'And so eventually, you just get tired of all of it.' No matter how good of a party it was, there's this invisible line it crosses where it becomes a major burden,' he says. I did it to the hilt, and I'm sort of over it. 'I used to drink vodka in the morning like people drink coffee. Slash says he doesn't miss that chapter with the band. 'One thing would always lead to another, and that's how I would fill my time between tours.' 'My drug habits were always in between tours because there's this huge amount of movement and energy and activity that goes on when you're on the road that you get very much used to, and then it just stops,' Slash says. But he says he didn't need drugs to get on stage and perform. Slash says he started using heroin in the mid-'80s when he was still a teenager. 'Unfortunately, we had a very volatile band, and so what should have been fun turned into something that was a lot more work than it needed to be.'Ī lot of work mixed with a lot of drugs. They went from being on tour and not selling many copies to playing in a stadium, and that was just fine with him. The change was quick and drastic, Slash says. That was 'Sweet Child O' Mine' from the 1987 album Appetite for Destruction. 'But then we had one song, a year and a half after the album came out, that took us over the top,' he says. club circuit, and for Slash, it felt nearly impossible to break out. Guns N' Roses started out as a kind of cult band, making its way around the local L.A. A lot more than I do now, because I've became somewhat of a cartoon character.' I would go on stage and just hide in that thing,' he says. He grabbed it for a show, and hardly ever took it off after that.

His signature top hat became a favorite as soon as he stole it from a store that no longer exists in Los Angeles. 'Part of it is sort of sunlight, but the rest of it is being in the public all the time and you don't want to deal with the flashes and this and that, and they end up just not coming off,' he tells Weekend Edition Sunday host Rachel Martin. With a name like that, he was destined for rock stardom.įor years, it's been hard to find a picture of him without shades and a hat on. When he was a teenager, his friend's dad dubbed him 'Slash' and it stuck. His new album is called Apocalyptic Love. Slash was the lead guitarist of the legendary band Guns N' Roses. (Travis Shinn)īehind the opening notes of 'Welcome to the Jungle' was a musician with a sound and look all his own. Slash, the former lead guitarist for Guns N' Roses, has a new album out.

Slash without glasses