The wild Use Your Illusion tour

In 1992, during the Use Your Illusion Tour, Guns N' Roses were at the peak of their live activity and living a life of excess. Relentless schedules, drug and alcohol use, and out-of-control nights marked a tour that ran to more than 190 dates and deepened the fragility and addictions already entrenched within the band, which had, for that matter, long been living anything but a disciplined lifestyle. In the early days, in fact, some members of the group lived day to day along the Sunset Strip with no rules, regularly frequenting circles tied to drug dealing and prostitution. Internal tensions were constant, and on at least one occasion the band came close to splitting up, when Axl Rose accused guitarist Saul Hudson, aka Slash, of being too dependent on heroin during a concert opening for The Rolling Stones.

During the making of "Use Your Illusion I", Axl Rose aimed for a broader, more ambitious project than the debut "Appetite For Destruction", with more elaborate tracks such as the ballad "November Rain". The effort required to carry through an album of that scale, and the tour that followed, put further pressure on the Californian band. For Slash the burden proved especially heavy, and despite having given up heroin some time before, he relapsed into drug use.

The most serious incident took place in a hotel during the tour. John Reese, the band's tour manager, recounted it years later in an episode of a documentary series on the American TV channel VH1: "We were at a hotel, during one of the 194 dates of the Use Your Illusion Tour, and I was woken up by a call from the front desk: 'Mr. Reese, one of the members of your band has passed out in the hallway in front of the elevator.' I ran out and found Slash practically dead. He had no pulse."

Slash had collapsed to the floor after a hit of speedball and was clinically dead. Reese recalls that the scene was chilling and unmistakable: "He was blue, he wasn't breathing. I thought it was over."

Paramedics arrived shortly after, gave him an adrenaline shot to the chest, and brought the guitarist back to life. Once he recovered, Slash was back on stage just days later, without changing his behavior in the slightest. Around that time, he claimed he hadn't been afraid of what happened, stating: "I wasn't afraid of dying. I was only afraid of stopping playing."

The incident occurred in an already fraught context. Internal tensions, onstage mishaps and the impossibility of reining in the excess made the band's life increasingly unstable. By the end of the tour, between 1993 and 1994, the lineup fell apart: Izzy Stradlin and Steven Adler had already left, and Slash departed in 1994.

In the years that followed, the American guitarist retraced his story in an autobiography published in 2007, reflecting on his journey: "I've always done things my way. I played guitar my way, and I dealt with life's difficulties my way." In 2001 he was diagnosed with severe heart failure and had to have a defibrillator implanted. Sober since 2006, he has steadily resumed his musical career, leading up to the reunion with Guns N' Roses in 2015. The Californian band is still touring today, while Slash also continues to pursue his solo projects in parallel.

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08/03/2026