Currently on tour with Myles Kennedy & The Conspirators, guitar icon Slash, best known for his tenure in the over-the-top arena rock act Guns N' Roses for the better part of his life, recently spoke of the differences between the two bands, both of which he holds close to his heart.
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Slash sees his current project with Kennedy & Co. as having more of a "down-to-earth, sort of toe-to-toe-with-the-audience kind of vibe," and GN'R as "this really big, epic kind of different of a thing," he explained to Yahoo! Entertainment before a show with The Conspirators in Phoenix earlier this week.
Describing just how extravagant things got around the height of Guns N' Roses' fame in the '90s, he remembered back to filming the band's classic Use Your Illusion-era "November Rain" music video, which turns 30 years old this month. With a more than $1 million budget ($2.1 million today), the extended clip ended up being one of the most expensive music videos of all time. It was conceptualized by frontman Axl Rose as a trilogy inspired by Del James' short story "Without You," with "Don’t Cry" and "Estranged" included in the storyline -- but none of that really mattered to Slash. "I don't even know exactly what it's about, but I was always that guy who really could not care less about concept videos and all that kind of stuff," he laughs. "I just showed up to do it. … I really just couldn't get into the cinematic and theatric kind of concept thing. So, I just would write my own part, like: 'This is what I'll do, and you guys do whatever.'"
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What he didn't realize when he showed up on set to film his blistering solo shot in front of the church, was that director Andy Morahan had an aerial shot planned. (Remember, this was before you could get a drone at your local supermarket.) Slash says, "when I got out onto the set and did my thing, I noticed that this helicopter would come back and forth at extremely fast speeds and get really, really low... And I thought, ‘Well, this'll be my last day on Earth.’ … It was the kind of thing where you’re just resigned to the fact that you're probably gonna die. And at that point in time, I was pretty much had that [mentality] — I didn't have very much fear of death in those days. Anyway, we shot it and I had no idea what it was going to look like afterwards. But it ended up looking pretty cool. But I didn't know it was going to be as memorable as it turned out to be.”
"I think at the end of the day, the whole sort of trilogy, there was a feeling of like, 'Wow, we've actually gotten to this point where we're shooting on a top of a building downtown with a helicopter,' for 'Don't Cry.' And I remember taking a Mustang off a cliff! I think it was just sort of like an acceptance of the indulgence at that point," Slash remembers.
Relive the era in our GN'R-flavored Run That Back feature and be sure to pick up Slash with Myles Kennedy & the Conspirators' new album, 4, on shelves and streaming now. Click HERE for a full list of tour dates.
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