http://www.theage.com.au/articles/2005/02/24/1109047000965.htmlFrom Guns N'Roses to Velvet Revolver guitarist Slash has gone well beyond the call of duty in the sex and drugs and rock'n'roll lifestyle, writes Michael Dwyer.
Slash has been dead more times than the average person can reasonably expect. His old Guns N'Roses bass-and-drug buddy Duff McKagan, now his slightly more stable ballast in Velvet Revolver, reckons it's four times. But the guitarist scoffs at that with a nicotine chuckle.
"I think it's more times than four," he says in a tone as much offended as amused. "And I have seen nothing that looked like anything close to an afterlife or anything like that. But then, you know, I might have missed it cause I was seriously f---ed up."
Like most war stories, it's all black comedy in retrospect. Keith Richards made an art form of trivialising drug addiction 35 years ago, when he popularised a string of devil-may-care quips along the lines of, "I don't have a problem with drugs, I have a problem with the police."
But like everyone who lives to deliver the savoir faire punchlines, Slash had the advantage of a final moment of awakening. It happened more recently than you might suspect, if you thought his resolute departure from the toxic miasma of Guns'N' Roses nine years ago was the dawn of a new era.
The clue is in the fine print of the first Velvet Revolver album, Contraband, in which the top-hatted guitar god includes a line of thanks to "Dr Cannom for resuscitating me".
"Well, there's not much to tell," he begins coyly. "I basically drank myself into a semi-permanent residence in a hospital at one point and they told me I had anywhere between three days to three months to live. That was it. And Doctor Cannom was the guy that basically got me through that, which I appreciate very much."
The former Saul Hudson's memory for dates isn't all that reliable but it seems that was about three years ago, when Mrs Slash was pregnant with their first son, London Emilo. His brother Cash Anthony was born last year but there's nothing like the first one to sober a man up.
"Yeah, that was the most grounding factor in my life at that time," Slash says. "Now I have at least one foot that is pretty firmly grounded. The other one still dangles out there and does what it's always liked to do. But I also like to try and keep it more or less within reason."
It's only midday at Slash's end of the phone, where Velvet Revolver are wrapping up their first "f---ing phenomenal" tour of England, but surprisingly, he doesn't sound like he just crawled out of bed. His sharp and attentive demeanour is completely at odds with the wasted outlaw reputation that helped G N'R turn the rock world upside down in 1987.
"Actually, I've been up for quite a while," he says, a little indignantly. "Everybody always has that image of rock musicians sleeping until 5pm but it's rarely the case, except for Keith Richards and Ron Wood. I wish I could sleep that long."
Today, he says, there's "far too much to do". As he learned the hard way with his mismanaged late '90s band, Snakepit, there's a lot of hands-on business required to keep Velvet Revolver on the steady upward trajectory they've enjoyed since the international success of their debut album last June.
If you came in late, Contraband is essentially a distillation of the Gunners' whisky-soaked LA-metal recipe but with former Stone Temple Pilots singer Scott Weiland. It debuted at number two in Australia and has since gone gold. Which means it's sold about a quarter as many as Guns N'Roses' concurrent Greatest Hits album, the one that Slash, McKagan and estranged leader Axl Rose fought to prevent from surfacing a year ago.
"I always take everything as a positive, as much as possible," Slash says on that subject. "The hysteria and the whole enigma of Guns N'Roses' longevity in the public's minds is something of a weird f---in' anomaly, to me. I haven't been able to sort that one out.
"But I am close to that material because that was part of my history, part of my growing up. I wouldn't be who I am today if it weren't for that, so I'm glad it stood the test of time."
You bet he is. Any resurgence of GN'R mania is useful to Velvet Revolver's fortunes, to say the least. The band's name and cunning initials logo are obvious references and much pre-release hype was based on the supergroup angle. Drummer Matt Sorum effectively makes VR three fifths of GN'R, even if Axl Rose hangs onto the naming rights in his lonely ivory tower somewhere in Los Angeles.
It's now 13 years since Guns N'Roses' last studio album, a stop-gap collection of punk covers called The Spaghetti Incident? For many of those years, Rose has been muttering about an increasingly unlikely album titled Chinese Democracy (get it?), with an erratically changing line-up. In '02, former Queen producer Roy Thomas Baker joined a long line of fired or rumoured producers that already included Bob Ezrin, Youth and Moby.
Rose toured the latest GN'R in the US a few years ago to mixed success: only one riot was involved, a poor effort by the original band's hyper-destructive scale. Today, even diehard fans must find it hard to stay interested in whatever Rose is constantly concocting and scrapping with behind locked doors. Put simply, if a rock band is the sum of its parts, Velvet Revolver is more Guns N'Roses than Guns N'Roses can ever be.
"You said it," Slash demurs, "not me".
Surely there's been a congratulatory phone call from Rose? A "break a leg" telegram? A Christmas card, perhaps?
"No, I have not received a Christmas card," he says. "I know my wife sent him one, as she does every year. It must be funny for him. Every year he gets a Christmas card from me, who he hasn't talked to in eight years."