Bursting With Pride

As the new Gibson Slash Collection is unveiled at this year’s NAMM show, we grab a moment away from the crowds with the man himself to chat about his latest collaboration with Gibson…

- Richard Bienstock

On a sunny California afternoon, Slash is holed up in a hotel room near the Anaheim Convention Center, where the NAMM show is underway, and where his guitars are causing a stir. Unlike other one-off collaborations with the guitarist who, with Guns N’ Roses, went a long way toward single-handedly putting the Les Paul back on the map in the late 80s, Gibson’s Slash Collection encompasses a full line of instruments. At launch, the range offers four new electrics – the Slash Les Paul Standard in November Burst and Appetite Burst, as well as limited-edition Anaconda Burst and Vermillion Burst – alongside two Slash J-45 Standard signature models (in November Burst and Vermillion Burst).

For Slash, one of the key selling points of collaborating with Gibson on a project of this scope was that the Slash Collection guitars would be part of the Gibson USA production line, and therefore more readily available and affordably priced than limited-edition Custom Shop models.

“It was really a revelation,” Slash says. “For the last year-and-a-half or so I’ve been using a couple of Custom Shop Les Pauls that I sort of designed, but that I basically did just for myself. And they’re great guitars. So when Cesar [Gueikian, Chief Merchant Officer at Gibson] said he wanted to do a core Slash line, which was basically those guitars plus other things that I wanted to do, like bringing the Appetite guitar [the limited-edition Gibson Custom Slash Appetite For Destruction Les Paul] back as a USA guitar, I said, ‘Fuck yeah, that’d be great.’ ”