For two decades, asking Slash and Axl Rose to share a stage again felt like asking for the impossible. Guns N’ Roses had been one of the biggest rock bands on the planet in the late 1980s and early 1990s, but by the time guitarist Slash walked away in 1996, the relationship between him and frontman Axl Rose had curdled into something closer to outright hostility than a creative disagreement.
The split traced back to creative tensions that had been building for years, including arguments over the band’s cover of “Sympathy for the Devil” and growing friction over Rose’s increasing control over the band’s direction. After Slash’s departure, things only got worse. By 2005, Slash claimed he’d shown up unannounced at Rose’s gated Malibu estate at five in the morning, leading to an exchange Rose later described publicly in deeply unflattering terms toward Slash’s then-bandmates in Velvet Revolver. By 2009, Rose was telling Billboard magazine that he viewed Slash as something closer to a disease than a former friend, declaring he wanted nothing to do with him going forward.
For years, the two communicated only through lawyers and occasional jabs traded in the press. Guns N’ Roses continued to tour and record without Slash, eventually releasing “Chinese Democracy” in 2008, an album over a decade in the making that Rose completed with an entirely different lineup. Fans speculated endlessly about a reunion, and Rose repeatedly shot the idea down, at one point dismissing reunion rumors on Twitter as baseless speculation with no real foundation whatsoever.
What actually broke the ice, according to Slash, wasn’t a grand reconciliation summit or a mediator brought in by management. It was simply a phone call. Slash has said that after roughly twenty years of silence, Rose reached out directly, and the two men talked through the history of bad blood that had built up between them. Slash later described the underlying issue as largely a misunderstanding that had spiraled out of control over the years, fueled as much by media coverage as by anything that had actually happened between them. He has said the call felt cathartic, like finally letting go of a weight he’d been carrying for two decades.
The reconciliation led to one of the most anticipated reunions in rock history. In early 2016, Slash and bassist Duff McKagan quietly joined Rose onstage at Los Angeles’ famed Troubadour club for a surprise appearance, their first time playing together since 1993. Weeks later, the band officially announced a return to Coachella and a tour billed as “Not in This Lifetime,” a title that doubled as a wink at how unlikely the reunion had once seemed. The tour ran for three years and became one of the highest-grossing in rock history. Slash later called their return to the stage together a genuinely emotional experience, a sentiment that would have seemed unthinkable to anyone following the venomous headlines of the 2000s. Two decades of silence, it turned out, ended with nothing more dramatic than someone finally deciding to pick up the phone.