The only band that Slash truly hated working with: “I have nothing positive to say”
At the height of Guns N’ Roses’ fame, there were very few that could touch the band, least of all because of the impresario guitarist Slash. Not for their insanely huge shows, their mass radio play, the hysteria that followed them, or the heavy drug use. They were the archetypal rock and roll outfit, and they were very proud of it. But it wouldn’t last.
By the mid-1990s, Slash would have probably been happy playing with any other band not named Guns N’ Roses. It might have been fun playing at the biggest stadiums the world had ever known, but the antics of Axl Rose and the overblown sound of their records were far away from the rootsy rock and roll that the guitarist built himself on. He needed a more creative outlet, and while some of his bandmates followed him into Velvet Revolver, he wasn’t exactly in the best shape when they took to the road.
But when you look at how the supergroup came together, it’s actually really easy to defend them as one of the great 2000s acts. Everyone might mention Audioslave from this time as the true supergroup of the era, but bringing Slash’s sleazy riffs to the fold and putting Scott Weiland’s disaffected voice over it is a lot more inspired than one would expect.
In retrospect, their debut, Contraband, is a pretty solid record. Does it get anywhere close to any of their previous bandmates? No, not really, but for a nice slice of arena rock, you could certainly do much worse, especially since this was the time when the backwash of post-grunge was still firmly etched into people’s minds.
Although Slash had the right songs to work with, he wasn’t having the best time in the background. Since this was a time to be back on the road, some of his old ways ended up creeping in again, which normally meant falling into the same drama as Guns N’ Roses but on a much smaller scale.
When talking about the passing of Weiland in 2018, Slash remembered that while he loved his singing, his stint as a lead singer in the supergroup was far from perfect, telling Loudwire, “As crazed as that whole period was, I was still shocked to hear about Scott. But yeah, Velvet Revolver was no fun. I have nothing positive to say about that experience except that we did write some cool stuff.”
In his autobiography, Slash also mentioned that Weiland ended up in a lot of the traps that he had seen when he was in his old outfit. While the grunge vocalist had been strung out on drugs at various points in his life, it’s hard to deny that he showed up on both records they made, making every second count on songs like ‘Slither’ and ‘Fall to Pieces’.
If anything, the supergroup does provide a great ‘what if’ scenario of what they could have been had Weiland been replaced with someone else. Outside of the grunge icon, there had been rumblings of everyone from Slipknot’s Corey Taylor to The Cult’s Ian Astbury trying out for the position, so it’s not like they lacked potential vocalists to choose from.
We’ll probably never know how the ideal Velvet Revolver should have sounded like, but does it really matter at this point? All that’s left now is a distant memory of Slash’s supergroup, and even if those headaches went on for too long, it was worth it to at least hear a song like ‘Sucker Train Blues’.
