(Credits: Far Out / YouTube Still)
Mon 13 April 2026 2:00, UK
Slash wasn’t the kind of guitar player who needed to really warm up in order to be great after a while.
Even though most people were shocked that he could stand upright half the time he was working with Guns N’ Roses, his playing was so second nature that every song seemed like he was flying off the fretboard every single time he kicked off a riff. But once he started to realise that Guns had become something different, it took him a while before he really got ready to move on to the next phase of life.
But living the life of a session musician wasn’t really what Slash was looking to do. No, after how much he loved working with Michael Jackson and Lenny Kravitz on a handful of songs, there had to come a time when he started making tunes of his own, and Slash’s Snakepit was at least a fair way for him to get a lot of his ideas out that weren’t necessarily right for Guns N’ Roses back in the day.
Because, really, Axl Rose was never going to go back to the same kind of street-level rock and roll that Appetite for Destruction was. He liked the idea of bringing in new influences every single time they made a new record, and since he was toying with everything from synthesisers to piano ballads to even hints of industrial, it was getting all the more challenging for Slash to incorporate any of his licks into the equation like he used to.
So despite Rose wanting to change things up, Slash’s Snakepit’s debut really was the album that was supposed to follow-up Appetite for Destruction back in the day. All of the nasty riffs had come back in full force, but since everyone was still out of control, Slash found himself running into the same old problems that he used to when things started to come apart. Slash’s Blues Ball was the second iteration of what he wanted to do, but it was clear that he needed to straighten himself out a little more.
His playing wasn’t suffering, but you could tell that he was going through a lot more trouble trying to nail down everything that he was trying to do, saying, “A lot of it was to alleviate the craziness of what Guns had already done. So it really was an outlet. I was trying to put a band together, but neither one of those bands were very stable. I wasn’t very stable, and there was normally one other member who wasn’t. So the chances of longevity with either of those bands were pretty slim.”
And while it took a few more years before officially cleaning himself up after Velvet Revolver, Slash had a much better reason to get back on the wagon. He had already suffered a massive health scare with his heart, and after cutting back on most of his drug escapades, he’s now reached the point where he doesn’t even smoke cigarettes behind the scenes anymore. Guns might be his priority now, but the true high for him now comes from the fact that he never stops working.
In fact, since Slash’s Blues Ball never made an official album, is it safe to say that Orgy of the Damned was the record they were supposed to make? Every single singer on the record was different when you look at the track listing, but when they’re all made up of the kind of blues singles that Slash loved growing up, this was his chance to go back to that style of playing and really refine what he was doing all those years ago.
Albums like It’s Five O’Clock Somewhere are still beautiful for what they were, but when you look at where Slash was, it’s a miracle that he was able to make any record that sounded this good back in the day. He was barely holding himself together half the time, so the idea of making a record that could compete with any Guns record really showed you how important he was to the band.
