Joe Satriani recommended Ron “Bumblefoot” Thal to Guns N’ Roses

In an interview with the podcast Appetite For Distortion dedicated to Guns N’ Rosesthe guitarist Joe Satriani he told how he recommended it over twenty years ago Ron “Bumblefoot” Thal for the role of guitarist in the band of Axl Rose.

This is the story of the 69-year-old American guitar virtuoso reported by Blabbermouth.net: “It happened because my current producer, Eric Cadieux, and I had been working together since the very first ‘G3′ live album. He was the editor in charge of putting together all those live performances for a DVD and a live CD. He had worked on Guns N’ Roses’ ‘Chinese Democracy’ album for I think about eight years, that album took forever. So one day he told me called and told me Axl was looking for the craziest guitarist ever, I think they already had Buckethead, and I was like, ‘Who would I recommend? Who’s the craziest and best?’ Who? I knew there was only one person. It had to be Ron ‘Thal’ Bumblefoot.”

Joe Satriani he continued, “I had met Ron in a very funny way, I was doing an interview in Paris, and the interviewer was trying to somehow get me to make offensive comments about other guitar players. Did he preface that he was going to play me some of Ron’s music and talk about blues, the feel of blues, and whether I thought there was any blues in these guitarists? He played me a clip of Ron doing something completely abstract, completely disturbing, which normally happens to Ron. I I said, ‘Well, I don’t think there’s any blues in there.’ The guy wrote it, and I kind of insulted Ron and he kind of contacted me and said, ‘Hey, how come you said that?’ So I explained the story to him and said, ‘Why don’t you come to a concert?’ I was playing somewhere in New Jersey at the time. I told him, ‘We’ll do it on stage. We’ll show everyone how to play the guitar today and laugh about this whole ‘blues feeling’ thing. So we became great friends and I became a great admirer of his all-round musicianship. He’s a phenomenon: his musicianship is incredible, and if you play guitar, you know that most of what he does, only he can do.”

Going back to how he recommended ‘Bumblefoot’ to people Guns N’ RosesSatriani explained: “Anyway, Ron came to mind and I said, ‘Eric, you’ve got to get this Ron Thal into Axl’s band. You’ve got to tell Axl that there’s no one else who can stand next to Buckethead and look even weirder and play as good,’ because they’re two first-rate guitar players.”

Thal joined the Guns N’ Roses in 2006 and played on the album “Chinese Democracy” (read the review here) from 2008. Thal never officially announced his departure from the band, but a source told the music critic Gary Graff that the guitarist abandoned Axl after eight years in 2014.