Former Guns N' Roses guitarist Gilby Clarke spoke candidly on how the ascendance of grunge pretty much stripped the band of the street cred they had earned up through the early-'90s.
Clarke chatted with 80's Metal Recycle Bin and spoke about how Guns dealt with the changing tide in the hard rock scene: “You can tell the style of music was really starting to change. And Guns N' Roses, we were a little slower to adapt, because in our world, everything was great. We were selling out stadiums, and we're selling 20 million records — it didn't really affect us until we came off the road in, like, '94.”
Although grunge and its top artists didn't take the band by surprise — how swiftly Guns N' Roses was passed over by fans definitely did: “Axl (Rose) was always on top of that stuff — he loved Nirvana, y'know, he loved Soundgarden, he loved Pearl Jam. We really noticed the big changed when we got off the road. One thing that stuck with Slash and I, when we were coming out of the Rainbow one time — and this was around '92, '93 — somebody saw Slash and goes, 'Oh my God, look it's Slash' — but they were laughing, like he was a cartoon character — not Slash from Guns N' Roses, which, y'know, three or four years before that was the coolest beep-beep on the planet (laughs).”
