News Segment
SLASH’S WIFE TALKS ABOUT ROCK-STAR LOVE AFFAIR:
July 31, 2007
Initially, 1987’s Appetite for Destruction had little impact on Perla Hudson, the wife of former Guns N’ Roses guitarist and current Velvet Revolver member Slash. “At the time I think I was playing with Barbies, listening to Latin music,” Hudson jokes. A few years later, after some growing up, she discovered Guns N’ Roses, but it wasn’t the riffs of “Paradise City” or Axl Rose’s wail that attracted Hudson to her future husband’s band; it was a pictorial in this magazine that grabbed her attention.
“I remember the issue. Axl was on the cover,” she says. “There was a photo of Slash, looking down so you couldn’t see his face. All you could see was his belly button.” It was love at first partial sight. As the story goes, Hudson told her mother that this mass of hair with a fresh cigarette cemented in his mouth was the man for her.
In 1992, with the Rolling Stone picture of Slash in tow, Hudson and some friends traveled to the Thomas & Mack Arena in Las Vegas for a GN’R show. One of her friends knew the promoter, and Hudson made her way backstage. Hudson and Slash partied that night and became instant friends, and their bond lasted over the years — through the break-up of GN’R and Slash’s first marriage — and the rest is history. “Now, Appetite is my favorite album,” Hudson says. “‘Estranged’ is my favorite song, though.”
So how have things changed for the pair? They used to be referred to backstage as Sid and Nancy; now they’re more like Joanie and Chachi. Hudson, who appears in E! True Hollywood Story: Rock Star Wives (which airs again Thursday at 3 PM ET), says the proof can be found backstage. “Slash’s old tour rider used to just be cigarettes and whiskey,” she says. “Now, it’s a water bowl for the dog and pinball machines for the kids.” Both Hudson and Susan McKagan, Duff’s wife and Perla’s co-star on Rock Star Wives, tour with their families as they hit the road with Velvet Revolver. Even Scott Weiland brings his kids. It’s like the Partridge Family, but with more tattoos.
While hanging behind the scenes at a Velvet Revolver concert is now a PG experience, Hudson still enjoys reminiscing about the some good ol’ groupie debauchery from the GN’R era. Her favorite tale? GN’R were playing a small venue on the East Coast. There was no bathroom backstage, so Slash and Izzy Stradlin relieved themselves into Corona bottles throughout the night. Some groupies came backstage, eager to party, and without asking, chugged the bottles of piss, much to the shock of Izzy and Slash. Having finished drinking the six-pack of pee, the groupies were convinced they were drunk (which speaks volumes about the amount of alcohol in Slash and Izzy’s urine). Hudson reflects for a second on the anecdote and says, “If someone told me back then that me and Slash would be married, with kids, and as happy as we are, I would never have believed them.”
Courtesy of www.rollingstone.com