Guns N’ Roses guitarist Slash has been busy making the rounds promoting the new album from Slash featuring Myles Kennedy and the Conspirators. The band’s “4” album came out Feb. 11 on Gibson Records. In a recent interview with Classic Rock, Slash shared his disdain for what the Los Angeles music scene became in the ’80s. “I have wonderful memories of LA from when I was seven years old all the way up to when I was twelve,” Slash said.
“I was kind of raised in the LA music scene and it was great,” he continued. “I watched it go through these music trends in my short little lifetime up to that point. But what it turned into in the eighties was something that was unrecognizable from an integrity point of view and a creative point of view. The whole thing had just sort of been diluted. I have to say, in hindsight, that at least it was exciting in the eighties, at least there was a scene. Right now there is no LA scene. But there was a huge scene going on in the sixties and right through the seventies. It was really identifiable and really musically revolutionary. And in the eighties it just turned into this other thing.”
Slash lamented the oversaturated trends of the time. “I f*cking hated the whole scene, man. At least if you were in the UK you had some cool bands that represented the eighties, at least from a rock ’n’ roll and metal point of view. You had some really cool, credible music coming out. But in Los Angeles it was just bullsh*t. And we were coming up in the midst of all that. Everybody was f*cking converting to the industry standard to get a record deal and get girls, this whole thing. Where our band was coming from was the antithesis of all that, and it’s something I’m really proud of.”
Even after 35 years of success, Slash is amazed at the journey Guns N’ Roses has afforded him. “I thought the band was f*cking great,” he saID of Guns N’ Roses. “It would have been a band that I would have listened to had I not been in it. I would have had the T-shirt, right? But I saw it as being a cool cult band. I didn’t have any fantasies of it being anything super-huge. So none of us, I think, was prepared for what it turned into when it did. I thought it was a great band with a certain energy and a certain chemistry, but I didn’t know that one record would become what it became – that it would sort of transcend …”
