Slash released an album of blues and soul standards that no one was expecting, then took the show on the road to support community causes
Slash has fashioned some of the most memorable guitar riffs and solos in modern rock. But few people would have had him down as a born-again bluesman. For his latest project, the Guns N’ Roses star dived deep into a world of music that had its first flowering 60, 70 and even 80 years ago.
“I’m a hard-rock guy at heart,” he explains. “But this kind of blues guitar playing for me has always been the basis for everything.”
It turns out that old songs such as Hoochie Coochie Man, Stormy Monday, Key To The Highway and Born Under A Bad Sign were foundational in Slash’s initial mastery of his instrument.
“When I first picked up the guitar, the guys that I was inspired by at that time were all heavily influenced by Muddy Waters and Howlin’ Wolf and Robert Johnson, and I just went full circle,” Slash says. “So that is really the root of where my guitar playing came from.”
Not only that, but the blues remains the common musical language of the jamming scene – and Slash has always liked to jam. He even got to play with BB King a couple of times (“He was really generous to me”).
“The initial idea for Orgy Of The Damned, the origins of it really go back to the late 1990s when I used to jam with a couple of the guys on this record [bassist Johnny Griparic and singer/keyboard player Teddy Andreadis] in an impromptu blues covers band called Slash’s Blues Ball. It was just us getting together, very drunken, and we would just play in all these LA dives.”