(Credits: Far Out / YouTube Still)
Wed 26 November 2025 19:00, UK
There’s a good chance that any rock and roll could be made at least 50% better if it had Slash on guitar.
Although he might not have been looking to become God’s gift to the six-string by any means, the entire idea of what a modern guitar hero looks like was practically built around his silhouette of curly hair and top hat, playing the meanest riffs anyone had ever come up with. But even though he had his hands full with Guns N’ Roses, Slash could find ways to sprinkle some magic into other people’s songs.
Hell, half of the reason he did session work could have been to get a break from Guns half the time. The band were the epitome of a gang when they first started, but since Axl Rose was throwing everything and the kitchen sink into Use Your Illusion, it made a lot more sense for Slash to make music that was more in line with what he wanted when he worked with everyone from Michael Jackson to Lenny Kravitz.
But not all of them were exactly rock and roll songs from top to bottom. His role in any session was about trying to fit a traditional rock and roll guitar solo into a song that didn’t necessarily call for it, which explains why he ended up working so well when playing charts for Ray Charles or coming out onstage with Carole King to play some melodic blues licks. There might have been a lot of professionalism there, but when anyone works with Bob Dylan, it’s usually best to throw the rules out the window.
Dylan never catered to the traditional means of playing rock and roll, and if you asked someone like Tom Petty, it wasn’t exactly a walk in the park playing behind him, usually. He could get a wild idea in the middle of a show that made everyone think on their feet, or there could be a tune that he decides to play in a completely different key because that’s simply how he was feeling that day.
That kind of experimentation is all well and good in the studio, but Slash remembered feeling completely cold when Dylan brought him in, saying, “That was a drag. I really regret that. I’d just finished the Iggy Pop thing, and Don Was approached me. I grew up with Bob Dylan stuff, but Bob Dylan then is not the same as Bob Dylan now, and I hadn’t really paid much attention to him. I did one of the best one-offs that I can remember doing. And then at the last minute, he took my guitar solo off because he said it sounded like Guns N’ Roses.”
Then again, that is keeping with the kind of mentality Dylan had around that time. He wasn’t afraid to throw wild sounds into his tunes, and if anything sounded too predictable, he could easily scrap a completely good take and deliberately mess it up to make everything sound a little bit off. At the same time, Dylan might not have known the kind of guitarist he was working with here.
His experimental side might work well among friends, but expecting Slash to not play rock and roll guitar is like trying to tell Snoop Dogg to stop smoking weed or telling Neil Peart that he was better suited to playing a set of bongos than a proper drum kit. The guitar maestro was good at his job, so why the hell would anyone want to throw everything out of whack from the minute he walked into the studio?
Dylan was after a very specific sound when he entered the 1990s, but chances are, even when he made masterpieces like Time Out of Mind, Slash still probably wasn’t the guy for the job. He needed his music to be a little more ramshackle, and there’s a price that comes with working with a musician who’s almost too good at their instrument.
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