Last of the Giants

by Mick Wall

  He thought he’d pulled through when, four months after the op, he was invited to play at Michael Jackson’s birthday celebration. ‘This was my first gig since the operation so I was looking forward to it. It certainly turned out to be memorable.’ He had worked through two days of rehearsal for the show, which boasted a bill including the reunited Jacksons, Marlon Brando, Liza Minnelli, Gloria Estefan and several other of Jackson’s celebrity ‘friends’. ‘On the day it was a great show,’ said Slash. ‘Everyone in the Michael Jackson entourage was rocking out, and I was doing the best I could to stay away from alcohol. After all, I now had a pacemaker. When the doctors put the defibrillator in me, it was for maintaining a normal heart rate. For most people this isn’t a problem, but it was for me. Once I get up onstage my heart rate sky-rockets. When I took the stage with Michael and got into it, I was suddenly hit in the chest by a shock and my vision flooded with electric-blue light.

  ‘This happened about four times during each song, and I had no idea what was going on. I thought I had a short-circuit in a guitar cable or a photographer’s flash had popped in my eyes. Each time it happened I had to stand there and make it look as if everything was normal. I saw it later on TV and you couldn’t tell, so I guess I pulled it off.’

  He had been halfway through a Snakepit tour when he first became ill. Had to cancel dates. He didn’t believe the doctors, but he followed their instructions, to sober up, and do some minor exercises. ‘And I recovered. Which is an amazing thing. A couple of people I know have died from the same thing.’ He also gave up drugs, at least for a while. But he still drank – and he still smoked. It would be quite some time before he was finally able to do something about that. In the meanwhile, he disbanded Slash’s Snakepit in 2001 and began collaborating with Steve Gorman, the drummer with The Black Crowes, who had recently quit the Atlanta-based band and moved to LA. The two put together an early version of what would eventually become a huge hit for Velvet Revolver called ‘Fall to Pieces’. But without other key players or any long-range vision for their project, the one-off collaboration would prove to be just that and nothing more.

  Then, in April 2002, a gathering of Hollywood’s rock illuminati descended upon the Key Club on Sunset Strip to pay tribute to Ozzy Osbourne’s former drummer Randy Castillo, who had passed away from cancer a few weeks before. A noisy, sold-out crowd of 800 enjoyed a parade of classic rock covers played by a rotating cast of musicians that included Ronnie Montrose, Ritchie Kotzen, Steve Lukather and a raft of other big names. Slash, Duff and Matt had all turned up to donate their talents to raising money for Randy’s family, and along with the guitarist Keith Nelson and Buckcherry vocalist Josh Todd they stormed through a blistering set that included ‘It’s So Easy’, ‘God Save the Queen’, ‘Nice Boys’ and Buckcherry’s bouncy, shout-out-loud coke anthem, ‘Lit Up’. They closed with ‘Paradise City’ (aided by Cypress Hill’s Sen Dog on backup vocals) and a roof-lifting cover of ‘Mama Kin’, on which they were joined by Steven Tyler himself.

  In the sweaty, electrified aftermath of the show, the three former GN’R members were on fire. ‘It was like a 747 jet taking off in that room,’ recalled Duff. ‘Powerful yet familiar, comfortable and friendly. There were no assumptions or ulterior motives. We were doing this for a friend’s family in need. End of story.’ Though their intentions were charitable, they recognised that their chemistry remained as strong as in their Use Your Illusion days. ‘Slash, Matt and I faced a bona fide dilemma,’ Duff went on. ‘It felt too good together not to continue after that gig. We didn’t have any new material yet, and had only the foggiest of ideas about what we might do, but the sheer power of us playing together was unmistakable, and we knew that if we worked hard, the rest would somehow come.’

  The next piece fell into place after a Loaded gig at Johnny Depp’s Viper Room, when Duff introduced Dave Kushner to Slash. The two guitarists had attended junior high school together, but through the years had only enjoyed a casual friendship. As Slash’s star began to rise, Dave joined Waysted Youth and later The Electric Love Hogs, who recorded an album produced by Mötley Crüe’s drummer, Tommy Lee. Kushner had also appeared in Sugartooth, Infectious and Danzig before securing a regular gig playing with Dave Navarro and serving as his music director. Guys like Dave Kushner were always in high demand around Los Angeles; through playing in so many different bands and drawing from influences as diverse as Black Sabbath and the Ohio Players, Dave boasted a prismatic versatility that producers and musicians valued highly.

  Duff, Slash and Matt invited Dave to take part in their new ‘project’ as the band’s rhythm guitarist, but the opportunity came with an extra complication in the shape of Izzy Stradlin, who had also been jamming with the band for a few weeks. Complicating the dynamic, Izzy remained silent about his intentions with regard to The Project, keeping Slash in the dark as to whether he planned on sticking around or whether he viewed this as an opportunity to jam. ‘Izzy did one of his disappearing acts,’ comments Alan Niven. ‘He was involved and then he didn’t turn up for rehearsal any more. Didn’t want to be involved. He doesn’t like the palaver. He’s skittish. As absurd as it sounds, that’s actually a valid point of view. All of us in some way or other suffered from our GN’R experiences. There’s no class at UCLA for dealing with what happens when you become successful. And it can be a tremendous trauma. It starts with the onset of fame because people around you start to change in the manner that they deal with you faster than you realise what’s going on. You’re not quite sure of anybody’s motives any more.’

  According to Slash, however, Dave Kushner was now their first choice anyway. ‘Dave brought a cool vibe to what we were doing. There was no deliberation; that was it, it was a perfect fit.’ Kushner could now set about the Herculean task before him: learning how to play with Slash. ‘I play nothing like Izzy,’ he explained, ‘and Slash even said that he’d never really been able to play with anyone except Izzy, so for the second guitar player to be really comfortable with him, it’s just a matter of playing open chords when he’s playing barre chords, or if he’s playing a riff, trying to come up with something good underneath it instead of doubling the riff. It’s about trying to find the right balance of not doubling him, but yet adding something to it or trying to play off of him rhythmically.’

  In September 2002, The Project placed ads for a singer in various newspapers and magazines that read: ‘Unnamed artist looking for singer-songwriter somewhere in the realm of early Alice Cooper/Steve Tyler, the harder-edged side of McCartney– Lennon.’ They had a specific vocalist in mind; however, that singer was already committed. In fact, he had only just got out of rehab. Still, they saw no harm in floating the idea and so Duff reached out to Stone Temple Pilots’ frontman, Scott Weiland.

  Scott Richard Weiland was a hugely talented but deeply fucked-up singer-songwriter who, by 2003, had become known more for his drug busts, abandoned spells in rehab, relationship breakdowns and arrests by police than he was for the handful of very good albums he’d made in the 1990s with his band, Stone Temple Pilots. Routinely portrayed in the rock press, in their earliest, most successful days, as the great grunge pretenders, in reality their crime consisted solely of not coming from Seattle but from Los Angeles. That and the fact that on their breakthrough hit, ‘Plush’, in 1993, Scott Weiland sounded a little like Pearl Jam’s singer, Eddie Vedder (who sounded a little like Tim Buckley, but no one ever pulled him on it, because most NME and Spin writers then had never heard of Tim Buckley).

  I had first met – and championed – Weiland when the Stone Temple Pilots toured Britain in 1994. Every day of the tour I was told to get ready for my interview with him, but come the appointed hour, come the bullshit excuse from the band’s manager, Steve Stewart. Scott had a cold; Scott was busy; Scott’s head was ‘not in the right place’. What really made it weird, though, was that I was staying in the adjoining room to Weiland at one hotel and I could hear him through the walls, yelling and cursing, followed by what sounde
d like loud weeping. Jeez, I thought, what’s up with this guy?

  Then, when we got back to London, I got a call at home asking me to meet up with Scott at his hotel. He was finally ready to talk, they said. Having been there so many times before, though, I turned up later that day with zero expectation that he would actually keep his word this time and sit down with me. Except he did. Turning up in an ankle-length black leather trench coat he told me he’d just bought that afternoon from Kensington Market, he added that he’d have to be ‘kinda quick’ as he was meeting his wife, who’d just flown in from LA, to take her to a movie. ‘Which movie?’ I asked nosily. ‘The new Quentin Tarantino,’ he said, ‘Pulp Fiction.’ Oh, I said, that’s cool. I heard it was quite good. ‘Yeah,’ he said.

  So we sat together in the coffee shop of his hotel, where other nearby guests bothered us not at all. STP may have sold three million copies of their latest album, Purple, but that don’t mean shit, daddy, in the UK. This, though, was something he seemed to enjoy. Weiland did not fetishise fame the way most rock stars did. Money was also not his deal. ‘Money isn’t really an issue; that’s all relative,’ he told me. ‘There’s security in the fact that we can own a home, but that’s it. I spend more money eating out than I used to, but I still buy pants and shirts for $1.25. There’s other elements of success that are far more confusing, like the idea of celebrity. That’s such a misconception. Unfortunately, people think that a public person is always a public person, and that you have these responsibilities to other people because you influence them. But the only thing we feel ultimately responsible to is music.’

  A few days after our interview, Weiland shaved his head completely bald. Interesting, I thought. R.E.M.’s Michael Stipe had just unveiled his own newly shaved pate in the then current ‘What’s the Frequency Kenneth?’ video. Three months later, I had also shaved my head completely bald. Like Stipe’s, my hair was already thinning, shaving it off was the only way I could see to keep some dignity. Unlike Michael and me, Scott shaved his off because he wanted to make some sort of statement. About what I could only guess – pressures of fame, insistence on private personal concerns over public perception and popularity? Just feeling, you know, fucked up? ‘I just, uh, felt like it,’ he told me when I asked. ‘So I did it.’

  As a young man he’d been through the tragedy of seeing his younger brother die. ‘We thought [it] was an overdose,’ he said, ‘but it was cardiomyopathy, due to just years of substance abuse. But he died in his sleep and at such a young age. There’s a part of me that still grieves for him every day. He and I were so close, losing a person that’s your brother and your best friend – we were creative partners as well … it was just beyond anything … you never quite get over it.’

  In 2011, he would write in his autobiography, Not Dead & Not for Sale, of being raped by ‘a big muscular guy, a high school senior’, an incident so traumatic he had suppressed it ‘until only a few years ago when, in rehab, it came flooding back’.

  In a phone interview we did at the time, I asked him about that. ‘I’ve always been a very driven person and I kind of look at it like, every time you falter and fall you have to pick yourself back up again, and every time you do it just gives you a further sort of a belief that you don’t have to quit. Just take an experience that is bad and turn it into something positive. Take a good experience and turn it into something even better. That’s sort of overall my philosophy.’

  I asked if he had been able to bring that philosophy to bear when he’d been sentenced to jail for six months in 2009 after admitting to using heroin while on probation. ‘Yeah, definitely. I was in this part where everyone was a drug addict so we had groups every day and did a lot of work. It wasn’t pleasant at all being in jail. I don’t think the jailing of people that are just users is necessarily the right way to go. But at that time there was a programme within the system that allowed me to deal with the issues.’

  He’d first heard about The Project when ‘I ran into Duff at the gym,’ Weiland later recalled in the Washington Post, ‘and he told me they were forming a new band and that I should check it out and see if it’s something I’d be into. They gave me two different CDs with about forty to fifty songs. The first CD was basically atrocious. It was stuff they’d also written with Izzy, and it sounded like Bad Company gone wrong. I told them I was busy and wasn’t really interested in the idea.’

  In his autobiography, Duff relates how he’d been introduced by his wife, Susan, to Scott Weiland and his first wife, Mary, who was a friend of Susan’s. ‘Scott and Mary had kids, too, and our families had gotten together for dinner on a few occasions. Scott was having problems with his band, Stone Temple Pilots, and he had been through trouble with addiction – on those occasions when our families met up, we had a lot to talk about. But I didn’t consider him for the new band because he had a band.’

  By 2003, The Project had leaked into the hive mind of social media and Guns N’ Roses fans were frothing at the mouth for a taste of that iconic Appetite-era sound, as Axl stood mired in the sludgy morass of writing Chinese Democracy. Slash announced that the band would release an album that year, yet while he boasted to Rolling Stone, ‘We got the baddest fucking be-all, endall rock’n’roll band’, he confessed that the sort of vocalist they vaguely had in mind continued to elude them. ‘There are no rock’n’roll singers out there right now … except Billy Idol.’

  In October, Slash sat in with LA’s rotating all-star cover band, Camp Freddy, featuring Matt Sorum and Dave Navarro. Skid Row’s Sebastian Bach joined in for ‘Time Warp’, from The Rocky Horror Picture Show, and ‘Paradise City’, also featuring Ronnie Wood. The club erupted and Slash began to wonder if the former Skid Row frontman might just be the guy The Project were looking for. Duff was less convinced. So Slash gave Bach five instrumental tracks, asking him to throw some vocals on top of them, but the collaboration ended there. Early in 2003, seeking to capitalise on the cheap appeal of reality television, VH1 sent over a film crew to capture the process of the band trying to find a singer, which they would later release as a documentary. Once again, for a group of musicians who had literally put their lives on the line to taste success to invite the distractions of a television crew, not to mention opening such a public window into band business, underscored how badly they lacked the internal force to push them ahead. If the guys grew frustrated with having nothing to show after a ten-month search, they missed the point; it wasn’t that the world lacked great vocalists, more that their selection process was bereft of real urgency. Accustomed to letting others pilot their ships, not one of them possessed the Jagger-like ambition to take control, to push others and to act decisively. Thrust into the roles of co-pilots, The Project were in danger of failing badly when Slash put in his call to Alan Niven. But Alan had other mountains to climb. He couldn’t afford to look back any more.

  Meanwhile, audition tapes and CDs arrived by the hundreds; try-out invitations were extended to a broad spectrum of vocalists, seemingly without regard to genre, range or style. They auditioned Neurotica’s Kelly Schaefer and Josh Todd, though neither slipped smoothly into the chemistry generated by the other four. They would also audition Steve Ludwin, of Carrie and Little Hell, and Travis Meeks, the frontman from Days of the New, whose business partner, Jonathan Hay, was only too happy to publicly comment on the audition. In one of the most comically absurd displays of putting the cart before the horse, Hay declared, ‘Slash, Izzy, Duff and Matt have all been working on new material that I have been blessed with the opportunity to hear and witness … This is the best rock music I have heard since Appetite for Destruction. Guns N’ Roses fans and Days of the New fans will not be disappointed. They will be ecstatic! The new material has that vintage GN’R feel that millions craved and loved in the late-Eighties and early-Nineties. I can honestly say that as a witness, this band is back and better then ever [sic]. Travis Meeks and the remaining members sound completely natural, comfortable, and astoundingly incredible. Travis, like Axl [Rose]
, is from Indiana. Both diverged from their original bands. This is a match made among the stars with a sound that is out of this world.’

  After such an appalling breach of band etiquette, nothing ever came of Meeks’s audition and his next brush with fame would be a tragic appearance on an addiction-centred American television show called Intervention, chronicling his grim spiral into meth addiction. He reportedly has since gotten clean.

  A Canadian bassist, Todd Kerns, would also audition for the role, offering a substantially more grounded take on the process. The tall, good-natured musician, whose collaboration with Slash would eventually come about a few years later, remarked, ‘I was sent three songs to work on. Every singer on the planet has been sent three songs to work on. I am to write lyrics and record vocals to three instrumental tracks that the guys recorded … Appetite for Destruction is still in my Top 3 greatest rock records of all time, so I do find the entire thing amusingly surreal.’ The band took a pass. Ian Astbury of The Cult, Mike Patton of Faith No More and Myles Kennedy of Alter Bridge would also receive invitations to audition, but each would decline. Kennedy, like Kerns, would eventually secure a spot in a future Slash project, but it too would be a few years down the road. By April, just as the audition process appeared hopelessly stalled, word arrived that Scott Weiland had just split from Stone Temple Pilots.