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Apart from making records, attracting groupies and getting tattooed,
the job description for modern day rock stars seems to include defending
rock & roll to all who will listen. Hard rock and heavy metal bands
in particular are always going on about keeping this ‘real’
music alive. This, despite the fact that rock has survived disco, electronica
and boy bands by simply slithering into new pants and reminding listeners
that nothing else is quite as fun as a full-throttle guitar riff and
devil salute.
Velvet Revolver is the latest act to declare itself
the saviour of rock, and it’s got the credentials to back it up.
Behind the new name are members Slash, Duff McKagan and Matt Sorum (ex-Guns
‘N Roses), Dave Kushner (ex-Wasted Youth and sidekick to Dave Navarro)
and Stone Temple Pilots singer Scott Weiland. Between them, they’ve
written some of the biggest, baddest rock songs of the past twenty years.
And yet they do not consider themselves a supergroup.
"I hate that term," says bassist McKagan,
on the phone from LA. "I can understand why people use it, but
Slash and I have never taken ourselves that seriously. We’re the
same guys as when we met when we were nineteen. We rehearse in a little
sweatbox in Burbank, we made a record, and now that we’re doing
press people are saying supergroup? Isn’t Asia a supergroup? We’re
not that, are we?"
Perhaps not. But they are a super group. The debut
album, Contraband, parties like it’s 1989. No rapping, no
scratching, no drum programming. Just straight ahead sonic bombast with
Slash’s signature guitar solos and Scott’s gutsy, groovy vocals
on top. The first single, ‘Slither’, immediately hit the charts
on all kinds of rock formats, says Duff, proudly. "We are #1 in
Modern Rock, Active Rock, Heritage Rock, across the board."
Velvet Revolver bridges ‘80s hair metal and ‘90s
alt.rock in a way few new rock acts have managed. I ask Duff about the
other group flying the classic rock flag of late, The Darkness. He laughs
out loud.
"I listened to the record. Izzy [Stradlin, ex-GNR]
brought it over to my house a couple of months ago. We were howling.
I’m not putting down the band, but I thought it was a parody. They’re
playing AC/DC riffs and the singer is singing opera or something. It’s
a joke, right?"
Duff says Velvet Revolver wants to spread itself further
than most rockers. Contraband features several slow numbers,
none quite as good as GNR’s ‘November Rain’ or STP’s
‘Sour Girl’, but the closing track, ‘Loving The Aliens’,
is a sign that Velvet Revolver doesn’t always have to go to eleven.
"‘Loving The Aliens’ was just Scott
and I down at the studio," Duff recalls. "He wanted a song
from like [The Rolling Stones’] Exile On Main Street. I
picked up an acoustic and he started singing, and in five minutes, we
had it. Slash came up with the really cool guitar riff over it. It’s
almost Radiohead-ish in the middle. It is us. It sounds completely different
from the rest, but we can go in any direction. We weren’t raised
on just one kind of music. We like soul and jazz and Burt Bacharach
and punk and Zeppelin and Nine Inch Nails, you name it."
Still, the band is mostly concerned with rocking out.
A few weeks after our phone chat, the band blew into Toronto for a sold-out
club show and press conference. There, they spoke about wanting to bring
"real" rock back to the people, lambasting the record business
for producing what Duff referred to as "pop, paint-by-numbers garbage."
Slash singled out Nickelback and Creed as particularly dreadful. As
if to reinforce the point, three of them wore classic rock band T-shirts:
Slash in crisp new Led Zeppelin, Duff in faded Ramones, and Scott in
frayed vintage Lynyrd Skynard.
Weiland later praised Queens Of The Stone Age and
Australia’s Jet for making respectable rock music. "Jet is
on the right track," he said. "They’re emulating the
right bands, but not any one particular band. They’re exciting."
Later that night, Velvet Revolver tore through a live
set of songs from Contraband, plus old hits from GNR, STP, and
even a Nirvana cover, keeping the spirit of rock alive for another night.
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