Slash’s Collaboration With Chester Bennington Finally Released
How cool is this!? The demo version of a never-before-heard collaboration between Guns N’ Roses guitarist Slash and late Linkin Park singer Chester Bennington is now online! The song is called “Crazy”, and it was originally earmarked to be on Slash’s debut solo album, although you eventually heard it as “Captain Alibi” with late Motörhead singer Lemmy Kilmister on vocals!
Music producer Chris Flores recently made the song available (he worked on Slash’s debut album more than a decade ago). In early 2022, Flores went in-studio with Matt Starr (Mr. Big) and Doug Pinnick (King’s X) to play drums and bass on the song. The plan is for the song’s profits to benefit 320 Changes Direction, the mental health awareness organization launched by Chester’s widow Talinda Bennington.
Flores was on “Appetite For Distortion” podcast in ’21 and talked about working with Bennington, “We sent him the demo and set up a session. Chester came in for literally probably a few hours, recorded it and was, like, ‘Hey, can I hang out for a little bit?’ and that was the last of it. It was one or two takes when he got here. There was nothing really to it.”
As for why the song wasn’t released, Flores said, “I think part of the reason it got shelved for so long was out of respect, just waiting for Linkin Park to release whatever they were going to release with Chester and then give Talinda and his mom time to figure out if they wanted to do anything with it. Slash hadn’t heard anything from them and it just was forgotten about.”
Back in ’18, Slash talked with Variety about his collabortion with Bennington, “When I was doing my first solo record, I worked with a lot of different people, some of whom, for whatever reason, didn’t end up on the record. One was with Chester. We did a song and Linkin Park at the time didn’t allow it to happen, so I did it with Lemmy. The guy who engineered my demos sent it to me and I sent it to Chester’s family.”
Isn’t it cool to hear songs like this – and imagine what else is out there that we haven’t heard yet! Who do you wish would collaborate?
