We all have our heroes, the ones who inspired us to become who we are and obviously, every guitarist was influenced by a “guitar hero” in the past. If that musician is like Slash, lucky enough to become respected and successful, he will certainly have the chance to meet many of those heroes he had growing up. If they are even more lucky, one day, those guitar heroes will go to see them play live.
That’s what happened to the Guns N’ Roses and Velvet Revolver guitarist Slash twice. He was really nervous when he realized some of his favorite guitar players were in the audience watching him play.
The 2 guitarists who went to see Slash play and made him nervous
Although Slash grew up in the United States and became a “guitar hero” as part of the American band Guns N’ Roses. But he was actually born in London, England back in 1965. He moved to Los Angeles at the age of six but he remembers seeing up-close the British music scene when he was just a kid. So he grew up listening to many incredible bands from the late 60s and 70s, and two of them were Queen and Led Zeppelin.
As a guitar player and fan of those bands, he was obviously paying close attention to Brian May and Jimmy Page. Those were the two guitarists who made Slash feel nervous on stage. They both went to see him play with the Velvet Revolver back in 2005 in England.
Slash had never met Page until then and he recalled that story in an interview with 95.5 KLOS in 2022. “I was doing a show at Hammersmith. So I guess it was 2005 with Velvet Revolver. Jimmy Page and Brian May, who I’ve not met before, showed up at the gig,” Slash said.
Slash chose a Queen record as one of his favorites
Like his bandmate Axl Rose, Slash is also a huge fan of Queen. In an interview with Australian Guitar in 2022, he listed 7 live albums as some of his favorites of all time. One of them was “Live Killers”, released in 1979, which was recorded during their European leg of “Jazz Tour”.
That album had classic tracks like “We Will Rock You” and “Don’t Stop Me Now”. Although Slash hadn’t met Jimmy Page before he already had not only met Brian May, but performed with him on stage.
That happened in 1992, during the Freddie Mercury tribute concert. He performed the track “Tie Your Mother Down” alongside Queen and Def Leppard’s vocalist Joe Elliott.
The Led Zeppelin song he said that influenced him the most
Besides Queen, Slash was also heavily influenced by Led Zeppelin. He once even named the song of the band that inspired him the most. As he revealed in an radio interview back in 2019, the track “Whole Lotta Love” was extremely important for him.
“There is a song that even before the ‘Rocks’, Aerosmith record came along that definitely had a big influence (on me). I mean, I didn’t had any aspirations to be a musician. But I really loved music all my entire childhood. So I was really drawn to it and loved pulling out records. Putting them on, listening to them. I think I can name classic records that (I used to like) when I was a kid. But one that really had an impact on me was the ‘Zeppelin II’ record. The song that means the most to me because it had such an impact on me would be ‘Whole Lotta Love’”.
“I think that sort of speaks to a subliminal thing that later on. (Especially) when I started to play guitar (was) what I was drawn to. So a lot of the music I was really into as a kid, without ever having thought playing guitar, turned up later as having a really big influence on me.”
“So ‘Whole Lotta Love’ was just this really sexy, sleazy, guitar driven thing that I just loved. That actually ended up being sort of the catalyst for my first experimentation with distortion. Les Paul’s and that kind of thing. Oh god, it was so cool. It was just such a great introduction to the 70s, where 70s was going to go,” Slash said.