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Re: Snakepit -era Slash interviews, curious.
I transcribed some of the more curious bits, but the whole things (and then some) can be accessed here.
Slash Slammer!
Murray Engleheart ducks for cover as SLASH tears into Hanoi Rocks and Johnny Thunders, whose songs were recorded for GN'R's hit album 'The Spaghetti Incident?'!
"We did a Hanoi Rocks tune but we decided not to put in on the album because we didn't wanna give Andy McCoy (former Hanoi guitarist) the money! McCoy's an asshole! The basic track was done but we never did any vocals on it. We also recorded a basic track on Iggy's 'Down on the Street', but we didn't finish that either. We stuck with 'Raw Power' - it just sounded cooler.
..."Steve Jones (ex-Sex Pistols axeman) was just like, 'Well, when's it coming out? When's my first cheque due?' So he was happy with it!
..."I didn't even play on the Johnny Thunders song ('You Can't Put Your Arms Around A Memory') cos I hated that little f*cker! So I really wasn't all that concerned when he died. We worked with him a coupla times, and I didn't like him at all. No disrespect for the deceased, but he's not one of my heroes, let's put it that way! I did like the Dolls (Thunders was a guitarist for Sleaze Rock legends the New York Dolls), but I just wasn't very interested in Thunders.
..."We never did talk to Soundgarden about doing 'Big Dumb Sex'. It was one of those spontaneous things. We were in the studio and it just sounded good. Of all the bands we played with during the '...Illusions' tour, Soundgarden were one of the coolest, just personable and down to earth. I was just happy to pay homage to them in the first place, although I did wonder what they might think when they heard it!
Realistically, though, isn't it going to be a long time till Guns N' Roses deliver a new album?
"Not necessarily. The only thing I know at this point is that I'm gonna take the 'Snakepit' thing on the road in March. We'll be touring till summer and then we're off. What happens then I don't know.
"There are some things that need to be sorted out. Axl wants Guns to do a lot of ballads and stuff, and I want to do rock stuff. I don't care about the current musical climate or what is commercially viable. That's why my records sounds that way it does. I'm just a street-level guy, and I don't fucking live one the beach in Malibu. And I'm not gonna conform to any of that shit either."
"We would write these songs in one night. When I first started writing stuff, Matt and I would get together - here's this riff, here's that riff - we'd finally get from point A to B and put it all together and leave it at that. There wasn't a lot of orchestration, like 'November Rain'. There were no vocals on it at this point but the songs were arranged.
...So I put all these songs down, Matt and I would play them - I played bass. Then Gilby got involved and Mike Inez got involved. Gilby redid all the rhythm guitar parts that I'd already recorded and Inez came down and redid the bass parts. That was very fortunate because I'm not a good bass player.
...Anyway, we had finished the entire record with no vocals... One of the first songs Eric [Dover] did was a song called 'Beggars and Hangers-On', where he wrote the whole song in one night. I was really impressed with that... It's about everybody we know! Half the girls I've met in my career to this point... So we went to Rumbo in the Valley and wrote the lyrics and melodies for 13 songs in one day.
I had a couple ideas... I had two songs with lyrics I'd finished myself, 'Be the Ball', and 'Take It Away'... 'What Do You Want to Be' is me and Eric... 'I Hate Everybody But You' is the closest I ever got to a love song, I wrote most of the lyrics for that.
[The instrumental] was a riff I'd been carrying around that Axl hated. He called it "red neck". He hated it so I never did anything with it.
Eric wrote his ideas from listening to the tapes... Once he gets the concept I might change a line here or there... 'Back and Forth Again' was my title but Eric had the lyrics. It's about people not being able to come to some cohesive understanding and breaking up...
'Neither Can I' is something Eric came up with as far as the concept is concerned...'Soma City Ward' [refers to] a drug you take when you're in a psycho ward. That's Eric's... There's one song called 'Lower' that was inspired by [the suicides of] Savannah and Kurt Cobain... 'Dime Store Rock' is Gilby's music and Eric's lyric... 'Monkey Chow' is a Gilby's song, I don't to this day know what it's about.
I have Guns on my mind so I couldn't take forever to put together the quintessential new rock band 'cause that wasn't my point. It was just a release for me... It's within our contracts to do one... There's no rules, you can do it way under budget so it doesn't cost a lot and the only thing I can do is promote it as much as I can so for the amount of effort spent, the money that goes into it, that I do what I can for it.
I have to worry about the pre-production for Guns, and who's gonna play guitar now that Gilby's not in the band... What happened was we were rehearsing and Gilby was really out of it one day. The morale of the band, we were all trying to keep it together and he was the odd man out that day. I was complaining and then Axl called me that same night and said he didn't want to work with Gilby anymore for a lot of different reasons. In a way I sort of went along with it, at least Axl thought I was going along with it because I had my own complaints from that night at rehearsal. This was about a year ago.
...Axl wanted to bring a friend of his that I didn't like. Right now there's a big hole on the second guitar. There's ideas going around, but fortunately I'm doing this other thing which lets me buy time. Axl's got an agenda but it doesn't really match mine. Every day is a new test, one after the other... Axl's out in Malibu. Halloween is the last time I saw him, but we talk. There's no bad blood between us, we just haven't figured out what we want to do and I'm a little concerned about the direction Guns goes in. We were supposed to do some stuff this month but we haven't done anything up till now and in March I'm gone [on tour]. Maybe in February, if we can come to some sort of an agreement as to what we're gonna do.
- Smoking Guns
- Rep: 330
Re: Snakepit -era Slash interviews, curious.
Nice read. I like when Slash doesn't sugar coat shit. He was about 30 years old then... I didn't know Gilby got fucked up like that. Slash was a functioning addict I suppose.
- Intercourse
- Rep: 212
Re: Snakepit -era Slash interviews, curious.
Was Gilby out of it on drugs or just misfiring with the band on a musical level - I can'rt work out what exactly he's saying here.
It would be a new one for me to hear that Gilby fell under the substance wagon....
