Slash discussed Poison and the 80’s Hollywood hair metal scene in a new Music Aficionado interview.
“I was always starting bands and finding people to write with, but I could never find a singer. A bad singer can make a good band terrible. So I just played without one. At one point, this guy Matt [Smith]—he was the original guitarist for Poison, a band I had no affinity for—called me up and told me he was quitting and going back to Pennsylvania. They needed another guitar player.
I thought about it for a while, and finally I decided to put pride aside and go check it out. At least I’d be playing gigs—they were the biggest band on the Strip at the time. I learned four of their songs and went down to play with them, and I gotta say I kicked the shit out of ’em. We had a definite difference of opinion as to what it was all about—image issues, clothing issues. I knew it wasn’t going to click. They asked me if I planned on wearing jeans and a T-shirt on stage, and I said, ‘Yeah.’
As I was walking out, C.C. DeVille was walking in. He was dressed to the nines. He had makeup on, his hair was all done up—I knew he was the guy for the gig. Bobby Dall called me and told me they’d picked the guy, and I wasn’t surprised. Had it worked out and I’d gotten the gig, it wouldn’t have lasted long. I wasn’t right for them.”
He also said, “The main focus for Hollywood glam metal wasn’t about what I would call musical integrity. They were all about the clothes and the image, and that’s what I hated about West Hollywood. Guns N’ Roses was the direct result of us hating that scene. We were sort of drawn together because of it. We were into the Dolls and Bowie, Aerosmith and early ’70s Stones. We weren’t into the eyeliner and the clothes.”
