The venerable session ace recounts fast times with John Lennon and David Bowie — and exactly why he turned down David Coverdale’s Whitesnake offer

By Joe Bosso

I DON’T WANT TO SPOIL THE PARTY “I thought, ‘Oh, God, this could go really bad.’ You know — John Lennon called me to play on his record, and he is who he is, and I’m telling him that I can’t remember playing with him on [DavidBowie’s ‘Fame’]. But he thought it was hysterical. It became kind of a joke during the recordings”

JOHN KISCH ARCHIVE/GETTY IMAGES THROUGHOUT THE 1970S and into the Eighties, Earl Slick was living most rock ’n’ roll guitarists’ dreams. He’d logged several worldwide tours with David Bowie and played a vital musical role on albums such as Young Americans and Station to Station. As if working with one British rock legend weren’t enough, in 1980 Slick was chosen by John Lennon to play guitar on the former Beatle’s first album in five years, Double Fantasy.

“That’s just the tip of the iceberg,” Slick says. “I was really, really busy back then. There are days now when I astonish myself going, ‘Christ, did I really do all that?’ I’ll go on Wikipedia and be like, ‘Oh, there’s this and that.’ Or somebody will call and say, ‘I was just on Spotify and you’re on this record.’ I’ll say, ‘Now that you mention it, I am. I forgot about that one.’”

By the mid-Eighties, however, the high-profile gigs weren’t coming like they used to. Slick attempted a career reboot with ex-Stray Cats members Slim Jim Phantom and Lee Rocker in Phantom, Rocker &Slick, but their union lasted for only two albums. After kicking a debilitating drug and alcohol dependency, he joined the L.A..-based glam-metal band Dirty White Boy, who went belly-up after one album. A short stint with another L.A. outfit, Little Caesar, yielded similar results. Finally, in 1992, fed up with beating his head against the wall, Slick decided to chuck it all and headed to Lake Tahoe. For the next four years, he pursued a “normal job” selling timeshares.

“Only problem was, I sucked at it,” he says with a laugh. “I was no good at it at all. It was a strange time —I was adjusting to being sober, and I was filled with anxiety and discouragement from being jerked around by record companies. I just thought, ‘I need a drastic change.’ So I went somewhere I could be anonymous and get away from it all.”

In an unlikely turn, Slick was tempted to ditch retirement by a Tahoe neighbor, Whitesnake singer David Coverdale, who floated an offer for the guitarist to join the veteran hard rock band. “I gave it some serious thought, but I finally had to say no,” Slick says, “I realized I would have been faking my way through it, and it would have backfired on both of us.” More to the guitarist’s liking was a six-month writing collaboration with Coverdale that resulted in the singer’s third solo record, 2000’s Into the Light.