1999.MM.DD - Rock In The North (UK) - Interview with Slash

Transcript:
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Interviewer: This show is all about artists from North. You’re not the most obvious one. I mean, the first 11 years of your life were spent up north, so what are your memories on all of that?

Slash: I have to dig back into the vault. I don’t remember the name of the street that I lived on, but I just have really fond memories of my grandparents and my uncles and aunts. They were just wonderful. The neighborhood that I lived in, everybody lived in the same part of the village, though, and then I had to go to school around the corner, which was, I would get up in the morning and the fog was so thick that you couldn’t see across the street. I walked to school and we had the lollipop guy? (laughs).

Interviewer: Yeah (laughs).

Slash: (Laughing) ...cross the other street.

Interviewer: And you couldn’t see because of the fog.

Slash: (Laughing) Yeah, I could hardly see. It was like, you could get run over. As far as school goes, I just didn’t fit in the school there because I had long hair.

Interviewer: I’ve read that you had long hair, yeah?

Slash: I had long hair and I had, you know, basically jeans, and t-shirts, and all that kind of stuff. And I was into drawing.

Interviewer: Right.

Slash: So, like, the regular sort of curriculum for the average boy was-

Interviewer: Was out of your scope.

Slash: Yeah. It was out of my way. And I was a little drummer boy for the Christmas play, like, four times in a row.

(Laughter)

Slash: I had a good time in England. And then my grandmother was an amazing cook, except for – she actually made, like, the most amazing pies, and my aunt would come over and they would just do that all day. So on the weekends that was, like, a big deal. I’m just shooting from the hip here, you know.

Interviewer: Good, good.

Slash: And that was basically it. I remember there was... my dad and I used to take these walks across where, you know, the cows – some pasture and stuff, and it was real peaceful. It was a very tight community.

Interviewer: It’s quite a difficult one, but can you imagine how different your life would have been had you not moved to the States?

Slash: Well, there’s a story that goes along with this. My dad, who actually still lives here in L.A. - his dad was a fireman. His name is Charles – Charles and Sybil, right? Anyway. Out of the three brothers, Ian, David and Tony – Anthony, my dad is Anthony, and he was the one that got into the rock ‘n’ roll thing, him and David did. So got turned onto the Who, the Moody Blues, the Stones, and the Beatles in Stoke. My dad and my grandfather did not get along because my dad was a tearaway; he went to art school instead of becoming a fireman, or becoming a lawyer, or whatever it was that my grandfather wanted him to do. So those guys were constantly at each other’s throats. My mom was an American black lady, right?

Interviewer: Which, up north was very rare...

Slash: Which, to actually tell you the truth, they loved her to death - it’s just my dad and my grandfather. Anyway, so my dad got in the art direction business, so I was constantly going back from Stoke to London; and that’s more or less where I was headed anyway. If I’d stayed in England, I’d still would have been involved in the music business, because that’s where my dad was and that’s where my mom was. We ended up in America, because my mom had a clothing store here and she serviced a lot of musicians. And my dad knew that this was the place to come to really be successful at that particular point in time, which was the latter part of the 60s - to be real successful in what was becoming a booming industry, which was rock ‘n’ roll. So he hooked up with Geffen – it wasn’t Geffen Records yet, it was Geffen & Roberts, a management company – and started doing album covers here. So when he left England, it was for two reasons: one to become successful, two to be just a rebel against his grandfather [=father] who was very old traditional type of guy. So I moved to L.A. and I kept commuting back and forth. Then, finally, we stayed permanently and took up a residence in Los Angeles. So, one way or another, if I hadn’t moved to Los Angeles, I’d probably been in London. If I’d stayed in Stoke, I’d probably been a farmer (laughs).

Interviewer: (Laughs).

[Clip from Beggars and Hangers On video]

Slash: I got the name “Slash” real simply from a guy named Seymour Cassel. When I was around 13-14 years old, I used to hang out with his son – we went to school together. So I was always, like, hustling something back then, I was always in a big hurry; and he would call me “Slash,” because I was always in and out real quick, you know. That was basically it. Then I got back to England years later and there was like, “You know what a “slash” is?” and I was like, “Yeah.” I hadn’t actually thought of it that way.

(Laughter)

[Clip from Beggars and Hangers On video]

Slash: Yeah, it doesn’t seem like anything, but in the general scheme of things, all through school in England and all through school here in the States, I didn’t fit in at all, because my whole upbringing was completely different than the average kid whose parents might have been, like, doctors or... - in L.A. at least, not in England. In England everybody was working class, but in the States they tried to keep me in, like... Not my dad, my dad never really promoted school. He taught me how to read - I didn’t learn from school how to read. I still can’t do fuck all with math, because I never adjusted – and he can’t either (laughs).

Interviewer: (Laughs) I bet that pleases your manager and accountant.

Slash: Well, I can add dollars in a physical sense, but if you put it on paper... So I went to sort of an upper class elementary – a whole bunch of upper class elementary schools. My mom was so persistent about me having a good education (gulps) – I can’t even say the word – a good education, and then she put me in, like, a French private school at one point, you know?

Interviewer: Wow.

Slash: And it was just like, I just did not fit in. I tried really hard to a certain point, and then, as soon as I started playing guitar, I just sort of, slowly but surely, gave up. I ditched the whole 7th grade, part of the 8th grade, and sort of just got by in the 9th grade. Then I went to high school and left in the 11th grade.

[Video clip]

Slash: I was really into music, but I never aspired to be a musician until, all of a sudden, a particular record, an Aerosmith record, came out; and all of a sudden I dropped everything, and then I became a guitar player.

Interviewer: You just thought, “This is it.”

Slash: I didn’t even know I was gonna become a guitar player. I didn’t know what I wanted to play; I just had to do something. I just picked a guitar, because the bass had less strings on it (laughs).

[Video clip]

Interviewer: How about your first guitar? Do you remember that?

Slash: Yeah, yeah. It had one string on it.

Interviewer: (?)

Slash: It had one string on it. It was in a storage unit or something; my grandmother had it. And I learned how to play UFO songs and Led Zeppelin songs on it.

Interviewer: On one string.

Slash: On one string. That’s when I first started. Then me and the first drummer for Guns N’ Roses, Steve Adler, decided to put a band together. So I was gonna play bass and I thought, “Well, I should take music lessons or something; there’s got a way to do this.” I went in and he said, “Do you have an instrument?” I said, “Well, I have this.”

(Laughter)

Slash: And he said, “Well, do you want to play guitar or do you want to play bass?” I said, “What’s the difference?” and he goes, “The bass has four strings, the guitar has six strings.” And I still didn’t really know the technicalities of, you know, the toying with that. So he played Stairway to Heaven, the solo for Stairway to Heaven, and I said, “That’s what I wanna do!”

[Clip]

Slash: The only thing was, I was trying to stay in school and then I had to get a full-time job to support the-

Interviewer: The habit (?).

Slash: My habit, yeah. Guitar strings and so on. And I got to such a low point in school that I just said, you know, “Fuck it, I don’t want to do it anymore.” So I started working, like, completely full-time to support my guitar habit, and I did that all the way up until... realistically all the way up until Axl and I first met.

Interviewer: Wow.

Slash: I had a full-time job even until Guns started.

Interviewer: What was this job?

Slash: The last one I had was a newsstand.

Interviewer: Was it?

Slash: On Fairfax (laughs).

Interviewer: (Laughs).

Slash: That was my last job and the only job I ever got fired from; and the only reason for that was because I was on the phone scamming gigs for Guns when we first started (laughs).

Interviewer: (Laughs) So you got your guitar, you’re in your first band by 16.

Slash: Yeah.

Interviewer: At this point, do you have aspirations? Are you thinking...?

Slash: I never even thought about it. Ambition-wise?

Interviewer: Yeah.

Slash: I never gave it any thought until-

Interviewer: Everyone wants to be number one.

Slash: No, there’s a different way of looking at it. I mean, this is in hindsight. You know, at this particular point in time it’s like, now it’s really just aspiring to do what it is that you like to hear. That was basically it. So I’ve always played around - you know, like I said in hindsight, I always played around the idea that this is what sounds cool and work on what you think sounds cool.

Interviewer: So do you remember your first gig, your first ever gig?

Slash: Yeah. I think the first ever, like, so-called... it was a backyard party.

Interviewer: Where was that, in somebody’s house.

Slash: Yeah, and, you know, I was in the garage, I think.

Interviewer: Right.

Slash: And it was horrible (laughs). Anyway. So it was never... It was always just like, “Okay, so we got this gig and play the shit out of this gig.” Then, if that went well, maybe you get, say, from a Monday to a Tuesday, a Tuesday to a Wednesday, and maybe you work your way up to a weekend - you know, because that’s where all the chicks were.

Interviewer: Yeah.

Slash: But I mean, for the most part, it was just about getting through the night. So once you got to a certain point, you just keep going forward. You didn’t want to stay in one place when you’d done with that already. You want to move to the next plateau, so to speak. That’s pretty much the motivation from playing, say, a Sunday night at the Troubadour to playing Wembley.

Interviewer: So how did Guns N’ Roses come about then?

Slash: First it was... Steven and I knew each other from – I guess I was, like, 13, and we lived in the same neighborhood. I met him falling off a skateboard where I used to ride my bikes – I used to race bikes, right? He came into the school one night, and he took a skateboard, and he just crashed and burned really big time. So I went over to him over to him and said, “Are you all right?”

Interviewer: (Laughs).

Slash: You know? And Steven is such a happy-go-lucky kind of guy. He was banged up pretty bad, but he was like, “Yeah!” Anyway, so we started hanging out and we ditched the whole 7th grade together just walking around Hollywood. At some point, when we got a little older, we ran into Izzy, so Izzy introduced me to Axl. With Izzy and Axl and I didn’t hit it off right away, because these guys had a definite agenda. You know, Izzy moved all the way from Indiana to Los Angeles to become the rock star kind of thing, and he moved to Hollywood. And Axl followed him - Axl turned around and hitchhiked all the way here, and found Izzy. So a couple of years went by and we had different bands, and we put an ad in the paper for a bass player, and Duff saw it - it said, like, Aerosmith, Alice Cooper, and this and that on it. So he answered it, met us at Canter’s, so then we started a band together. Then me and Steve had a falling out, and Duff ended up playing with Axl and Izzy in L.A. Guns. And Axl had a fallout with Tracii Guns and... Axl and I had a couple of bands together, as well, Hollywood Rose and such – well, actually, that was really the only band.

Interviewer: So Hollywood Rose, that’s how you got... L.A. Guns and-

Slash: And Hollywood Rose, yeah. Hence Guns N’ Roses.

Interviewer: How about the day you get signed? That’s a big day, isn’t it? That’s a big day.

Slash: Well, we didn’t have a day when it came-

Interviewer: Wasn’t there?

Slash: Uh-uh. We first became what you consider the biggest – you know, like the most popular attraction in local sense, in Hollywood. So when we had shows, like, everywhere from real hardcore punk rockers to real glam people and everything in between...

Interviewer: Right.

Slash: Really, I don’t put labels on anything, but you know what I’m saying?

Interviewer: Yeah, yeah.

Slash: A whole...

Interviewer: And eclectic...

Slash: Yeah, eclectic. Exactly. And we had these powerhouse shows, and we just happened to attract an audience that during the time - it was the 80s, and it happened to be the perfect time and more or less the perfect place as a forum for a band like us, who was totally against, like, the Culture Club. So I think we were, like, the perfect answer at that particular time; because, I mean, realistically, as a band from a heart point of view – you know, from a heartfelt point of view – we were the shit, because we were as genuine as they come. We didn’t mean that we were the greatest players in the world or anything like that, but when we came out and did our thing, we did our thing and that was all you got; and if you liked that, that’s what happened. So when the time came that we were going to get signed - I think it was about a year or so after we actually formed - we started sort of a bidding war.

Interviewer: Oh, right. (?)

Slash: Yeah, we were so popular – popular in terms of the time. We were a bunch of novices, right? We were really, you know, street smart but didn’t know much about the business really when it came down to it. But we didn’t sign any deals; we just got free lunches and dinners from all the different record companies for, like, six months. We already knew from the first meeting which company we were gonna go with, but we kept taking advantage of the free lunches and dinners, and all the upscale treatment we were getting.

[Clip]

Slash: There was five of us in the band and I think they gave us $7,400 or $7,500 apiece.

Interviewer: Right.

Slash: And then they told us to hide out for a year. You know, everybody was scared to death of us, so we couldn’t get a manager and we couldn’t find a producer. We were, like, the scourge of L.A, you know?

Interviewer: (talks over).

Slash: I mean, nobody would come. People would come to meet us for the first time and we’d never get a phone call back.

(Laughter)

Slash: Then, finally, we hooked up with Alan Niven and Mike Clink. Mike Clink produced us and Alan Niven managed us – and he used to do the Sex Pistols, right?

Interviewer: So he was safe.

Slash: So he could handle, like, me – I was really bad. He couldn’t handle me, and Axl of course was Axl, so that was as unpredictable as it gets. But as a group, you know, we were still a band.

Interviewer: Yeah.

Slash: So we got put up with, and we went in and did some demos at Sound City in the Valley, and did, like, all of Appetite and a bunch of other [songs] - November Rain and all kinds all material there. And we went from there to doing Appetite. And when Appetite came out, it was another year before anybody even knew we existed. So we opened up for the Cult, we opened up for Motley Crue, then we graduated to Iron Maiden, and then Aerosmith… and all of a sudden we became huge.

Slash: I really don’t wanna put too, like, a negative picture in everybody’s mind about the Guns name, because I have no regrets about Guns. I just quit when I thought it was still cool; and it looked like it was going somewhere else, and I didn’t want to be part of that.

Interviewer: Yeah.

Slash: But everything that I learned and all the experiences that we had were all fucking awesome, you know? I had a great time. But when the band got really big is when everybody’s true colors really started to come out. There was, like, managers and a lot of people riding –

Interviewer: People who used to be cool, yeah?

Slash: Yeah, riding this wave. I was handling a lot of interviews and stuff, still not really consciously aware of where everything was going, just keeping on and keeping on. And at the end of the day, all of a sudden it became the guy with the top hat and the Les Paul, and the crazy fucking…

Interviewer: The guy with the bandana…

Slash: The singer and the bandana. And the rest of the band sort of like just became this Guns N’ Roses thing, you know?

Interviewer: The engine, yeah.

Slash: You know, still to this day, I never really have gotten to how the image itself all works or any of that shit. We were touring around the world and doing this whole thing with this entourage of, like, 80 or something other people. I would say that there’s probably about – I could count on two hands how many people I still talk to. Duff, Steven and I were real close; and Izzy was just cool as long as things were just going along. But Axl had his own - I still want to know the answer to where Axl’s ambitions were from the get-go.

Interviewer: Right.

Slash: Because, you know, things came out in the open over the years. I was like, “Really? So you were thinking all that way before.” You know? And I was just like, “I just thought we were just hanging out.”

Interviewer: Right, yeah.

Slash: And that’s why he is where he is at now. And that’s why we’re all gone, because when it came down to it, it became really - when you ask what the demise of the band is, it’s not really a demise of the band. It just became a point where it wasn’t fun. I guess the band officially more or less fell apart, like, in 1994-95. So we went a good ten years.

Slash: Basically, there’s been so many offers to do gigs that I would have done, but it’s just when he decides to either finish his version of Guns N’ Roses at this point, because there’s not any members of Guns N’ Roses in the band.

Interviewer: But him.

Slash: Yeah, but him. He needs to finish that, because, I mean, we’re all sitting back going, “So what was it that you broke the real band up for?”

Interviewer: The thing has obviously a lot more longevity is dinosaurs and reptiles, man. You got the bug, haven’t you?

Slash: Well, ever since I was a kid, it’s like, I was… not an aspiring paleontologist, but always was really into dinosaurs and really into reptiles, so as long as I can remember. So I just collect – some of this stuff I’ve had since I was little, and I just keep collecting it.

Interviewer: You’ve got a house full of reptiles here, man. I mean, there are reptiles everywhere.

Slash: Yeah.

Interviewer: You were saying some of these escaped?

Slash: Huh? The two of the did yesterday, but we found them (laughs). It was great. One of them we couldn’t find, it’s this ten-foot long snake, and it was like, “Oh here it is” and we pulled them out (laughs). “Hi baby,” you know, “we thought we lost you there for a second.” I thought she went under a van or something.

Interviewer: So if you had to be a dinosaur…

Slash: What kind of dinosaur would I be?

Interviewer: What dinosaur would you be?

Slash: I’d be a type of a raptor of some sort.

Interviewer: A raptor? What was that?

Slash: Like in Jurassic Park, the velociraptor?

Interviewer: Who runs and runs. Real fast.

Slash: But there’s another kind called a Deinonychus, which is my favorite one, so I think I’d probably be that. And I like African hunting dogs and they’re similar, so…

Interviewer: I think I’d be a triceratops, because, you know, one horn is never going to be enough for me.

(Laughter)

Slash: That’s a good way of looking at it (laughs).

Interviewer: You can do three at once, man (laughs).

Slash: Yeah.

Interviewer: I’m sure it has happened plenty (laughs).

Slash: Um… (laughs). Anyway…

Interviewer: This room is full of pinball tables. When did you get the hook for this?

Slash: I got into the pinball machines, because I bought my ex-wife Adam’s Family. I mean, she turned me into pinball in Chicago. Over Christmas time you couldn’t go outside, it was freezing cold, and they had a bunch of pinball machines in the basement at her uncle’s house. It was a family thing and I was like, “Oh, Christ, this sucks. I gotta stay here for, like, two weeks.” So I started playing pinball and when we got back I bought her one for Christmas. Then I started getting into playing it with her, you know.

Interviewer: There is now, you know, and it’s here in the house over there. There’s a Guns N’ Roses pinball machine, man.

Slash: It’s actually really aggravating, because usually - like if you go and just press start on it, it just plays the beginning of Welcome to the Jungle for, like, ever, and it’s very irritating – and, sonically, the loudest game ever.

[They’re playing the GN’R pinball machine]

Slash: This goes back to the beginning of the conversation.

Interviewer: Right.

Slash: But when we’re talking about my northern England upbringing and so on, when my dad left, we never kept in touch – he sort of made it so that we never communicated with that side of my family the whole time I lived here. You know, my mother might have wanted me to, but he would just never give up the information. He had a very bitter thing against his dad, my dad.

Interviewer: Right.

Slash: To this day.

Interviewer: Even though, you know, you were still in touch with your mom and your dad even though they had separated by then.

Slash: They hadn’t separated at that point.

Interviewer: Okay.

Slash: But, you know, I’d write to my grandmother from time to time, to the family, and it slowly diminished to the point where I didn’t talk to them. And they found me in the Sun - they said “Slash aka Saul Hudson” – and they called at my management office; my uncle did. Guns was already big at that point, because we’d made it into the tabloids (laughs). So I get this phone call and they said, “There’s a guy named David Hudson trying to reach you” - we had a show coming up at Wembley, when Guns was headlining at Wembley – and I was like, “You gotta be kidding me.” So they found me in the Sun. It said “Slash aka Saul Hudson,” and they’d looked at the picture and said, “Yes, he’s the same guy – he was this big at the time, but I recognize him.” So they called the office – you know, my management office – and I get this message over the apartment going, “The guy named David Hudson called.”

Interviewer: “Hay!” Is that what he said? (?)

Slash: Well, not quite like that. And I was like, “David Hudson, that’s my uncle; that’s my dad’s brother.” So I called him back and sure enough it was. When I left England, he had two babies; he had an older one and then one that came along a little bit later on. So he showed up at Wembley with my grandfather and the kids – one of the kids was a teenager with a Guns N’ Roses t-shirt and a daughter – and I hadn’t seen them since I was 11 years old.

Interviewer: How was that?

Slash: That was a trip. Anyway, they went to every single show that we had in England from that point on. They’d come in, and they’d just drink all their booze and hang out, and then they’d all pile into a car and go back to Stoke.

Interviewer: It obviously stays in the family.

Slash: Yeah, you know (chuckles).

[Break]

Slash: The Snakepit band started while Guns was still together.

Interviewer: Right.

Slash: It was another way for me to fill the gap in time when Guns wasn’t doing anything.

Interviewer: (talks over) (?) you were doing nothing. (?)

Slash: Yeah, if I’m not doing anything it’s dangerous, you know?

Interviewer: Yeah.

Slash: So I built a studio in my house since I started writing material. And what happened was, I had Mike Inez from Alice in Chains, and Matt from Guns N’ Roses, and Gilby who filled in for Izzy when Izzy was gone, and myself, and we’d just write. I had all these tunes and I was writing material for the next Guns record hoping to go back and do that. And at that particular point, Axl decided that that’s not the kind of music he wanted to do. So I was like, “Okay, whatever” - you know, I’m pretty pliable that way; I just deal with it. So I thought, “Well, let’s go in the studio and record all this stuff,” and we called the studio itself “Snakepit Studios,” because right next to the door where you entered the studio was a huge walk-in snake cage.

Interviewer: One of yours.

Slash: Yeah. Three 20-foot pythons in it.

Interviewer: Wow.

Slash: And you could walk in or around in it. It was like a big zoo, kind of big exhibit. So we called it “The Snakepit Studios.” When we finished the record, we said, “What are we gonna call the band?” And this was all, like, high school fun kind of thing; it wasn’t that serious. So we called the band “Snakepit.”

Slash: Axl still wasn’t necessarily ready to start a Guns record, so I booked a tour for the record. We did the record in two weeks and then we toured for 108 gigs in four months and four continents.

Interviewer: Jesus.

Slash: And it took me back to where I started, what I originally loved doing.

Interviewer: What you were doing for a living.

Slash: And so, when the tour was over, at some point the record company told me, “You’ve got to come home now. You’ve turned the profit on the record and you’ve got to make a Guns record.” So I said, “Well, do I have to?”

(Laughter)

And I was like, “I’m having such a good time.” That’s when I said, “Well, I’m gonna have to put Snakepit together, like, for real.” And so that’s what I just did.

[Break]

Slash: The upcoming Snakepit tour brings me back to going to Europe, even to when Guns - the original Guns European tour, when we first started, went through London and most of England. This tour that’s going to be coming up is gonna be way on that level as opposed to being a sort of overly rock star issue and that kind of crap.

Interviewer: All right. I’ll listen to it and I’d rather it be overly rock (laughs). Maybe not overly rock star, but definitely it’s going to be overly rock.

Slash: It’ll just be loud and we’re gonna play as many little, like, fucking… as many cities as we possibly can en route, so we could play four days in a row. And when you get to be smart enough to be able to do what it is that you like to do, and handle the business side of it to the point where you can feel comfortable and trust somebody, that’s when you really have accomplished both ends of the scope, you know?

Interviewer: Yeah.

Slash: Both sides of the coin or whatever other point I can think of.

Interviewer: Do you feel that you’ve done that now? Do you feel accomplished?

Slash: Yeah, I feel accomplished in a lot of ways, but there’s always something else to do, there’s always another bridge to cross-

Interviewer: Of which, acting, man. You’ve recently – what was this comedy movie?

Slash: Oh (?).

Interviewer: I think it was based on Something about Mary. What was that?

Slash: Um, no…

Interviewer: What was that? What’s it called? I’ve got it written down somewhere.

Slash: It’s called the “something” comedy movie. I don’t know.

Interviewer: It’s a comedy movie.

Slash: I saw it for the first time the other day. Me and Rod watched it. Actually, the night-

Interviewer: “The Underground Comedy Movie,” it’s called.

Slash: Yeah. The night that I found out my shit was stolen.

Interviewer: Oh! would you ever – you’ve got to tell me about that.

Slash: The night that I noticed all the guitars were missing-

Interviewer: In this house, yeah?

Slash: Yeah. Me and Rod went up to my bedroom and we both said, “Let’s watch” and we watched, like, the Stones’ Cocksucker Blues and we watched something else, and I said, “I got this tape of this movie I was in and I’ve never seen it.” So we watch it - it’s the worst movie-

Interviewer: (Laughing) (inaudible).

Slash: I was in it because this guy wouldn’t leave me alone for, like, four or five months.

Interviewer: So just to get rid of him.

Slash: So I finally said, “Okay,” and I play a judge for a homeless person beauty pageant. I just play myself and it was like, if you ever see it, I look like I’m completely drunk.

Interviewer: I’m going to watch it.

Slash: I have a bottle of Jack Daniels… But I wasn’t drunk, you know? The first day I got there, there’s all these homeless people running around naked.

Interviewer: Real homeless people?

Slash: Yeah.

Interviewer: Oh man.

Slash: I guess he somehow managed to talk them into doing this thing. So when I got there, the cops were there and they said, “No, there’s no more shooting today,” and there’s all these (?) running around with no clothes on. I said, “What the fuck I got myself into?” (laughs). So I said, “Listen, my part is only about 30 seconds long. Let me just shoot this one thing. I’m in Pasadena, for Christ’s sake. I just want to get the fuck out of here.” And they said, “No. No more shooting today,” so I said, “Okay Mr. “ossifer.” I gotta go.” (laughs).

Interviewer: (Laughs) “Orsifer.”

Slash: (Laughs) Yeah. “Orsifer.” “Orsifer,” yeah. I’ve never heard that one.

[Break]

Slash: I get this phone call from my manager going, “Michael Jackson wants to call you.”

Interviewer: (Laughs) (?) “hello.”

Slash: And I was like, “Okay,” you know, and I was honored.

Interviewer: I mean, it’s cool.

Slash: I got a lot of backlash, actually, for doing that, and I was like, “Fuck you.”

Interviewer: (?)

Slash: Yeah, well, just from anybody who wants me to stay in one sort of sterile environment where you don’t branch out or anything. As far as I’m concerned, from a personality point of view, I’ve been unchanging ever since I started. I’ve never succumbed the business, you know.

Interviewer: Yeah. True to your nature.

Slash: And if I wanted to play with somebody, and – to this day, Michael is–

Interviewer: It’s a great track.

Slash: You know, after having worked with him, he’s one or the most awesome people I’ve ever been on the same stage with - I mean, bar none.

Interviewer: Really?

Slash: And I just did two gigs with him; the one in Germany, where he fell off… the hanger thing fell. I was standing right there when it happened, but I had my hair in my face and my head down, so I didn’t – I just felt it. I just felt the fucking wind come wind come by, and all of a sudden, boom. He got and he climbed up on stage. I mean, this is a big stadium, and he climbed up after he went about 30 miles an hour down, about 60 feet, so it was a controlled fall, because there was brakes on the cables.

Interviewer: Yeah.

Slash: But he was 60 feet up and he just dropped. And so he got up – luckily it was the second to last song, and he got up, climbed on stage, and I thought everything was fine. I had no idea what he’d just gone through. And he did the whole (?). That to me is, like – that’s rock ‘n’ roll. It doesn’t’ matter what type of music – rock ‘n’ roll is an attitude. Anyway. So, that being the case, he’s always been like that. I don’t know him on a personal level to the point where - I’ve seen his chimps a couple of times, but that’s about it.

Interviewer: Okay, this is it. At this point, I’m over the top of this, in fact. Slash, from our, you know, UK. I don’t know what special thing we have to do.

Slash: No, it’s [fist bump] like this now.

Interviewer: Okay. Slash, I’m going for slash.

Slash: Alright.

Slash gear was stolen in July 1999:

https://www.a-4-d.com/t4550-1999-08-26-mtv-news-slash-reports-missing-gear-assault-charges-explained