I'd be dead,” Slash continues, reflecting on working on 4 over the past two years. “Listen, man, if I hadn't quit doing what I was doing, I never would've made it through the pandemic. “Nursing a real chemical dependence is a big responsibility and you have to deal with it every day, so it takes a good chunk of time, you know? So, when I got clean, I took all that extra time that I was wasting on my ‘extracurricular activities,’ and it just naturally went back into music,” he explains. Luckily, he beat the odds and survived, becoming completely sober in 2006, and the now 56-year-old guitarist credits his workaholism - which includes his busy schedule with both GNR and the Conspirators - for helping him stay clean. By 2001, at age 35, he was diagnosed with a form of congestive heart failure called cardiomyopathy due to his years of alcohol and drug abuse, and he was given between six days and six weeks to live. The early ‘90s was definitely a time of indulgence - and death-defiance - for Slash.
… 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 admits that since GNR were already “playing stadiums and doing all that kind of stuff” by 1992, the “November Rain” shoot “didn't faze me all that much. But I didn't know it was going to be as memorable as it turned out to be.” Anyway, we shot it and I had no idea what it was going to look like afterwards. And at that point in time, I was pretty much had that - I didn't have very much fear of death in those days.
“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. “ didn't tell me that they were going to be doing bomb shots with me with a helicopter! And 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,” Slash recalls. Slash in Guns N' Roses' "November Rain" music video.
0 kommentar(er)
