How Guns N’ Roses guitarist Slash became sober

Sex, Drugs and Rock & Roll walked side by side in the life of many famous musicians, one of them was Guns N’ Roses guitarist Slash. He has been sober for almost two decades already and he often says how much his life got better after he got clean.

In an interview with Thrasher Magazine back in 2019 the musician recalled how he became sober after many years of using drugs and drinking alcohol.

How Guns N’ Roses guitarist Slash became sober:

“There’s a bunch of different factors. But the first big signal is when it goes from being fun to being miserable. There’s this shift from one to another that you don’t see coming. It just sort of happens. At one point, you’re doing a lot of drinking and drugs, which was more or less fun, then it becomes a burden and a dependency. It turns in a dark direction. Then you start to see it impact everything in your life. And you struggle on and then you finally have to come to terms with it and admit it to yourself that you’ve gotten to a place where you’re not happy and it’s not doing you any good.”

“Then you have to take a stand and do something about it. Getting from the nucleus of the idea of it not doing you any good to actually doing something about it seems like it takes forever. It’s hard, but I definitely got to a point where I wasn’t having fun anymore and it was having a negative impact on what I do as a musician. On top of that, I had two kids. I was raised in this industry. I was raised in the very liberal ’60s and ’70s and so I saw a lot of kids who had parents who were just vacant. S0 I didn’t want to be that. I had all these different things coming together to push me to get my shit straight. It was really good. It was one of the most important things I’ve done in my life.”

He continued:

“(…) All things considered, most everybody I hang with or work with have come to terms with it in some way, shape or form. Most of them are sober. If they aren’t sober, they’ve always kind of been normal and didn’t take it to the level I did. It seems like the attitude toward that whole lifestyle. That cliché of sex, drugs and rock-n-roll, is really diluted at this point. It’s around, but it’s not like it was. I’m not even going to say in the ’60s but in the ’80s and ’90s. I think over the last ten years, the peers have lightened up,” Slash said.

Saul Hudson, or simply Slash, was born ub London, England back in 1965 and emigrated with his father to the United States when he was still a kid. He started his musical career  in 1981, when he was still a teenager but really achieved fame after he joined Guns N’ Roses in 1985 and they released the groundbreaking debut album “Appetite for Destruction” (1987). He left the group in 1996 and besides focusing on his solo career, the musician also was part of the successful supergroup Velvet Revolver, which also had the bassist Duff McKagan.