SLASH AND BURN

Saul “Slash” Hudson is the luckiest man in rock. Quitting Guns N’ Roses in ’96 when they were on top of the world, he returned in ’16 for the ultimate victory lap, making peace with Axl Rose, playing guitar at the peak of his powers – and even learning to love a certain, harmonics-heavy ballad

- BY ANDREW DALY

SLASH WAS THERE when, in the aftermath of Guns N' Roses' 1987 debut album, Appetite for Destruction, the band suddenly exploded onto a chaotic arc from Sunset Strip hopefuls to one of the biggest, most debauched rock acts on the planet – so it's hard to imagine anything phasing him. But when the guitar maestro considers how far GN'R has come since his and bassist Duff McKagan's return in 2016, his mind is clearly blown. As he tells Guitar World, “It really trips me out that all of this has happened.”

From the outside looking in, of course, Slash's return to the GN'R fold seemed inevitable. Behind the scenes, though, he and GN'R vocalist and leader Axl Rose barely spoke after the guitarist left the band in 1996, let alone thought about teaming up to take on the world again. And even when he did agree to cozy up alongside Rose again, he didn't exactly have the long haul in mind.

"It sounds crazy, but when I first got involved again, it was just to do a couple of shows, one of which was Coachella," Slash says. "We'd been getting these offers to do that event for years, so Axl and I got together, sat down and hashed out a lot of stuff that had built up over the years. That's when he said, 'We get these offers to do Coachella. Do you want to do it?' I said, 'Yeah, that would be fun.'”

So much fun, in fact, that Slash is still here, nine years later. But this isn't your father's Guns N' Roses. There are no more hardcore drugs, no more binge-drinking benders and no more infighting – the factors that tore the band apart in the first place.

"That's the best way to put it," Slash says. "But other than changes in the way things were handled back in the day, it's just maturing... and maybe the lack of massive substance abuse on my part. [Laughs] I can't speak on everybody else's behalf, but all those things play into it. It's a perfect storm of a lot of things."