SLASH: “I ACTUALLY DID GO TO AXL’S HOUSE”
A couple of years ago, you may recall, former Guns N’ Roses/ current Velvet Revolver members Slash and Duff McKagan sued GN’R singer Axl Rose over royalties. Rose countersued, claiming that Slash showed up at his house one day and declared Scott Weiland was a “fraud,” McKagan was “spineless,” that he hated VR/ex-GN’R drummer Matt Sorum, and that Axl had won the “war” Slash had been waging against him.
It was certainly a provocative claim – up until this point, Slash and Rose hadn’t spoken in about a decade, since Slash quit GN’R – and fans were assured that Slash would release an official statement within days. Except, of course, that Slash never did release a statement, and the supposed visit to Rose’s house was another interesting semi-myth in the ongoing GN’R soap opera.
Well, add a footnote to the chapter: in a recent interview with Home News Tribune (who?), Slash states: “I actually did go to Axl’s house at one point, but I never saw him. I never talked to him. I left a note with his person over there having to do with lawsuit that we were in. I don’t know how it got turned into what it got turned into.”
That Slash and Axl never actually spoke syncs up with the recent claim of Axl assistant/surrogate mother Beta Labis that she is, in fact, the one to whom Slash made the derogatory comments about his bandmates. Still, it seems odd that Slash finally ‘fessed up to visiting the Redheaded One’s home. It would seem, then, that there are two possibilities here:
i) Slash is lying and actually did talk smack about his fellow Revolvers to Labis
OR
ii) Rose is in the wrong, either because he’s deliberately lying about what Slash said or – just as likely – because Labis told him what she knew he’d want to hear with regards to the encounter.
Look: Rose is obviously kinda nutty (to put it mildly), and it’s been alleged that he surrounds himself with Yes Men on more than one occasion, so the idea of Labis lying to him, and him believing Labis, seems more than a little possible (especially when one considers the possibility of Slash admitting defeat in that alleged “war;” that sounds suspiciously like Axl paranoia more than Slash-speak).
On the other hand, we also know that Slash has reached out to Axl and tried to re-establish communication on at least a few different occasions (including sending Rose Christmas cards every year and an ill-advised attempt to crash Rose’s New Year’s Eve gig in Vegas back in ’02); if things really weren’t going so well in VR during their post-Contraband hiatus (and the band has admitted they came perilously close to splitting up), it’s really not that far-fetched that, in a moment of weakness, Slash would have said exactly what he thought Rose wanted to hear. This seems even more plausible when one considers Slash’s very recent umpteenth trip to rehab: people say all kinds of shit when they’re fucked up.
Of course, we’ll probably never know the truth; for now, the closest we’ll come to an Axl/Slash reunion is that doctored photo at the top of this article.
-AR
