Slash

Slash

Summary:

He was born in England but reared in LA, surrounded by the leading artists of the day amidst the vibrant hotbed of music and culture that was the early seventies. Slash spent his adolescence on the streets of Hollywood, discovering drugs, drinking, rock music, and girls, all while achieving notable status as a BMX rider. But everything changed in his world the day he first held the beat-up one-string guitar his grandmother had discarded in a closet.

(I skipped a couple paragraphs here)

Here, for the first time ever, Slash tells the tale that has yet to be told from the inside: how the band came together, how they wrote the music that defined an era, how they survived insane, never-ending tours, how the survived themselves, and, ultimately, how it all fell apart. This is a window onto the world of the notoriously private guitarist and a seat on the roller-coaster ride…

(I skipped the rest of the thing. It’s wordy.)

I have been interested in this book for a long time. Not because I care about Guns N’ Roses (what songs do they even sing?) or because I care at all about guitarists, but because Slash is really mysterious. I’ve seen him all over TV with his top hat and long hair, just… being there. I’ve never actually heard him talk. So when I saw that he had an autobiography, I was really excited, so of course I grabbed it.

The thing that you have to remember when reading this book is that Slash is paid to play guitar. He is not an author, and he barely even went to school. So, because of that, I tried really hard not to judge the book by its multiple mistakes and constant use of the word “debauchery”.

Looking past those, it is very good, as autobiographies go. It’s got a wonderful format. I love that there are pictures all throughout the book, rather than just in the middle. With autobiographies, my motto is “the more pictures, the better”. I need to be able to picture everything I’m reading about, so that was great. It did get pretty slow at parts, since there is a large chunk in there where he did drugs, drugs, and more drugs, and after a while it just gets kind of boring, and I was waiting for ANYTHING interesting to happen.

Other than that, it really is a great book, and I would recommend it to anyone. You don’t have to care about the music, or anything. It’s a good look into what life is really like for a drug-addict, and a celebrity. I wouldn’t recommend it to people who don’t want to read about graphic sex, drugs, and violence. Also, there are pictures of nudity and what-not.

In all, I would give this a 4.5/5

This is my stack of books that I’m reading/want to read soon.

Books I own:

• Lord of the Rings: The Fellowship of the Ring (J.R.R. Tolkien)
• The Sword in the Stone (T.H. White)
• I Don’t Want to Talk About it (Terrence Real)
• Calming Your Anxious Mind (Jeffrey Brantley)
• English Fairy Tales (Joseph Jacobs)
• A Big Little Life (Dean Koontz)
• A Tale of Two Cities/Great Expectations (Charles Dickens)

Library books:

• Son of a Witch (Gregory Maguire)
• Lord of the Flies (William Golding)
• The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy (Douglas Adams)
• The Year of the Flood (Margaret Atwood)
• Catch-22 (Joseph Heller)
• Dracula (Bram Stoker)
• Inkdeath (Cornelia Funke)
• Slash (Slash)

I probably won’t do posts like this very often, but to get started I wanted to show how much I actually do read. The library books are all due within the next two weeks, and I’ll only have to renew a couple. I’m a fast reader, and I read a lot, so there will probably be quite a few reviews on here.

So, welcome to The Books List.