The musicians who weren’t serious enough for Velvet Revolver
Nothing about Guns N’ Roses was ever about winging it when Slash first joined.
Every member of the band had a hand in making fantastic material for the group, and after going through their stints in different groups, none of them were going to take a chance on making a song that was merely good. Everything had to be right when they started making their classics, and that kind of discipline wasn’t about to stop when Slash decided to find his feet without dealing with Axl Rose’s antics.
Then again, whatever Slash was working on needed to be miles different from everything that he had put up with for the last two years he was with Guns. There were pieces of that badass rock and roll group that they used to be, but it had all been buried under mountains of keyboards and the odd experiment that only served to please what Rose was doing whenever they went into the studio.
So when the guitarist came up for air, Slash’s Snakepit was the next best place for him to go. For one, it was all about pure rock and roll, but when listening to the two albums that they made, it was clear that it wasn’t going to get off the ground in the same way that everyone expected it to be, especially in the era when grunge was the dominating force in music.
If there was one thing that could match Rose’s antics, though, it was bound to be everyone else in the band getting together for a record. The idea of almost every ex member of Guns N’ Roses getting together for Velvet Revolver would have been a low blow to their former frontman, but it’s not like they knocked it out of the park when they first started auditioning for who was going to be in the band.
Duff McKagan and Matt Sorum were no-brainers, but when looking at the artists they had in mind, there were a lot more interesting people than Scott Weiland. The Stone Temple Pilots frontman was perfect for them in many ways, but aside from other legendary vocalists like Sebastian Bach and Corey Taylor in the mix, the band were dangerously close to going with Buckcherry’s Josh Todd.
That sleazy rock and roll vibe certainly fit with what Guns was all about, but the rest of the band knew that there was no way it was going to work if Todd had signed on, with Sorum saying, “No disrespect to Josh — I mean, what he does is cool — but I think that particular style or direction we were going in might have not been taken as seriously as what we’re doing now. I think what we’re doing now just has so much more substance.”
And judging by where Buckcherry would be heading in their later years, the guitarist wasn’t that far off in thinking that. By the time that songs like ‘Lit Up’ got on the charts, their brand of rock and roll was already 20 years behind the times, and given that the biggest names were bands like The Strokes and The White Stripes, a lot of what Buckcherry was about seemed to cater to a lot of the older rock and roll fans trying to convince themselves that the party never ended when Kurt Cobain came into town.
There were a million ways in which Velvet Revolver could have gone in a different direction, but the band didn’t need another fun experiment this time. Slash was dangerously close to becoming a has-been, and if he needed an ace in the hole, he could have hardly picked a better musician than Weiland to take the reins on songs like ‘Slither’ and ‘Fall to Pieces’.
