1995.02.DD - Noisy Mothers (ITV) - Interview with Slash and Eric Dover

Transcript:
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Female host: But next up, as promised, last week I met up with Slash and Eric from Slash’s side band Snakepit for a little latte in a rather exclusive hotel somewhere in Mayfair.  

Male host: It’s bloody windy around here, isn’t?

Female host: It bloody is.

Slash: When Guns N’ Roses finished their two-and-half year Use Your Illusion tour, when we got home, I was like, “Now what?” I sat on the couch and I was like, “Alright.” So I designed a pinball machine. And then, you know, that got done and I had a studio built in my house, just a small – like, probably, about twice the size of this bed over here. And I started, you know, I had a 24-track little Mackie board and like a kid in a candy store, I’m multi-tracking. And then Matt started coming over and hanging out, and we started putting on these ideas on tape – you know, little riffs that I wrote here and there. Then Gilby came over – this is after he left Guns N’ Roses, and he came over, and he brought a couple of songs with him and we taped those, and then he put new guitars on the stuff I wrote, you know, rhythm guitars and stuff. And then Mike Inez showed up unannounced at a party - it’s a guy I don’t even know and he just shows up at my house one day – and he put bass on it. All of a sudden, I thought, “Wow, we have a good band.” You know, Guns really wasn’t doing anything, because everybody was sort of doing their own little vacation or whatever. I was the only one still working, because if I didn’t I’d probably get myself in trouble. So I put some time in the studio in Los Angeles and we just whipped these songs out. Then we started looking towards finding a singer, so we auditioned some 40 odd singers. And then Eric – we got a tape through a mutual friend from Eric, a guy named Mark Danzeisen, and I heard his voice and I thought, “Oh, that’s cool.” So I gave him a piece of music, which was a work tape called Beggars & Hangers-On, and he… well, it was called “Song in D” at the time, and he wrote Beggars & Hangers-On. I thought, “Cool, we got a band.” And then we just went on to write all the lyrics and the melodies for the rest of the material, and that was it.

Dover: Well, Jellyfish had broken up, so I was working with Roger Manning from Jellyfish at the time. Then, when I was approached with it, I just… I wasn’t really that intimidated, because… (laughs)… to tell you the truth, it all happened so fast.  

Slash: Yeah (laughs). That is true, I have to say. We hadn’t any real plans and we went from one guitar riff to the next one, then all of a sudden we were in the studio, then all of a sudden Eric is with us, and then, next thing I know, I’m designing an album cover, and now we’re here (laughs).

Dover: You really didn’t bother even telling me I was in the band until I’d already done all the tracks, more or less (laughs).

Slash: That sounds like me.  

[Beggars & Hangers-On video]

Slash: A lot of people expected it to be a solo project and… I mean, even Axl, who we had a couple of altercations between he and I where he wanted the material back, and I said “No, the album is finished.” He was like, “You couldn’t have done an album in two weeks.” I said, “Oh yeah. It’s done. It’s been done” (laughs). So he was like, “Well, I want this song and I want that song” and I said, “It’s too late,” you know, because when I first played it for him he didn’t like it. So that’s how quickly this thing happened. And it’s pretty much all first or second take stuff and we improvised a lot while we were doing it. So at this point we just figured it’s more like a new band than a solo project, because everybody’s input, you know, is why it sounds the way it does.

[Video]

Slash: As far as Guns is concerned, we’ve played with one guy who I cannot stand, and then with Zakk Wylde who is a great friend of mine, but at the same time we don’t necessarily sound like Guns N’ Roses with two sort of heavy metal lead guitar players in the band. So, on that note, that’s when Eric, Matt, Gilby – you know, all of us decided to pursue a tour, and so I said, “Well, look, I’ll be back in six months and we’ll talk about it then.”

[Video]

Slash: It’s like starting from ground zero. I think that’s why we’re having so much fun, because we’re gonna go and play clubs, which Guns obviously hasn’t done in ages. (To Dover) I guess you always talk about Jellyfish being a great band but they didn’t like touring or something?

Dover: Yeah, it was kind of tough on Andy and Roger. We’re more or less of the same temperament when it comes to that.

Slash: Yeah, the whole band. The cool thing about this group is there’s not any so-called rock stars in this band. We sort of just get together and everybody’s real considerate of each other, and it’s one of those things where we’re all very equal. We call ourselves the wayward second fiddles, you know, and it’s just because we’re all side guys – you know, we’re all the pieces of the back line and we look at life a lot differently than the front guys do (laughs).

[Video]

Slash: One of the going attitudes about this band and about the whole concept - well, it’s not even a concept, just the way the record is – is that instead of looking at everything from oblique point of view, instead of everything being half empty, we sort of look at everything as being half full. So, a lot of the sort of downside to Guns N’ Roses, you just have to take it for what it is, and that way you look at everything with a sort of smile on your face. It’s like, “Whatever” and it keeps life from being too stressed, I think. You know, I never really thought about it till just now (laughs).