Slash Born: Rock's Most Recognizable Guitar Hero

Slash's opening riff on "Sweet Child O' Mine" became one of the most recognizable guitar lines in rock history, propelling Guns N' Roses from the Sunset Strip to global dominance. Born Saul Hudson in Hampstead, London, in 1965, he moved to Los Angeles as a child and grew up in a household where his mother designed costumes for David Bowie and his father created album covers for Joni Mitchell and Neil Young. He picked up guitar at fourteen after hearing a riff by Aerosmith's Joe Perry, and within a year he was practicing obsessively, sometimes for twelve hours a day, teaching himself blues scales from Muddy Waters and B.B. King records. By twenty he had joined Guns N' Roses, and their 1987 debut Appetite for Destruction became the best-selling debut album in American history, moving over thirty million copies worldwide. The album took nearly a year to gain traction — it debuted outside the top 200 — but MTV's constant rotation of the "Welcome to the Jungle" video ignited a slow burn that eventually reached number one. The band's combustible mix of punk attitude and blues-rock virtuosity made them the biggest rock act of the late 1980s, but internal dysfunction drove Slash out by 1996 after years of escalating conflict with Axl Rose over the band's musical direction. He formed Slash's Snakepit, then Velvet Revolver with former Stone Temple Pilots singer Scott Weiland, scoring a Grammy for the album Contraband, and released solo records that demonstrated his range beyond the GN'R sound. His blues-rooted, Les Paul-driven tone revived hard rock guitar at a moment when synthesizers and grunge threatened to bury it. The top hat and dangling cigarette became as synonymous with rock excess as the music itself, though Slash nearly died from alcohol-related cardiomyopathy in 2001 and got sober afterward. He reunited with Guns N' Roses in 2016 for the Not in This Lifetime tour, which grossed over $580 million and became one of the highest-earning concert tours in history, proving that the appetite for their particular brand of destruction had never diminished.