He cops some Rose-isms, for sure – but then hasn’t everybody? – yet his work is generally of a darker hue. ![]() Velvet Revolver plunge forward boldly but to lesser effect. The missing ingredient is the one provided in GN’R by Izzy Stradlin’, the most underrated Gunner and the source of the cool rhythms that loosened up songs like It’s So Easy and Rocket Queen. They’re hard, driven songs, aggressive and fast, but they lack the sheer hip-swinging cool of Guns N’ Roses at their best. Sucker Train Blues, Doing It For The Kids, Big Machine and Illegal Song, the first four tracks on Contraband, lack the light and shade to convince that the correct decision had been made. But when the tapes started to roll, the quality of the music, and the strength of the muse, overrode those concerns. ![]() While Weiland appears to lack Axl Rose’s megalomania, he shares the GN’R man’s propensity toward unpredictability. He’s such an amazing talent.”Įnough of a talent, apparently, for Slash, McKagan and Sorum to accept the real possibility that they’d hooked themselves up with another gifted flake. “All things considered,” Slash said of his singer, “if you’d given me a handful of résumés I’d avoid the ones that said ‘irretrievable junkie’ on them, but in reality Scott’s dealing with stuff. Even as the band – completed by GN’R’s second drummer Matt Sorum, and Slash’s chum Dave Kushner on the other guitar – came together with some purpose last summer, Weiland was up to his old tricks and headed back for rehab. ![]() That Contraband is as good as it is – and it is good, rather than great – is a triumph of faith over circumstance. So Velvet Revolver possessed as much potential to become a curate’s egg as it did to relaunch the flagging careers of its members. The straight-ahead, testosterone-led rock’n’roll so beloved of Slash and McKagan did not appear to be the most natural direction for a man prone to wearing a dress and indulging his fantasies of becoming David Bowie. Their last, Shangri-La Dee Dah, was undeservedly overlooked, and Weiland appeared to become weirder, and more interesting, by the day. Stone Temple Pilots seemed to get better, and more interesting, with every record. ![]() They tagged on to the end of the grunge years, making the albums that everyone wished Pearl Jam would make after Ten – big, echoing, stadium-sized rock things lent nuance by Weiland’s nihilism. But they were a band who began their career to widespread approbation. Stone Temple Pilots were more dependant on the singular ability of Scott Weiland, and would have been faceless, as well as voiceless, without him. The spin-offs and side projects of former members of GN’R have served merely to prove that no individual held the key to the Gunners’ creative fire theirs was simply the happy convergence of talent, timing and opportunity. So it would seem far from certain that these components contain enough of the essence of either band to ensure such a significant blend of the two. After all, Velvet Revolver contains just two ( Slash and Duff McKagan) from the Guns N’ Roses line-up that recorded Appetite For Destruction, the only record they made while “living off strippers”, alongside Weiland himself from Stone Temple Pilots. It was a remark that had a certain swaggering arrogance to it. With that tantalising promise, Velvet Revolver vocalist Scott Weiland launched that band’s debut record to the press.
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