By BROOKS BARNES

LOS ANGELES

POOR Slash. All the star guitarist wanted to do was tune his Gibson and collect his thoughts before going onstage at the Staples Center here with the Black Eyed Peas. He was jittery — a tattooed bundle of nerves in a leather top hat.

But a visitor was outside his dressing room door, his manager announced. Was it O.K. for Tom Cruise to come in and say hello?

Slash, who recently released a solo album (“Slash”) but is still best known for his Guns N’ Roses days, was taken aback. “As in, Tom Cruise Tom Cruise?” he asked. Yep, the wide-eyed manager said. “Um, yeah sure — tell him to come in.”

And suddenly there was a beaming Mr. Cruise. His wife, Katie Holmes, lingered behind him. “I’m a big fan, and I just really wanted to meet you,” Mr. Cruise said. Some awkward banter followed — neither man seemed to know whether to play the fan role or the celebrity one — and ended with a confession.

“I’m a little nervous to go onstage,” Slash said in a soft voice. Mr. Cruise tried to comfort him, saying the same thing happens on a movie set. “That’s good,” Mr. Cruise asserted. “That means it will be a good performance.”

With that, Mr. Cruise bid adieu, leaving Slash a bit discombobulated (although, frankly, it was hard to tell since his face was almost entirely hidden by mirrored aviator sunglasses and his enormous mop of hair). “That has to be one of the weirdest things that has happened to me in at least two weeks,” he said, adding that he couldn’t believe how nice Mr. Cruise was. “And he’s not as short as everybody seems to think.”

Last year, Time magazine ranked Slash, whose real name is Saul Hudson, as the second-best electric guitar player of all time, after Jimi Hendrix. He was playing with the Peas to promote his solo album, which features guest singers like Kid Rock, Iggy Pop, Ozzy Osbourne and the Peas’ own Fergie.

“Having my own record is like a dream,” he said, adjusting his guitar.

Slash, 44, riffed his way to fame with Guns N’ Roses in the mid-1980s but left the band in 1996 after a spat with its frontman, Axl Rose. He continued his career with bands like Velvet Revolver. He also spent a lot of time working on his proficiency in the sex-and-drugs side of rock ’n’ roll.

One story, detailed in his 2007 memoir, involves shooting so much cocaine that he had hallucinations of being attacked by machine-gun-toting, dreadlock-wearing aliens. Drinking a half-liter of vodka in under an hour? Child’s play.

But age, marriage, two sons (ages 5 and 7) and time in rehab have left him feeling more mature and sober, he said. He even stopped smoking a few weeks back, a decision he was regretting in the moments before clambering onstage. Not helping was his wife, Perla Hudson, who was tearing through a pack of cigarettes and blowing the exhaust in his direction.

What does he do for kicks now? Don’t laugh. “I love going on Disney cruises,” he said. “In fact, I took my family on one right after getting out of rehab.” Doesn’t he feel strange among the “Zip-a-Dee-Doo-Dah” Disney masses? “Not really,” he said. “But I mostly only wandered around the ship in the middle of the night.”