Slash's famous top hat began as shoplifted goods from Melrose Avenue
Before a 1985 club show, a young guitarist lifted a black felt top hat from one Melrose Avenue shop and a silver concho belt from another, then combined them into custom headgear. He said it made him feel really cool. The hat became Slash's trademark as Guns N' Roses turned into one of the world's biggest bands.
Born Saul Hudson on 23 July 1965 in the London district of Hampstead, he spent his first years in Stoke-on-Trent with his father and grandparents. His father, Anthony, designed album covers for Neil Young and Joni Mitchell; his mother, Ola, an African-American designer, dressed John Lennon and the Pointer Sisters. Around age six he moved to Los Angeles, where the actor Seymour Cassel nicknamed him Slash because he was forever rushing from one thing to the next. He once joked that he found it amusing to be both British and black, since American musicians wanted to be British while 1960s British musicians strained to sound black.
Guitar was almost an accident. In 1979 he and his friend Steven Adler planned a band; Adler claimed guitar, so Slash signed up for bass lessons. At the first one, a teacher named Robert Wolin played Brown Sugar by the Rolling Stones, and Slash switched instruments on the spot. A champion BMX rider, he gave up the bike and practised up to 12 hours a day on a flamenco guitar from his grandmother.
He joined Axl Rose, Izzy Stradlin, Duff McKagan and Adler in Guns N' Roses in May 1985. The debut album Appetite for Destruction, released in July 1987, had sold over 28 million copies by 2008 and became the bestselling debut in American history. Sweet Child o' Mine, driven by his riff and solo, was the band's only US number one, and Total Guitar later ranked that riff the greatest of all. Use Your Illusion I and II debuted at number 2 and number 1 in 1991.
Tensions with Rose led him to quit in 1996. He fronted Slash's Snakepit, then Velvet Revolver with Scott Weiland, released six solo albums and returned to Guns N' Roses in 2016. Time ranked him second only to Jimi Hendrix among electric guitarists.
Source: Slash (musician)
