In a new interview with Clay Marshall via Blabbermouth, Guns N’ Roses guitarist Slash discussed Aerosmith guitarist Joe Perry calling him in the past about Izzy Stradlin.
On whether he still gets excited playing iconic venues in his Los Angeles hometown:
Slash: “There’s still that sort of feeling like when you were a kid, and all those places you sort of looked on with that dreamy sort of [perspective]. That never really totally leaves, no matter how many times you play there. I remember with Guns, just recently playing The Forum, it still holds that allure from when you were young and fantasized about playing those venues.”
On the best advice he received from Aerosmith’s Joe Perry:
Slash: “The only piece of real, sort of direct advice he ever gave me was way back in 1988, I think it was, when he told me. I called him up from Japan at one point to tell him that Izzy [Stradlin] was in a bad way. I think he thought I was talking about Izzy like I was talking about myself, but using Izzy. He was like, ‘I’ll tell you right now — he needs to get help, but then if you do that, don’t come back to me if you fuck up. I’m not here for that. It’s not a destination, it’s a journey,’ which is a classic Alcoholics Anonymous line. That’s always sort of stuck with me. Other than that, Joe’s not really what I would consider an advice-giver. That’s one of the reasons I like him so much — he’s a wealth of knowledge, but he’s not sort of telling you what you should do.”
On his past comments that being a rock star is “an intersection of who you are and who you want to be”:
Slash: “For me, I think that really having a perspective on it now, when I was a kid coming up, with the exception of the top hat, I was exactly the same [as I am now]. Being Slash the guitar player is an outlet for me that Slash the regular person on the street, day-to-day, there’s an extension of that that I could never be as myself, but it’s very relative. In other words, the guitar’s that outlet that sitting here, I don’t have.”
