Slash Talks Making Peace With Axl, New Guns Music

No one could've predicted Guns N' Roses' reunion going from strength-to-strength — both as a touring outfit and a recording unit. Coming on February 25th is GNR's four-track EP, titled Hard Skool, marking the first set to feature Axl Rose, Duff McKagan, and Slash since the band's 1993 covers album “The Spaghetti Incident?”

Slash spoke with Classic Rock magazine and was asked if he thought the band would still be going this strong half-a decade after joining forces again: “Um, no. When we got together, Axl and I really got over this major sort of hump of negativity that we’ve been carrying around for years and years. It was a real simple, relatively short conversation that we had, which pointed a lot of fingers in the direction of s*** that we were going through in the past, and people we were working with at the time. So we got past that.”

He went on to say, “We decided that we would honor these requests to play Coachella that we’d been getting for years. That was really the main driver — to get together for the fun of it, and do the Coachella gigs. I didn’t really have any expectations, but it was such a magical kind of thing, such an overwhelmingly positive experience, that we just started doing it in earnest across the planet. And it’s continued for a pretty long time.”

Regarding the newly revamped Guns tracks set for the upcoming album that had been recorded prior to him and McKagan rejoining the band, Slash revealed, “The bass and the guitars are all re-done, for the most part, but the original drums are still intact, and the vocals.”

When pressed as to which era or album the upcoming Guns album most strongly resembles, Slash explained, “I really don’t have the vantage point to be able to have that perspective. I’m just not able to sort of objectively look at it like that. It’s just what it is. But it’s cool. I’m enjoying working on the stuff and having a good time doing it.”

Guns N' Roses co-founders Slash and Duff McKagan have decades of history together and Slash told us a while back that he and Duff have always had an undeniable chemistry. “When we first met, Duff came in with, for one, just the greatest f***ing work ethic and a kind of personality that's just totally resilient, which sort of mirrors what I'm about. And then as far as being a player, he has an approach that just goes right in sync with what I do as a guitar player, and we just hit it off as friends, as musicians, ever since the beginning, and it stayed all the way through this whole time.”