Slash: "Why I Chose Not To Continue On With GN'R"

There isn't anything new here. The following comes from Slash's 2007 autobiography. For those of you who haven't read it, and for those of you who've forgotten, I've reproduced it here.


"I'd like to make one more thing pretty clear, because this is another question that haunts me almost every day, usually because it's asked by people who don't know me at all. I'd like to state, very simply once more why I chose not to continue on with Guns N' Roses so that no one feels the need to ask me this ever again when they see me on the street.

Here it goes:

1) the constant disrespect for all involved by going on late for no good reason night after night after night,

2) the legal manipulation that Axl forced on us, from demanding ownership of the name to downgrading us, contractually, to hired hands, and

3) losing Izzy and Steven, who were such an integral part of the band's sound and personality ... without them, the band no longer had its original chemistry.

My departure had nothing to do with artistic differences, as many people claim to know. It was not as simple as "Axl wanted synths and Slash was old-school." It had nothing to do with Axl wanting to go digital and Slash staying analog. To think that dissolving the kind of band and the kind of musical chemistry we had over something so trivial is just asinine.

It's true, I am old-school, and I do like keeping it simple — but I've never been close-minded. If anything, I was more than flexible and willing to try any kind of recording technique or explore any new sound, so long as I was doing so on an equal playing field with musicians that worked together toward a common goal. I would have hung in there with Axl through an industrial record or whatever else he wanted to try if the creative vibe between us was positive. My flexibility is the only thing that kept me in the band as long as it did — that's how a team works.

Unfortunately, we stopped being a team somewhere along the way.

As for the rest of how it all played out, I learned, looking back on it all, that the people Axl hired to "represent his interests" through all of the band's undoing could have been a bit smarter than they were. Maybe intelligence has nothing to do with it: had they cared enough about him and about Guns N' Roses as a band to have advised him to pursue any other path than the one he did this story may have had a different ending. Anyone could have foreseen the lack of positive outcome that lay ahead on the road Axl chose to go down. But then again, maybe that is how he wanted it."



Related: Axl Rose Sets the Record Straight