this cheap apartment, and so they met,

and then Izzy and Axl and Duff and Tracii Guns

ended up having a band,

and that ended up being called Guns N' Roses,

but prior to that, I'd had a band with Axl

called Hollywood Rose.

Recently, Aerosmith used a drawing of mine

for their gate fold on the album,

and it was a drawing that I did

probably before I picked up a guitar,

when I was just a fan, you know?

And when I did the drawing,

I'd given it to a friend of mine

who was a massive, like, die-hard Aerosmith fan,

and he'd printed up copies of it

and gave them to people, I guess.

And one day I was working in a guitar store,

and I think he had like blue creepers on,

sparkly black pants, and a pink leather jacket,

and his hair was all teased up, you know,

but at the same time not overdone, very cool,

and he came in and he asked me

"Do you have a copy of it?"

And I said no, and that was the first time

I'd ever met Izzy.

Yeah, then Izzy moved across the street from me

in Hollywood, and he was kind of like

the Johnny Thunders character,

and Axl was this just sort of really gifted

savant of a singer, you know,

like who sings like that?

But everybody brought these influences,

everything from like 10cc and Nazareth,

we all agreed on Motorhead,

but we all agreed on each other's music

that we turned ourselves onto.

The Saints from Australia were a big influence

and Magazine and Nazareth,

I'd never really been introduced

to the deep cuts on old Nazareth records,

and we all agreed on Aerosmith and the Dolls.

So I don't think we looked at our differences,

we just kind of like, the stuff we had in common,

we really, that group of five guys

really understood how to excel

at the things we have in common.

I think we were the only five guys

in L.A. at the time that could've made up that band.

Like, we couldn't wait to go to sleep

so we could wake up and go rehearse again.

It was that kind of excitement.

So anyways, they come to Canter's,

A, to have a good meal, which they haven't had

in a little while, (laughs) and to do a photo session,

because they had just booked some gigs,

and they needed to make flyers,

so they took a photo around the booth,

and the look on that photo

basically shows the hunger in their eyes,

and they know that they're a band

to be reckoned with, and they're here

to fuck up Los Angeles and show them

this is the way to do it.

(rock music)

He'd bring his guitar over to my house,

and we'd just sit around and drink,

and he was always playing guitar,

and kind of, I felt like he was like a brother,

like a little brother or something.

I really, really, I loved him.

I loved his spirit.

I loved how he was like salt of the earth,

and we really bonded over music,

to be honest with you,

and he told me about this little band he had,

Guns N' Roses, like later when I went

and checked them out, and I really saw something

magical happening, and they were still playing

the Roxy and Perkins Palace,

but we were still pretty much just hanging around,

and they recorded their first record,

which actually Tom Zutaut, who signed them,

had asked me to produce it,

but at the time I was so strung out on heroin,

I couldn't even fathom the idea of leaving my house,

much less taking on a production of a band.

I think I first heard of Slash, I mean,

clearly because of Guns N' Roses,

but then from Alice Cooper songs too that he had played on.

It was my comeback tour.

It was my first time ever playing Alice sober,

because I had never done it sober.

So that was the very first show

that Guns N' Roses opened for us.

I mean they made no bones about the influence

we had on them, you know,

as one of the bands they listened to

when they were coming up.

There was definitely a mutual admiration society,

because it's really exciting to see a band like that

that's really good, that's really paid their dues,

to see them go from being like a club band

to like, you know, they're on their way to being headliners

and selling records left and right.

There's a feeling there that just never

happens again in your career.

And it was great to be a witness to that.

I just had an experience with Joe

that was really cool where he presented me

with an award in Cleveland a couple days ago,

and he was just so genuinely, like his little sort of speech

before I came out to accept the award,

was talking about his generation

and how I came with the next generation

and guitarists and all these very

sort of complimentary things that he said,

but he was somebody that when Guns N' Roses

first opened for Aerosmith in like 1988,

you know, obviously this guy was a huge hero to me,

but when I met him, very down-to-earth

and really not so much what his image

that you got in magazines and all that kind of thing,

sort of changed my whole perception of rock stars, you know?

With Slash, I mean, his dad was a well-known designer,

and if you've got David Geffen and David Bowie

popping in and out of your house,

you know, that's not usual.

Around the time when I was a kid,

when he was around, he was just David, you know?

And he was always cool, and my dad and him got along great,

and I used to love hanging out at the Geffen offices

when it was Asylum and before

Geffen Records actually became.

But then I didn't talk to him for years.

I guess he kept in touch with my mom.

We were bound and determined to make sure

that David Geffen didn't know who Saul Hudson was...

until he got to a point where the record

was sufficiently successful that David

started to want to know who was involved,

and then David's sitting there and going,

"This is Saul Hudson?

"I know Saul Hudson.

"What do you mean he's in one of my bands,

"on one of my labels?

"How did that happen?"

We wanted to avoid a sense of nepotism.

We wanted to avoid any baggage

that might come with that and play on that.

He wanted to stand for himself and stand on his own.

So we kept that entirely quiet.

At some point around that time,

he'd called my mom and said,

"So, how's Tony," (my dad),

"how's the kids?"

Said "How's Saul doing?"

Because he knew me by Saul.

And he's like, "Well you should know,

"he's on your record label."

And he's like, "He's on our record label?

"What band, what artist is that?"

And he goes, "Well he's in Guns N' Roses.

"His name's Slash."

But I remember him saying

"Yeah, I'm going to fly out and see you."

And his whole thing was to come over and manipulate me

into doing an edit of Sweet Child O' Mine,

because he knew we had personal relations,

which he never did get,

and I remember him trying to sort of massage me into this

going, "Well, what are you going to do with all the money?"

And he didn't realize who he was talking to,

which it had no influence on me whatsoever,

because I have no, couldn't give a shit about money.

(rock music)

So he never made a dent.

I'll always remember, then we never did an edit

for Sweet Child O' Mine.

So we went to the show, and we were hanging out

backstage or whatever, and some of the band came out

to sigh some autographs or whatever,

and I think Axl came up to me, or was signing autographs,

and I handed him, slipped him a little demo tape move.

I remember him walking away, and he handed it to his

security guy, and his security guy threw it on the ground.

(laughs)

That was awesome.

Someone said, "Oh, yeah, in the new Guns N' Roses video,

Axl's lying on a table shaking, talking to a therapist

or something, and he's got a Nirvana hat next to him,

and we're like, "You mean one of those baseball hats?

"The blue one with the yellow writing?"

"Yeah, he put it right there, because he likes your band."

And we couldn't imagine this dude

liking what we did, because for the most part,

like, we were the kids who would get our asses kicked

by the fuckin', like, big rock and roll guys.

They'd be like, "You're a fuckin' punk little fag,"

and they'd kick our asses, you know?

So we were like, "Well, wait, how does that work?"

You know?

It was that transition.

Something was happening.

And I think, what I now realize

is that in some way, we were all playing rock and roll.

(rock music)

It got weird once.

It got weird at the MTV Awards in 1992,

Axl and Kurt had a little screaming match.

Duff and Krist Novoselic had a moment together.

I was 23 years old and having the fucking time of my life.

Like, I was born for chaos, so I thought,

"Okay, great, let's do it."

(rock music)

I would say, "Dude, when are you

"going to change those fucking pants?"

"Oh, the only pair I brought on tour."

He'd wear the same pair for a fucking year.

And these were those guys, you know?

And the hat thing, that came by accident

from what he told me.

I mean, he loved Alice Cooper and all that, you know.

Who'd worn that hat before?

Marc Bolan?

And he got the hat and put it on,

he liked the way it looked on him, I guess,

and people started recognizing him,

and he had his thing.

It's like Lemmy, you know, they got a uniform,

and that's who they are, and they wake up like that.

Like I used to say fuckin' Slash wakes up like that.

(laughs)

But he would fuckin' wake up on the tour bus,

same guy he was, you know,

I remember the first time I joined the band

I went to get in the shower after the show.

And like, "What are you doing?"

I'm like, "I'm getting in the shower.

"Gettin the gig butt out," you know?

And they're like, "Why?"

(laughs)

I mean, they were dirty, filthy scoundrels, man.

Dirty, filthy fuckin' scoundrels.

And I was wearing top hats, you know, 1968, '67,

you know, and I thought that, I had a corner on the top hat.

But, I mean, it was a top hat.

Who cares?

You know, I mean I, but every time I saw Slash,

I thought maybe he wore it a couple times,

and all of a sudden he wore it all the time,

and I went, "well, okay, you can have it."

And I looked at him and I said,

"What do you want from this?

"What's your expectation?

"What are you looking for?"

And he sat back and he said the most perfect thing.

He said, "I want to be recognizable."

And I would say that's a watershed moment

in my relationship with him.

I would say that's the moment where I sat back and went,

"Okay, I'm dealing with a really intelligent

"live wire here."

That's what he wants.

He's not like Lars in his autobiography, saying

his dream come true was the first orgy he was in.

He's saying, "I want to be recognizable."

Joe Perry was more of an influence on the image

that Slash was, Joe Perry always looked cool,

and Slash was always about being cool.

I think he's going to be an iconic figure,

because he adopted a look very quick, you know,

like along with "Slash," you know,

like picking out a cool rock and roll name very early on.

To hold on to that and hold on to that thing

about rock and roll, I mean he's made out of the stuff.

I mean, you see the silhouette

and the Les Paul guitar, and you're like,

we all know that's Slash.

We came back from that Appetite Tour.

At least in my memory, there was no Internet then, right?

So you didn't know what was going on in L.A.

But we got back, I looked at a Band Magazine,

which was a magazine then

that everybody would advertise in,

and everybody had like, cowboy boots on,

bandanas, ripped jeans, leather vests, looked like us.

I'm in London, and I can't remember

why I was over there, but I see this fuckin'

bus go by with fuckin' Slash on it, right? (laughs)

It's like "Guitar Hero!"

And I call Slash and I go,

"Dude, you're on the side of a double-Decker bus!"

He's like, "I know, I should've asked for a lot more money."

(laughs)

Here we are at Velvet Revolver shows, right?

And I look out in the audience, and I see a lot of kids.

Like, long-haired little 15-year-old dudes,

and then they come backstage,

and they're like, "Hey, Slash, we love you, man!"

"Hey, kid, how'd you find out about Slash?"

"Guitar Hero."

He's just sitting in the corner,

and we kind of didn't really notice him,

because he's so, like, kind of blends in.

And he just gets up with a couple of beautiful women,

and we were just so like,

and he goes, "Hey, who are you guys?"

And we're like, and it was as if Slash

was standing and talking to you.

We were all kind of looking at him like,

"We're from Canada." (laughs)

You know, it's like, "Oh, wow!"

He's like the mayor of the Rainbow.

He's just going around, "Hey, how are you?"

When the resurgence of this Sunset thing happened,

all of a sudden it was hairspray, glam, big shows.

Bands that weren't even great bands were doing great shows.

They were stuck in the middle of that sea of shit,

because there was so much shit you had to wade through

in order to appreciate what they were doing.

I mean, most of those bands had just become

a parody of music.

Bands like Poison, bands like Warrant,

bands like, you know that were doing great shows.

Cinderella, Bon Jovi, Motley Crue.

I mean every band had a look,

and they were attitude all the way.

The Guns N' Roses guys were trying

to be their heroes, you know,

whether it was Johnny Thunders or Sid Vicious

or Steven Tyler or John Bonham, whatever it was.

I mean, you know, it's clear that their roots

were in something substantial and real.

When people ask me what about rock and roll,

what is going on in rock and roll?

I say I can only name you five rock and roll bands.

I said this band, you know, what Slash is

and those Conspirators are a rock and roll band.

The Foo Fighters are a rock and roll band.

We're a rock and roll band.

This band, The Stripes, from Ireland,

great rock and roll band.

How the fuck is some kid in Springfield, Virginia,

going to relate to some guy who's got

more hair than your sister?

And he's fuckin' got more makeup on

than your fuckin' mom.

You know, if you have a banjo and an accordion

in your band, you're not a rock band, okay?

(laughs)

How does that apply to my fucking life?

You know?

I get it, man, if I need to escape,

I'll fuckin' take some acid.

It's all good.

And then grunge happened after that, you know,

which was just the opposite.

There was a point when I wanted to go to Seattle

and take all the grunge bands,

put them in buses and take them to Disneyland.

Music was kind of changing,

and those guys were a big part of that, I think, you know?

And what happened in Seattle happened after that

as well as a musical change kind of everywhere,

and you know, to be that lightning rod sort of a band,

you know, I don't think they expected it.

(slow music)

I could tell you one great story

that he doesn't even know, I don't think.

On Hey Stoopid, I know this about guitar players.

When they first hear a song,

their first impression is their best impression of it.

And I played, I said, "Why don't we run this track,

"and you just riff with it and get a feel of it?"

I told the engineer, "Tape this."

(laughs)

We did 30 other takes,

and at one point I went, "Oh that last one was perfect."

And it was like this, and he was a little tired

and everything at this point.

We used the original.

The run-through tape was the exact perfect guitar solo.

I brought in a lot of guest players,

Eddie Van Halen, Steve Vai, Michael Landow

on the other side of things.

And I shook it up with different guests,

Edgar Winter, I got old-school guys,

I got new-school.

I like to mix it all up and see what happens,

and I wrote a song specifically,

actually with him in mind to play on it.

What I wish I wrote with Stan Lynch

the drummer in Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers, right?

It was called Broken Heart for Christmas.

And he just can't, I said,

"Would you come and play on this song for me?"

And he's like, he showed up and he was great.

He just did one take, and I let it go.

I mean, you know, when you take a guy like Slash,

you don't try to get all microscopic on it.

He goes, "What do you want me to do?"

I go, "Be you."

And that's what he did.

I was not a jammer, but Slash would always get up

and play with other people,

and one of the very first times

that we ever did do that,

I remember we played at some teeny little club

down by Santa Monica,

and it was half his band, half my band,

and we did a Sex Pistols song.

(slow music)

The phone rang, and my mom comes in the room,

she says, "There's someone on the phone named SLUSH."

I was really up against the wall,

and we needed to find somebody.

I started thinking about who's the best drummer

that I'd seen in a band ever.

(laughs) You know?

I said, "What's going on?"

And he says to me, "We're looking for someone

"to play on the record.

"Stevie Adler's in treatment,

"and we're trying to get him together

"enough to do a tour at least."

Because at that time, Appetite for Destruction,

they'd spent about four years trying to figure out

how to spend all their money doing drugs.

(laughs) No, I'm just kidding.

He came down, and we started working together

and just became really good friends,

and obviously we went on to tour together for years

and went on to do Velvet Revolver,

and we're still really good friends.

Me and Slash wrote this record

which became the first Snakepit album.

It was actually me and him together.

And we were really close, you know?

And I would be able to talk to him

and be brave enough to show him something

that I had an idea on the guitar,

and he'd be like, "Oh, okay, man."

You know and I'd be like, "Okay." (laughs)

And Slash says, "I want to do a fuckin' record

"with this material."

And I'm like, "Yeah, fuckin' let's do it!"

(laughs)

You know, it's like, "Come on!"

And I go, "What are we going to call it?"

And he's like, "We're going to call it Snakepit."

It was Snakepit.

Good name.

I had ended working with Guns

where I had done a thing called Snakepit

where I got to sort of go back

and just sort of simplify everything

and just play in these raw little places.

And it was just, it was really, it was a lot of fun.

It was a huge shot in the arm for me,

but it was also giving a perspective on things.

You know, we would record all this material

before we ever had a singer,

so we had an idea of how

to sort of do sections of riffs,

and, "Okay, we're going to do that 16 times,"

and we would say, "Here's a chorus, blah blah blah."

So we did those records Use Your Illusion I and II

all instrumentally, and the first Snakepit album

all instrumentally, and then we set out

in search of a singer,

and I was actually in New York when

he picked the singer that he put on the album,

which we had a little bit of a squabble about.

I didn't really care for it much.

And I remember I got very drunk

and drove over to his house and climbed over his fence.

(laughs)

He wouldn't let me in.

I was like, "Fuckin' I'm coming in there, man!"

He was like, "No, you're not."

And I'm like, "Fuck yes I am."

So I climbed over his fence,

and it had like, you know, these little spikes on the top,

and I remember I slipped,

and my fuckin' jacket, I had this leather jacket,

got caught, and I was like hanging off his fence.

And he came out and said,

"Oh, fuck, man, come on," you know,

he's, Slash is very low-key.

"Come in here, man, have a drink," you know.

At the end of Velvet Revolver,

when we saw it going south with Scott,

there was a band, we were, you know,

Slash got himself out of a pretty dark spot

right in between those two records,

and he was just ready to play,

and when it started going south with Scott,

I could see like if Slash had to stop playing

and us go on another year-and-a-half long

search for a singer.

After the sort of rock and roll turmoil,

if you will, of Velvet Revolver,

because we got into ourselves

into another situation with another singer,

(laughs) I was like, "What are we,

"guys that like to marry strippers?

"What is this?"

You know, (laughs) it's like you know

what you're going to get when you get into it, you know?

What the fuck?

I mean, we knew the guy was a piece of work,

but those kind of crazy fuckers make great front men,

you know what I mean?

And when we signed up for the deal,

it was like this is going to be fuckin" crazy.

(laughs) Okay, here we go.

(laughs)

And you know, it lasted a good amount of time

before it imploded.

Myles was a guy that we found

for Velvet Revolver, but it was an altar bridge,

and Myles, just the nicest guy in the world,

he's like, "Man, I would love to be in your band,

"but I'm in a full-time band, and I would feel

"like I'd be kind of chopping them below the knees."

Velvet Revolver, I think it was the summer of 2002,

that was the first time we spoke on the phone.

And I think I was just a name that had come up,

and I know they'd sent out quite a few demos

to a few people, and they sent me one.

And I worked on it for about two weeks.

They were like four songs,

and so it's kind of a long story,

but I basically pulled out, never sent it back.

I just felt like at that point I was

the wrong guy for the job.

I'd spent five years with my band the Mayfield Four,

and I think I just, I was a bit crestfallen, (laughs)

And I was a bit disillusioned with the music industry,

and something of that magnitude,

especially, you know, with those guys,

I was like, "Eh, I don't think this is the right thing

"for me at this point in my, at this juncture," as they say.

One of our most favorite tours,

let's put it that way, was touring with Velvet Revolver,

you know, and when we were kind of coming out

with Black Gives Way to Blue,

so, we spent a lot of time together on that.

(rock music)

He crashed a Pathfinder on Sunset,

rolled it over about ten times.

(crashing sound)

Like that.

And you know, typical Slash back in the day, you know?

If you recognize him like that.

He'd drive home drunk.

One night he got pulled over by the cops.

Cops got him out of the car.

He's fuckin' barely standing up.

"Hey, Slash, can we take our picture with you?"

(laughs)

Fuckin' cops like this with Slash.

"Now just get home now."

You put that guy back in the fucking car?

Are you kidding me?

(laughs)

You know, fringe benefits of the hat,

you know what I mean?

(rock music)

I think one of the best things

that's happened to him is his heart problem.

He wears a pacemaker.

And that has obviously changed his playing field.

Slash and I both struggled with outside things,

drugs and alcohol and both lived through it,

which is kind of incredible in itself.

And we've had a lot of friends of ours fall by the wayside

on the way here.

I believe if he would've tried to stick around

in Guns N' Roses when Axl was in charge of it

back in 1996, I truly think he'd be dead.

Guy said, "Back in 1985, they caught Slash out here

"totally naked running through the golf course.

"He was staying right there in that room,

"and he was on acid,

"and he didn't know where he was and all that."

(laughs)

That Slash was not going to survive

to play what he's playing now.

Well, he's just at a different answer than me.

(laughs)

You know, he never even bought me dinner.

And he's got a pacemaker, you know.

So he came over to sympathize

and point out what you shouldn't do,

like, I shouldn't fibrillate, apparently,

or it goes "vroom!" (laughs)

He wouldn't go to the hospital.

I don't know if you know the story or not,

but it was a tour manager that punched him,

knocked him out, and dropped him off

at the hospital in Pittsburgh after he spoke to me.

And I showed up, and we were there,

and the doctor looked at me,

and we weren't married yet at the time,

and he said, "I'm sorry, but he's got either six days,

"six weeks, or six months.

"And there's not much we can do."

So, we did everything that they possibly could.

This was in Pittsburgh.

We were there for a few weeks,

and then we flew back to L.A.,

went to another hospital.

They wanted to give him a heart transplant.

I'm not one to follow direction

or listen to even doctors that much, to tell you the truth,

and we left that hospital, went to another hospital

where they gave him the defibrillator,

and he was playing with Michael Jackson,

and the pyrotechnics went off,

and he thought he was getting blasted

or shocked from all the pyrotechnics.

He didn't realize that it was

the defibrillator going off,

because the doctors didn't set it properly.

They didn't realize how fast his heart rate would go.

So the thing's firing on him.

He's like, "Whoa, I thought, you know,

"those pyrotechnics, were they that hard?

"Because I felt like they were blasting me."

When we got back to L.A.,

we went to have it read,

the doctor says that it was going off.

Coming back from all that's pretty impressive.

And he's still there, you know,

he's a very well-read guy.

He's reading war novels when he's not playing guitar.

(laughs)

And then in 2008, I started realizing

I needed to get sober.

I don't know who to call.

Slash had quite a few years being sober,

and he's always been here to help me,

and actually Dr. Drew called Slash for me,

and we met, and I got to apologize to him

for all the things that happened,

he apologized to me, and he's helped me, you know,

get through some hard times.

I remember when (laughs)

like I asked him to go out with me one night,

I remember when I called him,

and he just had his first kid.

I said, "Come on, Slash, meet me at Crazy Girls."

He goes, "I'm babysitting tonight."

And right then I was like, "It's over."

First of all, I never imagined

that I'd be a father living in Los Angeles,

but I sure as shit never imagined

that I'd be playing a school fundraiser with Slash

in front of the principals and the parents

of a kindergarten. (laughs)

Just when I thought life couldn't get any fuckin' weirder,

I'm fucking jamming a Stones song

with a bunch of mothers from the preschool

dancing barefoot in front of me.

That's one thing that I think

that guys like Slash have it in their favor.

They've seen a lot of people in the business, you know,

that have turned it into a career

and may have been able to live through it,

and see that there is a possibility

if you play your cards right,

you can actually have a career.

You can actually raise a family around it.

You can actually have a real life

and still be that crazy, rebellious,

very close to being madman on stage

that you have to be, to be what rock and roll is.

I think now, family is important.

You know, people say that when the kids are small,

it's the harder time, but we both tend

to disagree with that.

Now that they're getting older,

the demands are higher with them.

So I think the future holds,

or well at least hopefully my future holds (laughs)

For Papa to be around a little bit more,

as we call him, the Curly Daddy.

I think he's really,

he's got one of the best bands I've ever heard behind him,

he can't go wrong.

And he's got that guy singing for him, you know,

what's his frickin'?

Myles, he's a frickin' great singer, man.

Unworldly, really.

This is a cohesive unit at this point, you know.

I think Myles is a killer singer,

and they write great songs together,

there's a great chemistry.

And he seems to be, I think he's going to eclipse his past.

I think he found the great lineup finally, you know,

I've seen him go through different itinerations, you know?

And this time, I think he's really nailed it.

He's got a great singer,

and they've got between them, I think they've got

a long way to go, they've got a lot of music inside them

that, you know, when they start writing more,

I think they're going to, I hope they stay together,

because they're really good.

And I think the guys that he has playing with him

are a really good band, and I think

it's a very comfortable thing for him,

and that's really probably what's most important, you know?

And he's making music that he likes to play.

It's still what gets him up out of bed every day.

He loves the guitar.

He loves rock and roll.

And to me that's very pure,

and I think that that's, and I think people see that.

I think that's what they feel,

and that's why he's where he's at,

that's why he's Slash.

You're not going to take that guitar out of his hand.

You're not going to pry it out of his hand.

Nothing's going to make him stop playing.

So whether it's Guns N' Roses if that happens,

or what he's doing now,

or some other version of it,

he's always going to do that,

and that is a gift to the fans,

and that is honesty, and we don't get a lot

of honesty in this business, you know?

A lot of people doing it for the money,

a lot of people doing it for this reason and that reason.

He is only doing it because he loves

that goddamn Les Paul to death, you know?

Probably doesn't love anything

as much as he loves that Les Paul.

You know, music is his mistress.

It's number one.

(guitar music)

I had this '59 Les Paul,

and I sold it for Christmas money,

and then I just kind of counted it gone, you know?

And then after the band got back together,

I got a call from a Johnson,

he said, "I heard that this guitar might possibly be yours."

He described it to me, and I said,

"Yeah, that sounds like the one."

And he asked if I wanted to buy it back.

I didn't have the bread at that point.

I guess he went on to sell it,

and I lost track of it for years.

I started making enough money

where I was able to kind of fill in my collection again,

and I was thinking maybe I could find that guitar.

So we searched around, and I spread the word,

and one day at rehearsal, Brad said,

"Oh, I know where that guitar is."

And he showed me a copy of Guitar Player magazine

I think it was, and the center spread

was Slash's guitar collection,

and right in the middle of it was that guitar.

So I got on the phone with him,

and he said, "Oh, man, I knew I was going

"to get the phone call."

And, "Oh, shit, don't ask me that.

"Let me think about it."

And, you know, of course I never got a phone call back,

and then I called him again,

and it got to the point where

our conversations got farther and farther apart,

and I said, "This is getting in the way of our friendship."

I'm not going to ask you ever again for it.

If you ever feel like selling it back to me,

you know, fine, but at least I know where it is,

and I'm happy about that, you know?

More years went on, and then I had my 50th birthday,

my guitar tech walks up with the Les Paul.

And he said, "Slash wants you to have this."

And I was speechless, you know, for a while,

and then I picked it up, and it was like, "Wow.

"It feels just like I remember it."

And that was it, you know?

And I called Slash up and thanked him,

and it was like I was still blown away,

I'm still blown away by it, you know?

But it really shows, you know,

he's just got such a huge heart.

I think it's time to set this world on fire.

I think it's time to push it to the edge.

(guitar music)

I've always been an analog guy.

The sound of drums and guitars

just sound better on tape than digital.

(guitar music)

But I also like having to go in there and actually perform

this song from one end to the other

without any interruptions, which a lot of producers

and a lot of bands nowadays don't do.

And with tape you find yourself, you're listening,

like you were actually sitting between the speakers.

I can't see where the kick drum is,

I don't know if he's pushed behind

like within a frame or two.

Does it feel good?

Does it sound good?

That's all you have to go by.

So for me, I have to be able to work

with guys that we have some like-minded energy,

you know what I mean?

It's all sort of got to be,

everybody's got to be into that sort of same concept.

And once I have that foundation,

that's what I can expand on.

So I don't like to be like,

"Okay, here.

"Here's all the parts.

"Learn this, learn that."

"Or you can record it over there at your house.

"I'll send you, you know, the tracks or whatever."

I love what happens, the sort of combustible energy

that happens when you get the right type

of players together.

The first step to putting the record together

is to go and jam those songs out

for an extensive amount of time,

just to get comfortable with them.

So before we even started to officially record,

which was in the last couple weeks,

it was basically October,

which was about four months ago,

where we started to just get

in the studio and work on those songs,

so, not a lot of bands do that anymore,

is actually to go and flesh those songs out for a while

before you actually press record.

You know, you hope that when you

press that red button,

that you're bouncing off of each other

making this amazing racket together

that it's being captured,

and it's not about, "Now we have to kind of sand off

"all the edgy points on that

"and make it kind of palatable for just the general public."

It's supposed to be a specialized thing.

What we do is specialized for people who dig what we do.

I feel like, you know, now it's the sophomore record

of the Conspirators, you can definitely feel

the band vibe, you know,

everybody's gelling together,

and that's just, you know, it's apparent.

You can definitely hear it on this record.

A lot less here and more here. (laughs)

Which for me sometimes is kind of a challenge,

because sometimes you tend to get a little,

you want to get a little too cerebral,

and you got to remember

this is a rock and roll band,

and I think a lot of what Slash does is from the hip,

and I, to keep it, congruent, I need to remember

that as a lyricist as well.

You know, when I make a studio record,

it's great, but it's all sort of a means to an end

which is to go out and perform,

so I'm really more of a live artist than a recording artist.

Sometimes, as you get a little bit more successful,

you start playing at these bigger places,

and that's great, but I like to be able to break it up

and still be able to play

in these really sort of small, loud, sweaty venues,

and for the release of this new record World on Fire,

I thought it'd be great to do

like, three of them in a row, you know,

the main ones that I got my start in.

(engine revving)

(rock music)

Last night in paradise

I can feel it down in my bones

Left the good Lord behind

Now I die on the vine

Waiting for my redemption song

I am never safe

Just a walking bomb

In a midnight rage

And I'm gone

I'm getting off this wicked stone

For some reason I always loved

being able to go back and play

at any one of these clubs, you know?

I like being in a sort of that intimate,

you know, toe-to-toe environment.

When I was a kid, I remember making

the pilgrimage down here.

It was summer 1988, and I was reading all about

everything that was happening down here,

and I convinced my cousin

to try and get me into some of these places.

And I remember going to the Troubadour first

and just peeking in and being like, "Wow,"

and there was hardly anybody,

it was like a Tuesday night or something,

and there was almost no one in the venue,

and we went up to the Roxy,

and I mean it was really cool for me,

just because I'd heard so much for so long.

And then, of course, the Whisky A Go Go was happening,

and then we'd all kind of saunter up Sunset late night,

about 2 in the morning, head into

the Rainbow parking lot.

You were at the Roxy or you were at the Whisky

or the Rainbow.

I remember when Van Halen first came out,

and there was bands like Exciter playing

at the Starwood, you know, Nikki Sixx's old band London.

There was this whole scene, but there was also

sort of burgeoning punk scene developing

as well at the same time.

But I love the whole dirty underbelly scene

that was happening in Los Angeles.

I had a band called London

and kind of started to make

a little bit of a stink around.

We were kind of like the only band

that kind of had a little bit of a

New York Dolls, Hoople vibe

but played this kind of little bit poppier stuff.

It wasn't like, you know,

some of these television shows

where you see all these guys

they're rolling up on Harleys and, you know (laughs)

They've got like the kaiser helmets on (laughs)

And shit like that, but this was just a whole different

kind of a scene.

That was when I really got my first taste

of what a real rock star looks like.

I saw Roger Taylor pull up in a Rolls Royce, from Queen.

He got out with two girls,

and he was wearing like a Savile Row suit,

you know, holding a glass of champagne.

And I was like, "Man, that, looks like he's having

"a pretty good life."

(rock music)

Kill the ghost

That hides in your soul

Rock 'n' roll

Rock 'n' roll

He's a very quiet person.

He's not somebody that's very outgoing,

and there's a certain veil

that he kind of has on all the time.

And then when you hear him play,

it all comes pouring out.

He doesn't like to talk,

and he doesn't like to talk about himself in all things,

and you realize, well, he's a great talker,

and there's a lot of things

that you could learn about him talking about himself,

but it all comes out in guitar playing instead.

His voice is guitar.

He doesn't like to sing it.

He wants to play it.

And I think that's cool too.

That's something that obviously was inside him

long before he picked up a guitar.

The guitar was just sort of

an extension of him in a sense.

He had great parents that had

good record collections.

Unfortunately, my folks had Liberace.

(soft music)

We would play the Troubadour once in a while,

like really low on a Monday night,

the opening band on a Monday night,

and started moving up there.

Putting out the flyers and that,

so they have to go out.

What's the best place you can get your flyers out,

the Rainbow, isn't it?

You know?

I mean it's still the best club in Hollywood,

as far as I know.

(rock music)

He's still, if you see him sitting around somewhere

or anywhere where he's not actually on a camera

or doing something that he has to do,

he's got a guitar in his hands,

and he's constantly rolling, you know?

And it's really impressive.

That's his bliss.

He's following his bliss.

When he plays guitar, it seems to me

like that's when he's happiest.

The thing that is still true to this day

about Slash is you very rarely see him

and he doesn't have a guitar in his hand.

Any time I see him, I've even told him that as a joke,

I'm like, you know, if he's going to come over,

I'm like, you know, "Are you going to drive and play guitar

"at the same time?"

You know?

And it's true.

He loves playing guitar so much.

And that's why he's continued throughout the years

to get better and better and better,

because that's what he does.

That is who he is.

He's a guitar player.

I mean, I've known him how long now?

30 years.

And nine out of ten times when we're together,

he has a guitar in his hand.

He's always playing, always working on something.

So he's probably the, I mean he's the hardest-working

guitar player that I know,

as far as like what work he does at home

or backstage before a show

or in his hotel room or on the bus,

he's always playing.

And I look at Slash, and Slash has that,

like he's got rhythm, and he's got,

he'll go off, and you can tell

it's just coming from right there, you know?

And it's all in the hands.

It's not in like some pedals on the floor.

It's like all right there.

When you see someone really doing that,

like, "Wow!

"That's why he is the guy that he is."

You know?

It's not the hat and the glasses

and the smoke or whatever.

It's like all right there in his hands.

You couldn't ask for a better guitar player.

I mean, he's played on a couple of our albums, you know?

And he's been every time, you know?

We're going to do another song off the brand new record.

This is called Meant to Fly.

(slow rock music)

Mama, don't you cry

Don't you worry

I cannot stay here any longer

I wouldn't be being honest

if I didn't say sometimes when I see him playing,

I'm like, "For fuck's sake, we should be playing

"together, somehow, again."

But this is his path right now,

and I appreciate that, and support him in every way,

without resentment or jealousy or anything like that.

I check in with him, you know,

make sure he's doing okay.

And he's busy.

I just went and jammed with him

outside of Seattle a couple weeks ago.

They opened for Aerosmith.

You know, I played drums on one song

on his last solo record,

and he asked if I'd come in and sing a song,

I said, "Oh, man, you don't want me singing a song.

"Can I play drums?

"I'll come in and play drums."

He said, "Okay.

"There's an instrumental track."

So I come to the studio,

Eric Valentine's producing, Duff was there,

Slash was there.

We sat down, listened to a demo of it,

said okay, walked out of the room,

the instruments were set up,

ran through it one time, hit record, did it one more time,

and that was the take.

But to watch Duff and Slash sit and talk about

the song together as we were getting ready to record,

"No, you do this part.

"Okay if you do that, then I'm going to,

"in this part I'll lay back and then

"we got to build that thing up,

"and make sure that part goes four times,"

and I'm sitting there behind the drum set thinking,

"Am I watching like a Guns N' Roses documentary right now?"

(laughs)

Like I felt like I was watching

something like history happening in front of me, you know?

I mean I look at musicians and music

as important as any politician or any pope, you know?

The music and the songs that these people make together

go on to influence people or inspire them

to change the world.

Generations of people are changed by two people

sitting together and writing a song.

And as I sat there and watched

the two of them do that,

I thought, "I get to witness something really special."

This is like history being made.

Regardless if Gene Simmons says

rock and roll is dead. (laughs)

If you listened to him, we'd all be fucked.

You know, so it's like no, rock and roll

is not dead, Gene, let me explain it to you.

First of all, rock and roll was never about making money

and, you know, fuckin' building golf courses

or whatever the fuck else you do.

Rock and roll was always about

that celebration of rebellion,

the celebration of life, the celebration of being

an individual, freedom, freedom to be

exactly who you are whenever you want.

You don't listen to The Man.

That's rock and roll.

Rock and roll is a sense of being.

It's who you are, you know?

And you look at guys like Slash,

and you look at Lemmy,

and you go, "Those guys, those are those guys."

I was driving down Sunset Boulevard the other day,

and I have these moments where, you know,

I just am like, "Wait a minute.

"I came here on a Greyhound bus."

I was driving down Sunset, and, you know,

I've had an amazing career,

and I'm in my Ferrari, and the top was off,

and the street's the same, you know?

Everything's the same, just the years have ticked by,

and I drove by Guitar Center,

and there was a picture of Slash

on the side of Guitar Center,

and I thought to myself, you know,

"He's going to be doing this

"like the way B.B. King is doing this,

"he's going to be doing this into his 60s and 70s and 80s.

It's what he's gonna do.

(rock music)

Okay, the most important question,

when did you get the haircut?

(laughs)

And action!

I love you Slash.

(laughs)

Yeah, anything you want to tell him?

I love you!

I miss you!

When are we going to go to lunch?

You work too much!

Stay home for a little bit.

(laughs)

You're loved.

(laughs)

You know, but uh,

now I don't remember what the question was.

What was the question?

I don't know! (laughs)

The story of my fuckin' life.

"Wait, what was the question?"

(rock music)