Blues guitar is a high-risk endeavour. Don’t be fooled into thinking it’s easy or safe just because there are fewer notes in the scale. If you want a safer pursuit, take up whitewater rafting, spelunking or snake milking. An easier way to pass your practice time would be to woodshed, build up speed and throw in some neoclassical tonalities. Stick some compression and delay on it and everyone on TikTok will think you are a genius. But blues is not that. Blues is making more out of less and that leaves a player wholly exposed.
Personality counts. Charisma matters. It is like stand-up comedy; you have to tell a story, you have to tell it well, and come the end of it you have to arrive at a punchline. Quarter-tone bends have to be on-point, and pity the fool who incautiously mixes major and minor note choices, slipping out of key and souring the jam. The audience expects. They want to hear soul in the vibrato. And if they don’t, you die. Maybe that’s why Slash has decided to record an album of (mostly) blues covers. It’s the old BMX bandit in him. No longer willing – or foolish – enough to put limb on the line on two wheels, he’s putting his reputation out there on the precipice by pulling together a blues band and welcoming a rotating cast of A-list singers to the studio for Orgy Of The Damned.
And what the hell, the band would track the album live in the studio while they were at it. This was the approach that worked so well on 4, Slash’s most recent album with Myles Kennedy and the Conspirators. On Orgy Of The Damned, veteran producer Mike Clink, who famously presided over Guns N’ Roses as they cut the most dangerous hard-rock debut of all time, Appetite For Destruction, in 1987, would be on hand to make sure the tape was rolling.
“From my first real session, back in 1986, up until now, we have progressed into a technological kind of arena where producers don’t do anything that is not safe,” says Slash, joining us on from his UK tour with Kennedy and co. “Everything has to be mapped out. Everything has to be recorded a certain way. Everything has to be separated. Everything has to be Pro Tooled to death, and it’s really hard to find engineers who will let a band just play in a room and mic them, and just go for it! So yeah, 4 was a fun record for me, and then doing this one with Mike Clink, he just let us do our thing.”
There are a few ways of looking at Orgy Of The Damned and what the track choices tell us about Slash. There is a case to be made that there’s an autobiographical thread to this, a through-line that takes us from Robert Johnson to T-Bone Walker, from Peter Green to Stevie Wonder, from the young Saul Hudson growing up in England
