Slash says that even as a solo artist, he still is most comfortable with the band dynamic.
By John J Moser
Former Guns ‘N Roses guitarist Slash says he didn’t really know anything about Alter Bridge singer Myles Kennedy when he first asked Kennedy to sing on his self-titled 2010 solo debut album.
Slash used a bevy of lead singers, such as Ozzy Osbourne, Soundgarden’s Chris Cornell, Kid Rock, Iggy Pop and even Maroon 5’s Adam Levine on the disc, and called in Kennedy to sing on the final two songs — which he says almost were left off the disc.
“I only called him because I’d heard a lot about him,” Slash says in a phone call. Slash says he especially was piqued by reports Kennedy had recently worked with former Led Zeppelin members Jimmy Page, John Paul Jones and Jason Bonham on a never-released project.
Slash not only ended up keeping Kennedy’s songs on the disc, he also enlisted him as vocalist for the touring band he put together for the disc. Then he made Kennedy the sole singer on his sophomore solo album, last year’s Apocalyptic Love, much of which Kennedy helped write while the two were on the road.
Kennedy again is accompanying Slash and the band — now called Myles Kennedy and The Conspirators — on a tour. The pair also is writing again — for a third solo album Slash says likely will come out early next year. “I was really curious to see what he sang like,” Slash says of that first audition.
“And since I was doing this record with all these different singers, I asked him to come in. And he was just phenomenal, and ... I really liked him as a person. You know, his whole personality and his attitude and everything really jelled with mine.”
“The longer we knew each other, the more I really just liked working with him. I thought we had a really great chemistry and we started writing on the road.” Slash says Kennedy wasn’t the only one with whom he connected.
“I put together what I thought was, you know, a quick pickup band” to support the first record, Slash says. “But it turned out to be, like, the perfect bunch of guys. And I just thought that, after we’d been on the road for a while, we should just go in the studio and make a record with these guys.”
Slash says there was no other overriding reason for making Apocalyptic Love other than the love of playing with the band. There also “was no theme to it, no particular direction, other than just the like-minded songwriting of myself and Myles.”
The album went to No. 4 (it was still in the Top 100 this week, 14 months after its release) and produced the No. 1 Rock Chart hit You’re a Lie, as well as the Top 4 hits Standing in the Sun and Anastasia.
Slash has had his greatest success with bands. In the nine years Slash was guitarist for Guns ‘N Roses, the band sold 50mn albums, including 18mn copies of its 1987 Appetite for Destruction, making it the best-selling debut disc of all time.
Rolling Stone put him on its list of Greatest Guitarists of All Time, and various music magazines also have ranked his riffs on the band’s hits as among the greatest ever.
He followed that success by selling 2.5mn albums and having three chart-topping rock hits with the supergroup Velvet Revolver in the mid-2000s.
Slash says that even as a solo artist, he still is most comfortable with the band dynamic, which is why he built Myles Kennedy and The Conspirators around him.
“I’ve always put bands together; I’m either in one or putting one together. ... In working with these guys, I’m really a band guy. So the only difference about me being in a band and what I’m doing now is that I actually lead this band. It’s a sort of conscious knowledge between everybody,” Slash says, laughing.
“But I still treat it as a group. It’s just more directed by me than a lot of the bands that I’ve been in before, where it was more of a joint effort. But this bunch of guys is very happy just to have me sort of steer the ship, and they just kind of go along with it because we all want to sort of do the same thing, you know?”
On the current tour, Slash and Myles and The Conspirators play both Guns ‘N Roses and Velvet Revolver songs.
Asked whether he would ever consider working again with his former group, after a split so acrimonious that lead singer Axl Rose skipped the band’s 2012 Rock and Roll Hall of Fame induction, Slash admonishes the interviewer for even asking.
“I hate answering that question. I think they probably told you I don’t want to answer that question,” he says. “The Guns thing is obvious, so I don’t know what you want me to say.”
He seems more open to talking about Velvet Revolver, answering simply that band “isn’t broken up.” But the band hasn’t released an album since 2007, and played together just once — a benefit concert in January 2012 — since firing singer Scott Weiland in 2008.
Slash is now very familiar with Kennedy’s other band, Alter Bridge, with which the singer is recording its fourth album and which is scheduled to tour this autumn. But he says Kennedy’s work in that group is different from what he does in The Conspirators.
“He commands a different style completely, singing in this band than that band,” Slash says. “Which is how we co-exist, really.”
Slash says he and Kennedy have been writing on the road since the last album, and now are “going through this sketch process” as Kennedy concentrates on Alter Bridge.
“Then we’ll get together and start fleshing this stuff out,” Slash says. “We’re sending the stuff back and forth and sort of get the groundwork going on — what we like, what we don’t like. And then once I start seeing, you know, what’s coming together,” he works with drummer Brent Fitz and bassist Todd Kerns.
“Then when (Kennedy) gets back, we’ll start really sort of hashing it all out,” Slash says.
Asked about the sound of the new songs, Slash says, “there’s never anything verbally that I can say. You know, I’m really excited about the material and it’s great. I don’t know what particular direction it is. It’s a hard-rock record, because that’s what I do, but you really can’t say anything about it until it’s out.
“And then each person has to ascertain for themselves what they think it is.” — The Morning Call/MCT
