Slash Says Guns N' Roses Passed on a Sphere Residency — and Chose a U.S. Tour Instead

Every band with a big enough catalog eventually gets asked the Sphere question, and Guns N' Roses, it turns out, already had the conversation — and talked themselves out of it. In an interview with Audacy host Abe Kanan published on October 15 and transcribed by Blabbermouth, Slash said the band discussed a Las Vegas Sphere residency last year and chose a U.S. tour instead. His reasoning, paraphrased from the Audacy interview as transcribed by Blabbermouth, will surprise exactly no one who has ever watched him play: the room is built around the show on the walls, and he is built around the show coming out of an amplifier.

As Slash described it to Audacy's Kanan, per Blabbermouth's transcription, Sphere is fundamentally a production- and visual-driven venue. It is not, in his assessment, a place set up for a band to simply roll in its amps and play live the way Guns N' Roses ordinarily does. The backline would effectively have to live somewhere else, separated from the band on stage — a strange arrangement for a group whose entire live identity is volume, sweat and a wall of cabinets behind the drum riser. He did not slam the door. He said a residency might happen down the road, but was clear, in the interview, that it is not something he is aspiring to do.

The Joe Walsh factor

Part of the hesitation, Slash told Kanan in the Audacy interview transcribed by Blabbermouth, came secondhand: Joe Walsh's account of playing the room put him off. The Eagles are among Sphere's defining residencies, and Walsh knows the building as well as any guitarist alive. When a player of Walsh's stature describes the compromises the venue asks of a working band — the separation from your own gear, the production calling the shots — guitarists listen to each other in a way they do not listen to promoters. Slash heard the review from inside the fraternity and decided his band's version of a great night did not need a 160,000-square-foot screen to happen.

And yet there is a delightful wrinkle, also from the Audacy interview via Blabbermouth: Slash is eager to see Metallica play there. That is not a contradiction; it is a connoisseur's position. Metallica's Sphere residency, Life Burns Faster, opened on October 1 with the band's No Repeat Weekends format — different setlists across paired nights, nothing repeated within a weekend. If any metal band was engineered to feed that room, it is the one that has treated stage production as a contact sport for four decades. Slash passing on the gig for his own band while buying the metaphorical ticket for someone else's is the most honest review Sphere has gotten from the guitar world.

What Sphere asks of a band

Some context for why this is even a dilemma. Sphere, in Paradise just off the Las Vegas Strip, is a 17,600-capacity venue that opened in September 2023 and immediately rewrote what a residency could be. U2 opened it, and Phish, Dead & Company and the Eagles have since taken up residencies, each building a bespoke visual world rather than bringing a touring production through the door. That is the trade the building offers: surrender your show to the room, and the room gives you something no arena can. For jam bands and production maximalists, the trade is easy. For a band whose mythology is a top hat, a Les Paul and dangerous volume, it is a genuine identity question — and last year, according to Slash's Audacy interview as transcribed by Blabbermouth, Guns N' Roses answered it by booking a U.S. tour instead.

There is also a practical Vegas angle. A residency plants a band in one city for weeks of shows with no travel — the model that has drawn everyone from legacy rock acts to pop stars to the Strip. Guns N' Roses choosing the road over the residency is a bet on their own drawing power in 40 markets rather than one very shiny room. Given that their reunion-era tours have been among the biggest-grossing rock runs in the world, it is not exactly a gamble.

Not never — just not the dream

The careful reader's summary of Slash's position, per the Audacy interview transcribed by Blabbermouth, is: discussed last year, chose the tour, put off by Walsh's experience, unconvinced the room suits a plug-in-and-play band, open to it someday, not aspiring to it, and genuinely curious about Metallica. In an era when most residency quotes are pure press release, that is a refreshingly unvarnished take — a guitarist explaining, in gear terms, why the most famous room in music is not currently for him.

If it ever does happen, it will be fascinating precisely because of the friction: the most amp-worshipping guitar hero of his generation inside the most screen-worshipping venue ever built. Until then, Sphere's rock story runs through Metallica's Life Burns Faster — which you can read more about on Previously's Culture front — while Guns N' Roses do it the old way, city by city. More entertainment coverage lives on the news front, and Vegas goings-on are a Previously staple for a reason.