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Re: Some more interesting points in Slash's book that I never knew about
To be honest I skipped a lot of pages in this book. There's little depth, so reading about non-gn'r related stuff was pretty fuckin' boring.
Other than that it just felt like a bunch of unrelated/semi-related stories put together. "yeah, then I did heroin, then I drank xx bottles of whisky, then I fucked a lady etc. etc." Some of that is entertaining, sure, but hell, give me something to chew on. This isn't Poison.
Re: Some more interesting points in Slash's book that I never knew about
Neemo wrote:Well wouldnt it set the record straight "from Slash's perspective"
some of the stuff i have heard about that is in this book, he talks about alot of things, from what i understand, things we've never heard about before....
but if "from Slash's perspective" is not the truth.. what good is it? And if he is talkin about things we haven't heard before, how do we know its not more bullshit? this book is to be read with a grain of salt.
I agree. I'm a big Slash supporter and read it all with a grain of salt. It was an interesting read, but it was full of his recollection of events - the same as Axl's or anybody else's book would be. We will never get the real truth, so all we can do is read as much as possible and made educated guesses based off of the information we have.
An interesting side note: I haven't heard any Axl supporters ripping the parts of the book where he says good things about Axl. Apparently the inaccuracies are limited mostly to bad things related to Axl. It's good to know Slash's memory of the good things is so accurate and the bad things are foggy...this certainly increases the odds of a reunion down the road once he forgets all the bad Axl things. 
Re: Some more interesting points in Slash's book that I never knew about
buzzsaw wrote:An interesting side note: I haven't heard any Axl supporters ripping the parts of the book where he says good things about Axl. Apparently the inaccuracies are limited mostly to bad things related to Axl. It's good to know Slash's memory of the good things is so accurate and the bad things are foggy...this certainly increases the odds of a reunion down the road once he forgets all the bad Axl things.
Funny you mention that. Having not read the book myself, I honestly assumed there were no good parts about Axl in it, lol.
I think I mentioned this earlier in the thread, but he is pretty complimentary about Axl's singing and writing abilities. He even goes out of his way not to mention personal things about Axl that he certainly could have gotten into about his past. I think it's pretty obvious that Slash respects his talents and despises his attitude, which is the way I think a lot of people fall on the issue. The only things he really bashes Axl about are blowing money on shit they don't need and not showing up/walking out of shows.
Re: Some more interesting points in Slash's book that I never knew about
Right or wrong, I enjoyed the book.
He's quite complimentary about some facets of Axl's personality at some points, although I think as time went by he lost any respect he had.
I found it interesting that Slash said he would have stuck through an industrial album with Axl if there had been the right creative vibe.
Re: Some more interesting points in Slash's book that I never knew about
I've just finished reading Slashs book and I'm still in two minds about it.
It was a good read, filled with plenty of interesting stories about his days in GNR, but the timeline of the book confused me a little too much. For example, Slash talks about the release day of Use Your Illusion albums but then a few pages later he suddenly jumps back to talking about the mixing/mastering process even though that subject had already been covered in detail previously.
Whilst I don't care for Velvet Revolver I felt that Slash had rushed through this entire section, granting it nowhere near the same amount of detail he did for other chapters in his life. He mentions Scott Weiland liking there material but being in two minds about joining the band. On the next page Slash wrote about Scott being late to a corporate showcasing gig. At this point I was still under the impression Scott hadn't joined the band though so found it all pretty confusing.
The author Anthony Gazza seems to have a love affair with the words "we'll get to that in just a little while". I counted that sentence, or some variation of it no less than 6 times in the first 70 pages. Whilst I'm not trying to bash the book it pissed me off to the point where I considered just closing it. The sentence kept popping up throughout the book and to me it came across as an unprofessional writing. Maybe thats just me though.
Fortunately the book is filled with as many good points as there are bad. I was pleased to see Axl represented in a fair light, and being an Izzy fan I enjoyed all of the little annecdotes involving him, including how they originally met.
Something that jumped off the page for me was the following photo:
Caption: Duff, Izzy, Slash and Matt at Mates rehearsal studio, jamming pre-Velvet Revolver. They may or may not have been working on a song called 'Snafu'
"Snafu" is a Stradlin song that was released on "Like A Dog". Whilst I need to work out the exact dates to confirm if this can be true, my mate Ed has already contacted Izzys engineer/bassist from "Like A Dog" era ; here's what he said:
"Izzy just brought some basic (acoustic) ideas on tape and the songs really took form and were arranged in the studio with Rick and Taz. If they were Project songs he probably would've mentioned it at some point.
Not 100% sure, but it's very unlikely that they stem from the Project."
If this were true it could explain Izzys reasons for not releasing the Dog album straight away. Izzy had it mixed/mastered in April/May 2003 but it didn't see a release until mid-2005, whilst Contraband was released between the two in June '04.
Izzy jammed with the guys a lot during the years prior to VR so its possible Snafu was originally worked on with Slash etc, just not in the timescale represented in the photo posted above.
It's all food for thought anyway, especially to Izzy fans 
Re: Some more interesting points in Slash's book that I never knew about
Have you ever noticed how the things you start out liking about someone end up being the things that annoy you?
Familiarity and contempt..
None of these guys have REALLY talked the shit they could about each other, I hold out hope for a reunion one day.....
Re: Some more interesting points in Slash's book that I never knew about
I finally got the book about a week ago and read the whole thing in 2 days (hey I was bored and on holidays then).
My initial reaction when I finished it was that I was a little disappointed. As I think someone else mentioned, it seemed to lack any real depth. Generally I didn't feel that I got any great insight into Slash personally - a lot of it seemed quite superficial.
Anthony Bozza - I'm gonna hold him responsible for some of the other shit in there like the continual "but we'll get into that later" comment, as well as the whole timeline thing was really confusing and pissed me off. I would have though that was his job to at least make sure it was written and structured correctly.
I can't quite put my finger on what's missing with the book. Either it's a Motely Crue - The Dirt type book, if that's the case then I think it needed a heap more anecdotes in there. Sure Slash talks about doing drugs and banging chicks but doesn't really go into the details of many of these events much.
So if it wasn't meant to be The Dirt style of book, then perhaps it was supposed to be an outlet for Slash to vent his spleen a bit. Clearly that didn't really happen - well at least not to the level that you would have expected, which implies to me that he didn't want to burn any bridges to a reunion one day. I know he said he wanted to "set the record straight" - which he did a bit about how events made him think and feel and untimately lead him to make the decisions that he did. But it still didn't do that in any real depth IMO.
So if it's not either of those two styles of book then presumably it's a book to try and give us an insight into Slash the person. Unfortunately after reading it I didn't feel like I had some sort of deeper understanding about the guy, or about his lifes journey etc etc. Yeah there was some new stuff, but nothing profound - at least for me anyhow.
One interesting thing I got out of it was exactly how disrespectful Axl was to the rest of the band regarding the recording sessions. I mean, I had read articles about it but hadn't quite realised it was that bad. That would have been fucken intolerable after a while, never knowing if he was going to rock up, and basically trying to write an album whilst playing secret squirrel communiucating through Doug Goldstein and hardly ever seeing or even speaking directly with Axl.
I was also curious as to what actually scared the crap out of Izzy to make him call his dad and go back to Indiana all of a sudden, Slash didn't really elaborate on this??? It also seemed like when he came back from Indiana and saw Axl going off his nut and throwing spaghetti out the window and trashing everything and he went straight back to Indiana - that sounded like a turning point for Izzy - a confirmation that the whole thing is out of control and he no longer wants to be a part of it?
I would also be interested to hear Axl's version of events as to why it seemed like he didn't want to be around them. Perhaps how drug fucked they were caused him to cut himself off from them somewhat.
Re: Some more interesting points in Slash's book that I never knew about
I was also curious as to what actually scared the crap out of Izzy to make him call his dad and go back to Indiana all of a sudden, Slash didn't really elaborate on this???
I doubt we'll ever know. Izzy talked about driving through a desert and he was so fucked up that he thought it was snowing. He'd open cans and see maggots and worms crawling everywhere etc. These incidents happened in 1990 so add an extra years worth of being fucked on and it's gonna be pretty bad 
If this kind of thing was happening frequently, throw in the occasional riot and band members that apparently just don't see eye to eye then one day he probably just snapped. Would you stick around if put in the same situation?
Re: Some more interesting points in Slash's book that I never knew about
Aussie wrote:I was also curious as to what actually scared the crap out of Izzy to make him call his dad and go back to Indiana all of a sudden, Slash didn't really elaborate on this???
I doubt we'll ever know. Izzy talked about driving through a desert and he was so fucked up that he thought it was snowing. He'd open cans and see maggots and worms crawling everywhere etc. These incidents happened in 1990 so add an extra years worth of being fucked on and it's gonna be pretty bad
If this kind of thing was happening frequently, throw in the occasional riot and band members that apparently just don't see eye to eye then one day he probably just snapped. Would you stick around if put in the same situation?
Not quite the Vanishing Point trip huh?
