2000.07.16 - Los Angeles Times - Slash 'N Burn (Slash)

SLASH 'N BURN: Having assembled a new version of his band Snakepit, with a new album due Oct. 10, guitarist Slash is having what to him are some unusual experiences.

“The guys in the band are great—there are no rock stars,” he says. “Everyone’s very levelheaded, we have the same aspirations. Everyone’s just so enthusiastic and moving in the same direction, including our singer, which I’m not used to.”

That, of course, is a swipe at Axl Rose, Slash’s former Guns N’ Roses partner. Rose wanted to take GNR in new directions, so Slash quit the band five years ago and the singer has been working on a still-unfinished album with new musicians.

Slash, though still perplexed about why Rose would “systematically eliminate or alienate everyone so Guns N’ Roses wasn’t fun anymore,” shows no bitterness about the new GNR. In fact, he’s eager to hear the results of Rose’s sessions.

"I’m a huge Axl Rose fan,” he says. “I’d love to hear what it is that he decimated a band of that stature for. ... There has to be some sort of method to the madness.”

For his own music, though, Slash says there’s no mystery.

"I’m a rocker through and through,” he says. “What I do is what I do."

The fact that his style of rock is out of favor with radio, MTV and major record companies these days actually excites him. In fact, he says, he turned down several major-label offers to sign with independent KOCH Records for his first album since leaving GNR because it seemed to have more of the upstart spirit that Geffen Records had in 1985 when GNR signed there.

“You can call me crazy, but I enjoyed battling the corporate radio stuff that was going on in ’85,” he says. "We were the antithesis of everything going on back then. I dug the challenge, and now it’s like doing it all over again. I don’t want to sound too nostalgic, but this band is definitely not like the bands that are out there selling a lot of records today."

—S.H.