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Slash

Biography

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Slash (1965-present): a Musician from Stoke-on-Trent, Staffordshire, UK.

aul Hudson (born 23 July 1965; a.k.a. Slash), despite being born in the UK made his fame as musician, songwriter and record producer in the USA. Of his successes, he is best known as the lead guitarist of the American glam metal band Guns N' Roses where he received critical acclaim and became considered one of the greatest guitarists in history.

Saul Hudson was born in Stoke-on-Trent, Staffordshire on 23 July 1965. He was named after Romanian-American cartoonist Saul Steinberg. His mother, Ola J. Hudson (1946-2009), was a black American-born English fashion designer and costumier whose clients included David Bowie (whom she also had dated), Ringo Starr and Janis Joplin. His father, Anthony Hudson, is an English artist who created album covers for musicians such as Neil Young and Joni Mitchel. At age 5 he would move to Los Angeles when his parents transferred for work.

Equipped with a one-string flamenco guitar given to him by his grandmother, he began taking classes with Robert Wolin, a teacher at Fairfax Music School. During his first lesson, Slash decided to switch from bass to guitar after hearing Wolin play Brown Sugar by the The Rolling Stones. A champion BMX rider, soon later Slash put the bike aside to devote himself to playing guitar, practicing up to 12 hours a day.

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Slash joined his first band, Tidus Sloan, in 1981. In 1983, he formed the band Road Crew (named after the Motorhead song (We Are) The Road Crew) with his childhood friend Steven Adler, who by then had learned to play drums. He placed an advertizement in a newspaper looking for a bassist, and received a response from Duff McKagan. The act would be disbanded in 1984 when Axl Rose and and Izzy Stradlin came calling about their relatively new band named Guns N' Roses that had recently gone under a major membership change; he would go on to record five chart topping records with them.

In 1993, Slash formed the side project Slash's Snakepit and in 1996 he left Guns N' Roses to co-found the supergroup Velvet Revolver, which re-established him as a mainstream performer in the mid to late 2000s.

Before returning to Guns N' Roses in 2016, Slash would record Slash (2010), solo album featuring an array of guest musicians, Apocalyptic Love (2012), World on Fire (2014) and Living the Dream (2018) as Myles Kennedy and the Conspirators, another band he founded, dropped them, then restarted in 2022 to record 4. With Velvet Revolver he would record Contraband (2004) and Libertad (2007), while It's Five O'Clock Somewhere (1995) and Ain't Life Grand (2000) would be recorded with Slash's Snakepit.

Slash would be named by Time magazine as runner-up on their list of "The 10 Best Electric guitar Players" in 2009, while Rolling Stone placed him at number 65 on their list of "The 100 Greatest guitarists of All Time" in 2011. Guitar World ranked his guitar solo on November Rain number 6 on their list of "The 100 Greatest guitar Solos" in 2008, and Total guitar placed his riff on Sweet Child o' Mine at number 1 on their list of "The 100 Greatest Riffs" in 2004. In 2012, he was inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame as a member of Guns N' Roses' classic lineup.

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