Over the last few weeks, we’ve been noticing that rock guitarist Slash, formerly of Guns N’ Roses, has doubled his number of Facebook fans to 1 million (i.e. that’s more than Oprah). Okay, for all of the Slash/GnR fans out there, we know he’s a talented guitarist. But his page was hardly growing until around September 23rd, when it started gaining thousands of new fans.

Meanwhile, Guns N’ Roses‘ own page is poking along at 345,000. Sure, Slash left the group in the mid-90s — so what about his new band, Velvet Revolver? We don’t even see an official page for it. Another possible cause: Slash has been playing live concerts recently, ahead of a solo album called “Slash & Friends” slated for release next year. However, we haven’t seen any sort of of massive ad campaign for that album, or anything else to do with Slash.

Facebook users have suddenly and spontaneously started expressing their long-standing love for Slash by becoming fans of his page.

And it appears Slash (aka Saul Hudson) has been doing a great job of fostering that love. For months, he has been actively updating his Facebook page multiple times a day, using the mobile text feature. He’s even feeding messages from his Facebook page to his Twitter account (which itself has around 100,000 followers). Thousands of fans are liking and commenting his every update. Maybe all this interaction is what’s driving the growth, although it doesn’t explain the surge of the last few weeks.

Any more ideas about what’s going on? Let us know in the comments.

Note: The drop-off in the growth graph, above, appears to be due to a data-reporting delay rather than an actual drop-off.