“I had to get pizza money for my girlfriend”: Why Zakk Wylde didn’t end up joining Guns N’ Roses
“We had all these riffs laying around and I was just like, nothing was happening,” Wylde says.
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Zakk Wylde has revealed why he did not end up joining Guns N’ Roses in the mid ’90s despite being one of the guitarists considered for the job.
Wylde, who famously auditioned for Guns N’ Roses in 1995, tells host Mark Strigl on SiriusXM’s Ozzy’s Boneyard that the entire thing took place while he was working on Ozzy Osbourne’s Ozzmosis album.
“Axl called me up and he was just like, ‘Hey Zakk, it’s Axl.’ I was like, ‘Hey, what’s going on man?’” Wylde recalls [via Bravewords]. “He just goes, ‘I was just wondering, you want to get together and jam with me and the fellas because I was asking, you know, Slash. I was like, well, who would you want to get to jam with? and you know, he goes, ‘Your name came up because we were all talking about why don’t we give Zakk a call,’ or whatever and I was like, ‘Yeah, of course man.’”
“You know, because obviously I love – the guys are great guys and an amazing band, so we were jamming stuff at this rehearsal place that they had.”
He adds, “We were jamming there for a while, just jamming ideas, and then we were gonna go do some stuff over at Duff’s house, and then, you know, nothing was kind of happening, like, are we gonna do this or what, because I need to save up for pizza money and a soda pop to take out my girlfriend. You know what mean?”
The guitarist also notes that he’d come up with a couple of riffs and ideas with the GNR members at the time, though he still didn’t get an answer as to whether or not he was officially in the band.
“We had all these riffs laying around and I was just like, nothing was happening,” Wylde explains, “Then Oz was like, ‘Zakk, I can’t be sitting around waiting.’ You know, because it was after we did Ozzmosis and everything like that, he was like, ‘I’m getting ready to tour,’ whatever and I mean, without Ozzy there, I wouldn’t even be in a conversation with Guns N’ Roses.”
“Because I owe everything to Oz, so the Guns thing was just lying dormant, you know, just nothing was happening and I was like, ‘I need to raise some pizza money and soda pop money for my girlfriend, Barbaranne,’ so that’s when Black Label Society was born.”
“So that’s the reason. I had to get pizza money for my girlfriend,” Wylde concludes.
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