Slash: The Autobiography

Slash: The Autobiography
Anthony Bozza

Slash Slash

It seems excessive…but that doesn’t mean it didn’t happen.The mass of black curls. The top hat. The cigarette dangling from pouty lips. These are the trademarks of one of the world’s greatest and most revered guitarists, a celebrity musician known by one name: Slash.Saul “Slash” Hudson was born in Hampstead to a Jewish father and a black American mother who created David Bowie’s look in The Man Who Fell to Earth. He was raised in Stoke until he was 11, when he and his mother moved to LA. Frequent visitors to the house were David Bowie, Joni Mitchell, Ronnie Wood and Iggy Pop.At this time Slash got into BMX bikes and would eventually turn professional, winning major awards and money, but at 15 his grandmother gave him his first guitar. Sessions with numerous local LA rock bands followed until a fateful meeting with singer W Axl Rose…and the rest was rock history. Guns N’ Roses spent two years builiding their reputation before Appetite for Destruction was unleashed on an unsuspecting world.Chart success and global domination followed but with it came the inevitable fall – addicted to heroin, booze and cigarettes the band imploded in a rift between Axl and Slash that is as deep today as ever. But with a new wife, kids and new band Velvet Revolver, Slash is back on track. As raucous and edgy as his music, Slash sets the record straight and tells the real story as only Slash can.

Slash

Slash with Anthony Bozza

Copyright

HarperCollinsPublishers 1 London Bridge Street, London SE1 9GF

www.harpercollins.co.uk (http://www.harpercollins.co.uk)

Copyright © 2007 by Dik Hayd International, LLC.

Slash and Anthony Bozza assert the moral right to be identified as the author of this work

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the non-exclusive, non-transferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on-screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, down-loaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins e-books.

HarperCollinsPublishers has made every reasonable effort to ensure that any picture content and written content in this ebook has been included or removed in accordance with the contractual and technological constraints in operation at the time of publication.

Source ISBN: 9780007257751

Ebook Edition © OCTOBER 2007 ISBN: 9780007481033

Version: 2018-08-23

To my loving family, for all their support through the good times and the bad

And to Guns N’ Roses fans everywhere, old and new; with out their undying loyalty and limitless patience, none of this would matter

Contents (#uf6afb24e-da28-5b21-9b59-49c5f9013fc6)

Copyright

Introduction

1. Stoked

2. Twenty-Inch-High Hooligans

3. How to Play Rock-and-Roll Guitar

4. Education High

5. Least Likely to Succeed

6. You Learn to Live Like an Animal

7. Appetite for Dysfunction

8. Off to the Races

Photographic Insert

9. Don’t Try This at Home

10. Humpty Dumpty

11. Choose Your Illusion

12. Breakdown

13. Coming Up for Air

If Memory Serves

Photography Credits

About the Authors

Credits

About the Publisher

Having Considered All Things

It felt like a baseball bat to my chest, but one swung from the inside. Clear blue spots lit up the corners of my vision. It was abrupt, bloodless, silent violence. Nothing was visibly broken, nothing had changed to the naked eye, but the pain made my world stand still. I kept playing; I finished the song. The audience didn’t know that my heart had done a somersault just before the solo. My body had delivered its karmic retribution; reminding me, onstage, of how many times I’d intentionally served it up a similar loop-de-loop.

The jolt quickly became a dull ache that almost felt good. In any case, I felt more alive than I had a moment before, because I was more alive. The machine in my heart had reminded me of just how precious this life is. Its timing was impeccable: with a full house in front of me, while I played my guitar, I got the message loud and clear. I got it a few times that night. And I got it every time I was onstage for the rest of that tour, though I never knew when it was coming.

A doctor installed an implantable cardioverter-defibrillator in my heart when I was thirty-five. It’s a three-inch-long battery-powered generator that was inserted through an incision in my armpit. It constantly monitors my heart rate, delivering electroshocks whenever my heart beats too dangerously fast or slow. Fifteen years of overdrinking and drug abuse had swollen that organ to one beat short of exploding. When I was finally hospitalized, I was told I had six weeks to live. It’s been six years since then and this piece of machinery has saved my life more than a few times. I’ve enjoyed a convenient side effect that the doctor did not intend: when my indulgences have caused my heart to beat too dangerously slow, my defibrillator has popped off, keeping death from my door for one more day. It also shocks my heart into submission when it beats fast enough to court cardiac arrest.

It’s a good thing I got it adjusted before the first Velvet Revolver tour. I did that one sober for the most part; sober enough that the excitement of playing with a band I believed in to fans who believed in us moved me to my core. I hadn’t been that inspired in years. I ran all over the stage; I basked in our collective energy. My heart raced with excitement hard enough to trigger the machine inside me onstage every night. It wasn’t pleasant but I began to welcome those reminders. I saw them for what they were. Strange moments of alienated clarity, moments out of time that encapsulated a life’s worth of hard-won wisdom.

1

Stoked

I was born on July 23, 1965, in Stoke-on-Trent, England, the town where Lemmy Kilmister of Motörhead was born twenty years before me. It was the year rock and roll as we know it became greater than the sum of its parts; the year a few isolated bands changed pop music forever. The Beatles released Rubber Soul that year and the Stones released Rolling Stones No. 2, the best of their collections of blues covers. There was a creative revolution afoot that has never been equaled and I’m proud to be a by-product of it.

My mom is an African American and my dad is English and white. They met in Paris in the sixties, fell in love, and had me. Their brand of interracial intercontinental communion wasn’t the norm; and neither was their boundless creativity. I thank them for being who they are. They exposed me to environments so rich and colorful and unique that what I experienced even while very young made a permanent impression on me. My parents treated me as an equal as soon as I could stand. And they taught me, on the fly, how to deal with whatever came my way in the only type of life I’ve ever known.

Tony Hudson and his sons, 1972. Slash looks exactly like his son London here.