Buzzcatcher

Slash Is in Session

UNDER THE RADAR AND

BLASTING FROM OUR OFFICES

Entertaining and educational, the guitarist’s
autobiography, Slash (HarperCollins), offers a crash course
for aspiring rock gods. Here’s what we learned.

1Cats and dogs are for pussies. He prefers to play with mountain lions and snakes, because “earning the trust of an animal that might eat you in the wild is a defining and rewarding experience.” 2 Don’t solo on the snow. Playing guitar on cocaine is “as awkward as the first time you try to ski.” Still, he takes to the powder like Bode Miller.

3Crack, not that wack? After smoking rock with Mega-deth’s Dave Mustaine, he comes up with some “major heavy-metal riffs, just fucking dark and heavy as hell.”

4How to pilfer a python from a pet store. The snake lover’s method involved “wrapping them around my wrists and then putting my jacket on, making sure that they were nestled high enough on my forearm” before walking out.

5Date a porn star. Really, you should. While seeing ’80s triple-X icon Traci Lords, Slash realizes he was “never one of those guys who was judgmental”

about her line of work. He likes her for who she is. And also because he’d “seen her in this movie where she was bent over holding her ankles.…She looked amazing.”

6Leather pants: fashionable, comfortable, and absorbent. “When you pee yourself in them,” he writes, “they’re more forgiving than jeans.”

7Needles, not noses. Any method of drug ingestion besides intravenous is “a conscious decision to be inefficient.”

8Axl always wins. Even though Slash finds the line “Where the grass is green and the girls are

pretty” in “Paradise City” to be “totally gay,” he has to defer. (Slash’s preference, by the way, was “Where the girls are fat and they’ve got big titties.”)

9And if he doesn’t... While driving with the frontman, Slash gets into an argument with Rose, causing the singer to jump from the moving vehicle, stumble to the sidewalk, and run away. He reappears days later “as if nothing happened.” 10Caveat emptor, dude. Sleep with a girl nicknamed “Craberon” and you catch what you deserve: “She gave each and every one of us crabs.” DAVID MARCHESE

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Drug Rug

WHO: A girlfriend-boyfriend-led band from Massachusetts takes fuzzy garage rock and shimmering power pop and makes them claw each other in a cockfighting ring until all that’s left is a pool of stoned, fragmented shout-alongs. LA TEST: Drug Rug (Black and Greene) FOR FANS OF: Matt & Kim, Pavement

Ravens & Chimes WHO: Five winsome New Yorkers string together frothy melodies and croon brokenhearted lullabies about wandering the streets in a snowstorm. LATEST: Reichenbach Falls (Better Looking) FOR FANS OF: The Shins, the New Pornographers

Slash finds that
hailing a cab
in Los Angeles
isn’t very easy.
Boys Noize

WHO: Having remixed artists as varied as Feist, Marilyn Manson, and Bloc Party, German-Iraqi DJ Alex Ridha combines methed-up drums, constipated keyboards, and the sound of modems making love for a neck-snapping, rump-shaking stew. LATES T: Oi Oi Oi (Last Gang/Turbo) FOR FANS OF: Aphex Twin, Kraftwerk

Magnet School WHO: Four Austinites infuse their bar-band anthems with tangy rhythmic flour-ishes and slather on the psychedelia like it was barbecue sauce. LATEST: Tonight We Drink…Tomorrow We Battle the Evil at Hand (Arclight) FOR FANS OF: Secret Machines, Dinosaur Jr.

Sick of Sarah WHO: The women who make up this Minnesota quartet bow at the altar of riot grrrls’ days gone by while simultaneously thumbing their noses at scowling chick-rock clichés. The songs are as bracing as they are familiar. LA TEST: Bittersweet EP (Adamant) FOR FANS OF: The Breeders, Sleater-Kinney

FROM LEF T: TIM SO TER/RE TNA; ALLYSON RAIM_ONDI