“George Jones doesn’t sound like he was influenced by any other singer: He sounds like a steel guitar. It’s the way he blends notes, the way he comes up to them and comes off them, the way he crescendos and decrescendos. The dynamic of it is very tight and really controlled — it’s like carving with the voice.” - James Taylor
“What’s beautiful about George’s singing is, if you get the opportunity to speak to him, you’ll hear in the way that he speaks that it’s the same kind of cadence, same kind of rhythm of the way he sings. That’s what makes him so gifted. It’s unaffected. It’s very, very natural. I really study that in people that are great singers. If you don’t talk like you sing, then you’re not as honest as maybe you should be.You can’t define the ache that’s in George’s voice. It’s just something inherently him. It doesn’t need definition. It doesn’t need clarification. It doesn’t need a lot of things. You just sit back and appreciate it. It’s just greatness.” - Vince Gill
❞In September 1968, the budding rock star paid a Beverly Hills auto dealer $3,500 for the three-year-old sports car. When she bought it, the Porsche was a factory-painted “oyster white.” For a flamboyant singer who wore rose-colored glasses and feather boas, that wouldn’t do. So she got roadie Dave Richards to paint it with swirling psychedelic images, including Mount Tamalpais on one fender and a portrait of her with her band, Big Brother and the Holding Company, on another.“They used regular house paint,” Michael Joplin recalled. “They were just playing around, saying, ‘Hey, let’s make an art car.’ They were having a lot of fun. It was a convertible, and she would drive it around with the top down. People would leave notes for her on it.” (x)
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By the time Guns N’ Roses wrapped up their world tour behind their two Use Your Illusion albums in 1993, they had played 192 shows in 27 countries, in front of more than seven million people. The band had been on the road for two and a half years, which made the jaunt for that time—and perhaps still—the longest tour in rock and roll history. When the last show, at Estadio River Plate, in Buenos Aires, Argentina, on July 17, ended, Slash, for one, was more than a little relieved.
“I was definitely physically and mentally exhausted,” he says. “And Duff [McKagan, bass] was in dire need of some serious rehabilitation. But the final show was great. That was during the ‘Skin & Bones’ leg of the tour, which was a lot more stripped down and raw. There was less camp and less production, which is what I prefer.”
That’s not to say that there were no special effects involved that night. Following the song “You’re Crazy,” a man dressed in a Domino’s Pizza uniform walked onstage to deliver a piping-hot pie to the band, which singer Axl Rose then tossed into the crowd. “I don’t know what that was all about,” Slash says. “That was an Axl thing. I have no clue why he set that up.”
After running through the rest of the set, which included covers of the Rolling Stones’ “Dead Flowers” and the Who’s “Pinball Wizard,” the band closed the show with “Paradise City,” which, in addition to being Slash’s “favorite Guns song,” now stands as the last tune he and Duff would ever play onstage with the band. Not that Slash knew it at the time. “I knew I was just done—very worn out—but I couldn’t look too far into the future to imagine what would happen next. But then, as soon as I got home, the first thing I did was to start putting together the Slash’s Snakepit record. So I guess I had some idea in my mind about what I needed to do.”
