Slash & Friends in a Fun Set of ‘70s Rock

Getting your pink slip from one of the era’s biggest rock bands is enough to give a boy the blues. And that’s just what guitarist Slash has come down with following Guns N’ Roses’ latest, and by many reports final, sayonara.

Rather than brood, he threw together a six-man blues band and returned to the fundamentals as laid down by such masters as . . . the James Gang and Alice Cooper?

Nobody can accuse Slash of being a purist.

Slash’s Blues Ball made only its second Southland appearance Thursday at the Coach House and it was clear even before he of the stovepipe hat and black ringlet curls stepped on stage that the model wasn’t going to be a prewar Martin, a Mississippi front porch and Robert Johnson. The stacks of Marshall amps were a dead giveaway.

But the guitar slinger who was born Saul Hudson appeared to have nothing but fun for nearly two hours, reeling off song after song chiefly drawn from the heyday of ‘70s blues-based hard rock acts. Nothing profound, just lots of chord crunching with some pals formerly of the Buddah Heads, Mary’s Danish and elsewhere.

As for that split with GNR? Well, maybe it’s permanent and maybe not. Though Slash used no allusion to the subject--the only onstage hint of GNR was his use of Dylan’s “Knockin’ On Heaven’s Door”--after the show a band source said that for now “It’s off--but that door never closes.”

The revolving ones never do.