In a new interview with the GUNS N’ ROSES-centric Appetite For Distortion podcast, guitar virtuoso Joe Satriani spoke about how he ended up recommending Ron “Bumblefoot” Thal for the guitarist position in GUNS N’ ROSES more than 20 years ago. He said (as transcribed by BLABBERMOUTH.NET): “That happened because our current producer, Eric Cadieux, and I had been working together since the very first ‘G3′ live album. He was the editor that was charged with pulling all those live performances together for one live DVD and CD. And he had been working on [GUNS N’ ROSES’] ‘Chinese Democracy’ [album], I guess, eight years or something like that; that that record took forever. And so one day he calls up and he says that Axl [Rose, GUNS N’ ROSES singer] is looking for the craziest guitar player ever; it was one of the things that he was demanding. And I think they already had Buckethead, and I was thinking, like, ‘Who would I recommend? Who’s the craziest and the best?’ Who was really at the top? And I knew there was only one guy. It had to be Ron’ Thal’ Bumblefoot.”
Joe continued: “I had met Ron in the funniest way, because I was doing an interview in Paris, and the interviewer was sort of trying to get me to make off comments about other guitar players. And he prefaced playing some of Ron’s music by talking about blues and blues feeling, and do I notice blues feeling in these guitar players? And he had played a clip of Ron doing something absolutely abstract, completely freaky, which comes normally for Ron. Yeah. And I said, ‘Well, I don’t think there’s any blues feeling in there.’ And so that’s what he printed, was me sort of dissing Ron. And so Ron got ahold of me somehow and said, ‘Hey, how come you said that?’ And so I explained the story to him, and I said, ‘Why don’t you come out to a gig?’ I was playing somewhere in [New] Jersey at the time. And I said, ‘We’ll just do it on stage. We’ll just show everybody where guitar playing’s at today, and we’ll laugh about the whole ‘blues feeling’ thing.’ And we became really great friends, and I became a super admirer of his musicianship all around. He’s just like a total freak — his musicianship is amazing, and if you play guitar, you know that most of what he does, only he can do.”
Circling back to how he connected Thal with GUNS N’ ROSES, Satriani added: “So anyway, Ron came to my mind, and I said, ‘Eric, you have to get this guy Ron Thal into Axl’s band. And tell Axl that there’s no one else who can stand next to Buckethead and look even stranger and play just as good,’ ’cause they’re two premier guitar players.
“But my conversation with was with Ron was pretty funny, because the last thing he expected was me to call him and say, ‘How would you like to audition for GUNS N’ ROSES?’ Because he had accepted, I think, the fact that he was just the oddest guitar player, and [he never thought] that the most accepted rock band at the moment, the new standard for straight-ahead rock was ever going to be calling him for an audition. But he did it anyway, I think as an experiment in life, just to see how much fun it would be. And he got the gig, because he was himself. And I think Axl could see right away he’s a genius. And so that lasted a long time, didn’t it?”
Back in 2014, Thal spoke to Glide Magazine about how he became friends with Satriani. He said: “Well, as time is going on, by this time it was the early ’90s, and I was actually having real commercial releases with my music coming out on a lot of comp CDs or things like that. By the early to mid-’90s, I had a record deal on Shrapnel Records so at that point I was putting out my Ron Thal albums. I did two albums on there and then I started my own label in the late ’90s just to put out my own music. So it’s 2004 and we crossed paths and I ended up jamming with him at one of his shows and we’d talk every once in a while. Then he sent me an e-mail saying, ‘Hey, I’m just letting you know that they were looking for someone, and I recommended you and if someone reaches out …’ And a few hours later, Chris Pitman wrote me this funny e-mail and we spoke for about two months, back and forth, with management, with Caram Costanzo, the producer. Then there was a lull for about a year and a half, and then they had a tour coming up and they said, ‘Hey, you still wanna do this?’ And we met up in New York and we jammed for a couple of nights and hit the road.”
Thal joined GUNS N’ ROSES in 2006 and appeared on 2008’s “Chinese Democracy”, an effort which contained music that had been written before he came into the group. The disc took 13 years to make and was only a modest seller, moving just around half a million copies.
Thal never officially announced his departure from the GN’R, but a source confirmed to Detroit music writer Gary Graff back in 2015 that the guitarist had been out since the end of the band’s second Las Vegas residency in 2014.
Thal later revealed that he was focusing on his solo career and other projects after spending eight years playing in GUNS.
Photo by Larry DiMarzio (courtesy of Peter Noble at Noble PR)