The Daily Swarm

The Daily Swarm reader Anthony Bozza’s latest book, Slash, is due to hit the shelves on October 30, and the final version is every bit as funny and honest as the advance hype promises.

The Observer Music Monthly published the first lengthy excerpt online yesterday, and this one bit stuck out as notable, especially given the simultaneous launch of Target’s latest fashion line.

Some quick background: Slash’s mom was a clothing and costume designer who created some of David Bowie’s iconic looks, and the Thin White Duke was something of a father-figure to the future G’n’R guitarist in his kindergarten years. Fast forward to the time in between Appetite for Destruction and Use Your Illusion, when a now rich, famous, and drug-addled Slash is speedballing so much that his hallucinations are freaking out everyone around him, so much so that his family insists on setting up a phoner-intervention-reunion:

David was engaging, and wise in the ways of chemical abuse. He asked me about what I was doing drug-wise and what I was going through emotionally, psychically, and with the band. I rambled on for a while, but once I started talking about my little translucent friends, David interrupted me. The conversation as a whole was way too involved to have with someone that he hadn’t seen since they were eight years old, but he’d heard enough.

‘Listen to me,’ he said. ‘You are not in a good way. If you are seeing things every day, what you are doing to yourself is not good at all. You are at a very spiritual low point when that begins to happen.’ He paused for a moment. ‘You are exposing yourself to the darker realms of your subconscious being. You are making yourself vulnerable to all kinds of negative energy.’

I was so far gone that I didn’t agree. I thought of my hallucinations as my good-time entertainment.

‘OK, that’s cool.’ I said. ‘Yeah, I suppose that’s bad. Duly noted.’

Anthony Bozza also writes a bit about his time working with Slash on the OMM blogs, and compares the experience of working with Slash to his time writing with Eminem:

We got around this best we could by meeting up most days after he’d finished recording, over a period of a few months. This would normally be sometime around midnight, and we’d just go through every detail that’s in the book (and many that are not) until dawn. I was so impressed by how much he remembered, and glad that, as I’d hoped, he is the type who prefers to say little, but observes everything. Slash is very thoughtful and really got into the whole process of reminiscing about his life from childhood onwards.

Even so, when Slash started telling me about the debauchery of the Guns N’ Roses days, it was pretty shocking. What made it sound worse was the nonchalant air with which he recalled all of it, in that he told those stories in the same soft-spoken, direct tone that he employs when he’s talking about anything else, from his childhood friends to his own kids. It is the voice of someone who is definitely at peace with the life they’ve lived.

Compared to Eminem, then, Slash was a much different subject to write about on many levels. Eminem is younger and so his perspective on his own life, although it is one that has already seen a lot of living, is from somewhere else. How they are similar, however, is that they are both unique in the scene that spawned them. Slash is from the era of excess, and he’s certainly seen his share (to say the least), but where the average rock star of that era is proud to brag about the armies of chicks and mountains of coke, if anything, he was very conscious of not bragging. It might be hard to believe but this book is the humble version of his exploits – he’s not denying anything, but he’s definitely not exaggerating. And there are more than a few tales that he deemed unnecessarily excessive.

Aside from the mind-boggling debauchery, the most surprising thing I learned about Slash is that he has had a pacemaker-defibrillator unit in his heart since the age of 35. Coming in a close second is the revelation that he is probably the biggest Disney fan on the face of the earth. Actually, on second thoughts, the Disney revelation is much more shocking…