In a new chat with Goldmine, Slash admitted that he’s unsure if he ever owned a copy of Guns N’ Roses‘ 1987 masterpiece, Appetite For Destruction. Slash explained, “I don’t think I’ve ever owned the Appetite For Destruction record. And even if I did, I didn’t live anywhere, so I wouldn’t have any place to put it! Granted, I did have a lot of records I’ve kept. But I just never was one to sort of really collect records of the bands that I’m actually in. Does that make sense?”
He went on to say, “You have to understand — I mean, it’s like this for all the records I do — I don’t collect any of it. If you were to come to my house, you’d be hard pressed to know I was in a band. Or at least any band you had heard of. I mean there’s instruments around, but I don’t have any, like, souvenirs or anything special from the releases over the years.”
Slash shed light on how things really work for a musician who’s been constantly recording and touring on a treadmill over the years: “I mean, you make a record, you go through this whole process of creating the music and working on it with the guys and developing it. Then you go into the studio and you record it, then go in and mix it. And then the final process is mastering. And once that’s done and it’s off to be released, you’ve moved on. Y’know what I mean? It’s like you’ve gone through everything you need to on that material, and the only thing you have to look forward to at that point is going out and performing it. . . You play it every night, so the material’s always there. And it’s exciting if you hear it on the radio or something. But I don’t listen to it otherwise.”
Slash told us a while back what he’s most proud of when it comes to Guns N’ Roses: “The most proud I am would have to be just the sense of accomplishment from getting from these sort of nomadic gutter rats that we definitely were, to manage to get from that point and make a record and go out and start touring and doing all that stuff and then to actually succeed, to have that record succeed, it was definitely an accomplishment that I’m very proud of.”
Guns N’ Roses kicks off their 16-date South American tour on September 1st, in Manaus, Brazil at Arena da Amazonia.