Slash Recruits Iggy Pop, Steven Tyler & More For 'Orgy Of The Damned': 'I'm A Blues Guy'

Slash has the blues these days. And he's happy about it.

Orgy of the Damned, the Guns N' Roses guitarist's new solo album (out Friday, May 17 on Gibson Records), is a mostly blues-cover set packed with A-list guests — Aerosmith's Steven Tyler, ZZ Top's Billy Gibbons , Demi Lovato, Chris Stapleton , Gary Clark, Jr., Iggy Pop, Chris Robinson of the Black Crowes and Brian Johnson of AC/DC, to name a few.

The 12-track set takes the guitarist back to his youthful roots, touching on standards by Robert Johnson, Willie Dixon, Lightnin' Hopkins, Howlin' Wolf and more, and also branching out into the psychedelic blues of Steppenwolf “The Pusher” and Motown favorites. such as the Temptations' 'Papa Was a Rolling Stone' and Stevie Wonder's 'Living For the City'.

“I'm a blues guy,” says Slash Advertising sign via Zoom from his headquarters in Los Angeles. “That's been the background of my style since I picked up the guitar. But everybody knows me as a hard rock guy” — mostly from what he calls “more serious career choices” like GNR, Velvet Revolver, Slash's Snakepit and Slash with Myles Kennedy and the Conspirators. “So I'm not going to put on a face and say, 'Oh, I'm a blues guy now and this is my serious blues record.'

“But I've always thought, 'Gosh, it would be cool to do a record like this,' which is just for fun. But I've never really had time to do that.”

For the past couple of years, however, Slash says he's been “listening to a lot of old blues and blues records playing guitar, and I still wanted to make that kind of album. It's just something fun that I really needed to get my chest up and I wanted to have fun with it.”

Slash's longtime manager Jeff Varner of Revelation Management adds that the timing turned out to be fortuitous for Orgy of the Damned as well as for the 29th SERPENT Blues festival tour; Slash kicks off July 5th in Bonner, Montana. “Before last year we were mapping out the next 24 months and this idea came up again,” Varner recalls. “He said, 'I'm thinking about doing a blues record,' and I said, 'Funny, I've been thinking about doing this, doing a tour around it.'” It was an incredible moment of, “OK…” He's obviously leading the charge, but we felt there was a real opportunity here and now is a good time to do it.”

For the album, Slash recruited Teddy Andreadis and bassist Johnny Griparic, with whom he played in an ad hoc band called Slash's Blues Ball in the late '90s in Los Angeles. They added Michael Jerome on drums and began working on material with the idea of ​​having fun at the top of the agenda.

“I never wanted it to be taken too seriously and be this serious blues record like people are putting out these days,” explains Slash, whose only original on Orgy of the Damned is the instrumental closing “Metal Chestnut”. “Most good musicians have a certain degree of integrity, so you take it seriously in that context, but at the same time it was really just fun. I think that's one of the reasons we came up with the idea of ​​having different singers so it's not a 'serious' blues record.”

This isn't the first time Slash has taken the all-star approach, of course. His 2010 self-titled effort also featured a diverse roster of guest vocalists (Ozzy Osbourne, Dave Grohl and Cult's Ian Asbury to Maroon 5's Fergie and Adam Levin). It also featured Myles Kennedy and spawned the band Conspirators, who have released four studio albums. For Orgy of the Damned, Slash he says he “picked the song first and just thought about who would sound good doing that song. The bottom line for any of them was whether the person I thought of related to the song and had any kind of history with it — whether it meant something to them. That was the criteria to go ahead and record it.

“Luckily for almost all the records, the song they're on really had some deep meaning to them or they really loved it or it affected them.”

Nowhere was that more true than in Hopkin's acoustic rendition of “Awful Dream” with Pop, who had also appeared on a track for the Slash album. “I read that Iggy always wanted to do a record or a blues project or whatever and I called him,” Slash recalls. “I talked to him and he said he never had a chance to play the blues. So I asked him, “If you wanted to do a blues song, what song would you do?” and without missing a beat he said “Horrible dream,” and there was something in the way he said it that seemed to him to be really special.

“We made a studio date for the next week and he came down and we just sat on some stools across from each other and played it a couple of times straight through and I was like, 'This is pretty good.' And he was great, man. It was really special to do it with him because he felt like it was something he wanted to do but never had the chance to do. So that really opened it up for him.”

This is just one of many magical musical moments Orgy of the Damned. Slash goes toe to toe with Clark Jr. on Robert Johnson's “Crossroads” (closer to Cream's recurring fantasy than the original “Crossroad Blues”) and with Gibbons on Dixon's “Hoochie Coochie Man.” AC/DC's Johnson was Slash's first choice for Howlin' Wolf's “Killing Floor,” and Tyler on harmonica was a bonus. “We were talking one day and I told him what we were doing and he offered to play harmonica on it — and he came down the same day. They were good company.” Lovato's appearance on “Papa Was a Rolling Stone” may surprise some, but not in the wake of the rock direction of her own recent music.

“People don't think of her in that capacity, but she's absolutely amazing in it…and it's nice to see her in a little bit of a different light,” notes manager Varner.

“All the songs are songs that I've been influenced by since I was very young, until recently,” says Slash, who used the album to explore various aspects of his playing technique. “In the different bands I've been in, there's a lot of improvisation and stuff going on, but they're bands with very set songs and arrangements and stuff,” he explains. “I go out and jam a lot with different club bands that will let me sit all over the country, if not the world, just because I happen to be in the neighborhood and you get to play with some really good players that have a nice, greasy feel. There's something about it that you can't do in bands.

“Even when you were making the record, it was more relaxed and you play from the heart and you don't have the pressure of feeling like you're trying to make sure you're playing everything right. It's a lot more relaxed and a lot more streamlined and relaxed.”

The SNAKE tour (Solidarity, Engagement, Restore, Peace, Equality N' Tolerance) was a logical progression of it Orgy of the Damned, In the meantime. The trip will feature a rotating cast of guests including the Warren Haynes Band, Samantha Fish, Eric Gales, Keb' Mo', Robert Randolph, ZZ Ward, Christone “Kingfish” Ingram, Larkin Poe and Jackie Venson, and Slash predicts that “there will be many different engagements” during the dates.

Slash adds that he is open to making more blues albums in the same vein as Orgy of the Damned, while Varner predicts that the SNAKE The tour could become a recurring theme in the future. “I think from our perspective this is a fun project that's quite flexible and nimble,” he says. “I can definitely see doing more of that SNAKE festivals either here or in Europe, different versions of it. Our goal here is to create something that can be evergreen, something that can have an additional outlet — not that it needs other things on its plate.”

That's a juggernaut Slash says he's happy to maintain.

“It's just fun for me,” he says. “As a player that's what I like to do. So having all these different kinds of opportunities to be able to play and record and hit the road, I'm really enjoying it. Just having that different variety of things is healthy. It's very motivating for me, it's inspiring.”