As the Guns N’ Roses reunion tour heads into its third year, Slash is sharing the story of his first contact with former bandmate Axl Rose in 2015 after nearly two decades apart.
“It was on the phone, and then we got together when I got back into town,” Slash tells Nikki Sixx on his Sixx Sense radio show (video below). “I was on the road; I was in Peru. I remember it specifically. It was very cathartic to physically talk. ‘Cause there’s a bond that you have that’s never [broken], and then what happens is the bond makes the negative side of that much worse, because you’re forced out of it.
“There was always that thing, and I won’t get into all the personal stuff,” he continued. “There was a lot of bad feelings from the breakup all throughout that 20 years, whatever it was. But there’s also a part of you that’s, like, in a marriage, where you love somebody… So there’s always that feeling, but then there’s all this negative stuff. There was so much stuff perpetuated in the media, and it was just blown out of proportion. So when he and I talked for the first time, it was really, really cool.”
Slash, Rose and Duff McKagan launched the Not In This Lifetime tour with a rare club show at The Troubadour in Los Angeles on April 1, 2016; the event saw Rose break his foot early in the performance, requiring surgery and the use of a throne – on loan from head Foo Fighter Dave Grohl – for live shows until the injury healed.
Slash said the Troubadour gig felt “very surreal” when he looked across the stage and saw Rose, adding, “And it just snowballed from there. So it’s been 18 months … if you had talked to me 20 months ago, I would have said, 'No f---ing way. It’s never gonna happen.’ But it did, and it was f---ing awesome.
“There were these moments on stage where you sort of take stock of where you are at the moment and go, ‘Wow, this is a trip.’ There was something about this particular tour that didn’t take me back to the last tour in the ‘90s … it was completely unique in its own new thing. Same guys, same songs – but a whole different experience.”
The reunion run recently delivered Guns N’ Roses the No. 2 spot on live music industry magazine Pollstar’s list of worldwide concert tours in 2017, with 2.68 million tickets sold over 81 dates for a gross of $292.5 million; since its 2016 launch, the trek has made almost $500 million.
The group will reconvene for a series of summer 2018 concert dates across Europe that will begin in Berlin, Germany on June 3.
Guns N’ Roses were named the No. 2 Rock News Artist Of The Year and delivered the No. 5 Rock News Story Of The Year as part of the 2017 hennemusic Rock News Awards.
See also:
U2 and Guns N’ Roses top 2017 worldwide concert tours
Rock News Artist Of The Year No. 2: GUNS N’ ROSES
Rock News Story Of The Year No. 5: GUNS N’ ROSES
VIDEO: Dave Grohl joins Guns N’ Roses for Paradise City in Tulsa
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