In a recent interview with Guitar World, Slash talked about his early guitar heroes and why he thinks American artists who started it all are better than his favorite British guitar players.
Even though Slash liked blues music early on, he says he didn’t really understand it back then. It was later, when he started playing guitar, that he learned from names like Cream, Led Zeppelin, Rory Gallagher, and Eric Clapton.
However, the guitarist thinks names like Jimmy Page and Eric Clapton aren’t as great as the original blues guitarists. He explained why:
“It was that stuff, maybe Clapton, that took me back to B.B. King again. And I remembered B.B. King from my grandmother. So it was a sort of full-circle moment of realization. Because my grandmother had told me, and I didn’t really get it at the time — I mean, I got it, but it wasn’t really important to me — that I was listening to all these British artists, and they were all heavily influenced by these Black artists from America. And she wanted to make sure credit was given where credit was due.”
Apparently, it was the blues guitarist who invented most of the modern techniques and rock guitarists later picked up on them to improvise it later:
“She was right. And all things considered, my favorite British guitar players are amazing, but they all pale in comparison to the original guys, because that was their own personal technique, from its origin, and everybody after that was just picking up on it and taking it somewhere else.”
Why Slash Prefers Blues To Rock
In his new album ‘Orgy Of The Damned,’ Slash moved away from his regular sound and decided to release a blues album instead. And it appears that he prefers the genre to rock more.
In another recent interview with the Los Angeles Times, he explained what makes blues so special for him and what he doesn’t like about rock music anymore:
“Everyone’s so technical now — and there’s some really interesting and impressive stuff that’s come out of it — but there’s only a few guitar players who I really like these days.”
Slash named one blues guitarist that he really likes these days:
“There’s a guy named Chris Buck, who’s a really great blues guitar player. I helped him to get a visa to come here, and then I called the Troubadour to get him a gig. You see all these young blues artists really going for it and getting really f*cking good. That’s a genre that’s really thriving and alive and fresh at the moment, whereas it’s a little bit few and far between for me to find interesting things to listen to in rock.”
You can hear ‘Orgy Of The Damned’ below.