The Led Zeppelin song that influenced Slash’s style is “the song that means the most to me.”
Despite Axl Rose’s snarling accent and Guns N’ Roses’ zany, West Coast aesthetic, the band is steeped in plenty of British DNA. Long before he met his Guns N’ Roses brethren, Saul Hudson, the guitarist better known as Slash, was born and raised in London to an English father and an African-American mother.
Though he travelled to California with his mother in his early teens, discovering the beauty of Aerosmith and their classic album Rocks, Slash’s father brought him up on a strict diet of classic British rock music. “My dad especially raised me on British rock music – you know, The Kinks, Cream, The Yardbirds, The Stones and The Beatles,” Slash once recalled. Meanwhile, his mother, Ola J Hudson, was a famous fashion designer famed for collaborations with Ringo Starr, John Lennon and David Bowie.
Throughout the 1980s, Guns N’ Roses led a classic rock revival. While artists like Depeche Mode, OMD and Ultravox popularised synth-pop, Slash and Rose championed guitar rock with a sound associated with the 1970s. Steven Tyler’s vocals were an obvious influence on Rose, but before both came the towering projection of Robert Plant. Likewise, before Joe Perry was the British guitar hero Jimmy Page.
Since age seven, when he first listened to his father’s copy of Led Zeppelin II, Slash dreamt of playing the guitar like Page. Once he had decided to become a rock star, he set his sights on the iconic Les Paul to copy his hero. “I attributed that sound – from what I felt was the coolest record I’d ever heard at that point in my life – to the Les Paul,” he told Rolling Stone. “I knew it was a Les Paul making those guitar tones because I saw pictures of Jimmy Page holding one – so that’s what made me associate the Les Paul with that kind of sound.”
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