By "Metal" Tim Henderson

Rock royalty was in town recently for Canada's prestigious industry schmooze fest called Canadian Music Week, where a plethora of musicians and their handlers (labels, managers, promoters and the like) call Toronto hometown for a few blurry-eyed days and anarchy-ridden nights.

The former GUNS N' ROSES/present VELVET REVOLVER guitar legend SLASH (aka Saul Hudson) was one of the Keynote Speakers and gave an hour retrospect on his entire career in the music business. The session was moderated by John (JD) Roberts of CNN America Morning who has a hardened history in Toronto as his early MuchMusic years saw him host the popular one-hour heavy metal video show called The Power Hour. Most certainly the former Gunner and the now prim and proper Roberts crossed paths in the '80s at one time or another. But I digress.

Following the keynote address, Slash sat down with BraveWords.com to talk about his eagerly-anticipated solo effort, simply titled Slash, featuring a host of guest stars from OZZY to ALICE to LEMMY ... even FERGIE (check out the complete line-up here). But to begin, Slash has fond memories of debauchery and frolic in the city of Toronto.

"I have a great fuckin’ time here," the famed guitarists says with excitement behind his recognizable shades. "I have some of the best, priceless memories in Toronto, so when I say that I’m not exaggerating.

And can you remember them?!

"Oh, yeah, I can remember a lot of them very vividly, ‘cause our first tour ever in Guns N’ Roses was in Canada, and so it all started on that tour. You get sort of attached to certain places when you’re on tour and you sort of remember certain cities that have done you right over the years and Toronto’s one of those. The first tour was actually opening for THE CULT.

We continue to reminisce over the GN'R's historical shows in Ontario's capital including their triumphant Use Your Illusion headlining gig in 1992 at the CNE Stadium with METALLICA and FAITH NO MORE as openers. Talk about a massive rock event!

But back to Slash the record. You must feel this massive weight off your shoulders, like the birth of a new-born baby, complete with top-hat! Was there ever that much pressure inside?

"I definitely feel something, I think. I never thought about how hard it was to do, whatever it was that I was doing. And then I started making this record, I look back and I go, 'god, that was a big project.' But at the time, I just threw both my feet into it. It was a lot of work, but I didn’t really pay attention to it. But now that it’s done I can sort of like go, 'wow, okay.' You know and it’s coming out now, and it’s something that from its inception has taken almost two years. It’ll be two years from the time that I first started writing songs for it, in roughly April or May. So it’s pretty much two years in the making. So yeah, it is a little bit of a relief."

Was it always going to feature a lengthy list of guests or was it just going to revolve around your personal band?

"I think I had the idea of doing this thing with guests around the time that I was writing the book (2007's autobiography Slash). It’s sort of like this thing that I thought it’d be nice if I could do a record where I had different people that I sort of look up to and admire, respect, you know, all of the above, and put them on one of my records because I spent so much time playing on other people’s records. And you get really sort of involved for that minute that you’re doing that, and then off it goes and that’s it. And it leaves you feeling just a wee bit empty. So I thought it’d be great if I had a bunch of guests, people on my record. So at the end of the last Velvet Revolver tour I was like, 'okay, I’m going to do something on my own for a little bit and do that particular idea.' And I just sort of very casually started writing music for myself, but then at the same time thinking, 'well, who would sound good on this and who would sound good on that' and started to accumulate different names that would go with all the different material. Then I went and made presentable demos and farmed them out to all of the different singers to see if they would comply with the concept, and it all worked out really well."

What was your hit and miss ratio in terms of getting the voices you wanted?

"It was about 90%. I had one guy that contractually couldn’t do it. I had one guy that it did work out, but I just didn’t like the way it turned out, and I ended up getting somebody else to do it. I had somebody else that we got involved and he couldn’t do it because his band’s record was about to come out. It was timing-wise it wasn’t going to make any sense. You know, little things like that, but they were like really not even really bumps in the road. In a project like this you can’t get too disappointed if something doesn’t happen, so I was actually really fortunate to be able to get as many people as I did."

Who ultimately surprised you the most in terms of performance?

"It’s hard to say, because for one I got great performances from everybody, and you get so sort of close to the record. I think CHRIS CORNELL sort of surprised me because he was so easy to work with. I didn’t know him that well, and when I sent him the song I just didn’t really know what to expect. And he turned it around in like a day and came back. He fixed some of the arrangement on Pro Tools at his house when we made the demo, and it just came back as this great, sort of finished song. And I was like, 'wow!' This guy’s pro! (laughs) And KID ROCK surprised me, because I just didn’t realize, it never would have occurred to me, I guess, how amazingly professional and how involved in his music he really is, in every aspect of it. And it was really a pleasure to work with somebody like that. And then, you know, it surprised me that I got OZZY to do it, you know. It amazed me that FERGIE is such a fuckin’ great rock singer and to sort of do her first ever real rock recording. It was cool. I mean, everything has its own sort of surprises."

There was talk that the first single from the album would be Ozzy's 'Crucify The Dead' but it was pulled last minute and replaced with 'By The Sword' (featuring Andrew Stockdale of WOLFMOTHER). Can you shed some light into this?

"It’s so funny how things go. A lot of the brass wanted to go with the Ozzy song as the first single, but he’s got a record coming out. So I guess they wouldn’t want to have two competing Ozzy singles. It would have been a little bit of a conflict of interest, so that was basically it. And I was sort of not totally into the Ozzy idea because it was just the predictable thing to do. I love the Ozzy song, but I didn’t want to try to capitalize on Ozzy’s presence on the record. I thought that would have been sort of tacky, so when it turned out that there was no way it was going to happen, I was sort of relieved."

Who turned out being the most fun, somebody that you would actually want to hang out with and jam?

"I had a great time jamming with Duff (McKagan; Velvet Revolver, LOADED, JANE'S ADDICTION, ex-Guns N' Roses) and Dave Grohl (FOO FIGHTERS, THEM CROOKED VULTURES), that was pretty cool. Definitely having Lemmy (Kilmister - MOTÖRHEAD) down as somebody that I’ve known and hung out with and had a few drinks with over the years, and so you feel a sort of a comfort zone. The one guy that really sort of surprised me, because I’d never really worked with him before, was Miles Kennedy, and so that was somebody that I actually ended up recruiting for the tour."

How did you want to stretch yourself on the guitar? When you were piecing this together and building the tracks, did you want to showcase different elements of your strings on each one?

"Well, I think with the music itself, I showcase different elements of my style just in the writing, because there’s different directions. There’s not all just one sort of hard rock song. There’s a lot of different types, and I think as a guitar player, once the songs were established, it was just sort of being in control as possible of what the end product was going to be. So really enjoying myself just doing guitars without any outside interference, without any producers sort of. Eric Valentine really got what I wanted to do and just made this record really a pleasure to make, because he and I were totally in a perfect harmony. And so I just got to really just play. Sometimes being in a band can be, there’s so much give and take and sometimes the guitars were the first things to give, you know? And so I just, I think I just really enjoyed doing this record because I got to express myself as best as I possibly could at the time."

What are your thoughts on the music business in 2010? During the creation of Slash you were actively twittering studio updates and keeping fans in the loop while you enlisted singers, completed songs. You were keeping us abreast of the project virtually each step of the way.

"It's only since Velvet Revolver began that I started to use a computer. Technological advancements, I don’t necessarily need them. I don’t use them if I don’t need them. And I ended up gravitating towards using a Blackberry as opposed to a computer, just because I could do all my business on it and what not. And I said, 'at some point, you know, you should get a MySpace, you know get a Facebook, and you know all that kind of stuff,' and it took me a while. And then around the time of getting into this record, I started to realize that I could update fans. I didn’t have to use outside resources, I could update fans in real time myself. And then all of a sudden it was like, just like a sort of a light opened. (laughs) It’s like, 'oh, this is cool.' There’s something to be said where you can have a personal interaction, even if it’s through basically the internet. Where you can talk back and forth with fans who are interested. And you can update them and you can get shit straight. You can dispel stuff if it’s not accurate. And they seem to enjoy doing it and I enjoy doing it, and it leaves out the middle man, because a lot of the way you’re interaction with fans is fan mail kind of deal where you just sign some shit. It’s not very personal. And then you’ve got press releases, you’ve got the, the sort of regular media and radio and all that kind of stuff. But the only times you ever really talk to them is maybe in a meet and greet, or maybe in a liquor store if you happen to run into somebody that knows who you are. Anyway, so I think it’s pretty cool. Twitter’s definitely the newest thing that I got involved with. I’ve become sort of hooked on it."

Do you miss the circus of the big stadium gigs and all that kind of madness that surrounds them?

"I’m going out and doing festivals this summer. So it’s still there, but I get to do smaller gigs and sort of get a combination of all the different sort of size of venues and all that kind of stuff. Velvet Revolver sort of did that as well. I don’t miss all the drama. I have really great memories of all the really, really cool stuff. I don’t necessarily miss it, but I retain all the positive aspects of it and it is sort of cool to have that under your belt.

And now you’re doing your own thing on Slash terms.

"Yeah. For the moment I’m going to go back to Velvet Revolver and get the singer thing together next year. But I think we’re gonna make a really bitchin’ record. We have some killer material, and so we want to make it so that we get a singer that can sing that, as opposed to sort of changing the trajectory of the band."