Guns N’ Roses guitar legend Slash has been in the press plenty lately as he continues promoting the new album from Slash featuring Myles Kennedy and the Conspirators, “4.” As one of rock ’n’ roll’s ultimate axe-slingers, Slash has cited plenty of influences that helped mold him into a player responsible for some of the genre’s most iconic riffs. So it’s certainly intriguing to hear what guitar riff he considers the “heaviest of all time.” In a new interview with Matt Pinfield, Slash talked about the role Black Sabbath had in his musical upbringing.
“The first Sabbath record just had the biggest impact on me,” he said. “Because, when you think about it, in the landscape of all the other music that was happening at the time, there’s this one dark record that comes out that really created what you would consider dark heavy metal and created the path for everything that was to follow. And so yeah, that record is especially poignant.”
“I also love the ‘Sabbath Bloody Sabbath’ record,” Slash added. “I mean, really all those records… But the first one and the ‘Sabbath Bloody Sabbath’ record probably had the biggest impact on me. And the title track, that breakdown towards the end of the song. There’s just nothing that’s ever come out that’s heavier than that. Not one band that I can think of has a riff that is as heavy as ‘Sabbath Bloody Sabbath.’”
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 recently 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 …”
