by Mick Wall
Behind the strength of chart-smashing hits like ‘Set Me Free’ and ‘Slither’, and power ballads like ‘Fall to Pieces’ and ‘Loving the Alien’, Contraband would sell over a quarter of a million copies in its first week, making it the fastest-selling debut album by a rock act in US chart history. Their debut would generate two supporting tours, stretched out over nearly two years, and land them a Grammy award for ‘Slither’ (Best Hard Rock Performance) and two additional nominations – ‘Fall to Pieces’ (Best Rock Song) and Contraband (Best Album). To date, Velvet Revolver’s debut has sold over four million copies worldwide. Interviewed retrospectively in the Mail on Sunday, Slash pointed out how ‘At first everyone thought we were just doing it for a quick cheque. But, trust me, getting this band off the ground required ultimate sacrifice and commitment. We toured Contraband for nineteen months, playing five shows a week in every country we could get into. It was never for the money. I can’t even say it was for the girls. Really, it was a music thing.’ In the same interview, Duff added, ‘Money’s never dictated me. I came up at the time of punk. People like Iggy and The Stooges were my heroes. They were never about the money. They never sat down and said, “Hey, let’s be rock stars”, they were just like, “Fuck you”, and that’s always stayed with me. When the three of us, me, Slash and Matt, played the benefit gig for Randy Castillo, it was the first time we’d played together for maybe eight years. And it just felt right.’
In the press junkets, the band fielded the same tired questions about working with a singer prone to such exceedingly public and outrageous behaviour. ‘I’m just not that judgemental,’ said Slash. ‘Look, I’m one of the biggest fuck-ups I ever met. So all things considered, how am I going to pass judgement on this guy? I don’t know one brilliantly talented individual in this business that doesn’t have a burial ground worth of skeletons in their closet. It was a given that Scott had this baggage that he’d been dealing with for years. He said he wanted to get clean and we could all relate. So we rallied for him. We had to jump a lot of hurdles, but it was worth it. Scott’s got a great rock’n’roll voice and charisma. Had we not taken those chances, we wouldn’t have the band we do.’ As Velvet Revolver lined up their touring commitments for the summer of 2004 amid a wildly successful radio launch, they received an intriguing offer. ‘We were offered a gig in Lisbon, Portugal, opening for Guns N’ Roses,’ Slash revealed. ‘The new Guns N’ Roses, whatever that consists of, but we actually said okay. We’d love to be there. It’d be very exciting. I think it would be quite a spectacle.’ However, the gig never materialised. Guns N’ Roses wouldn’t return to Portugal until the Rock in Rio Lisbon festival in 2006, when they were supported by The Darkness. Meanwhile, after finishing the ‘Fall to Pieces’ video in July, the band recorded cover versions of Cheap Trick’s ‘Surrender’, Aerosmith’s ‘No More, No More’ and Queen’s ‘Tie Your Mother Down’ to use as B-sides in subsequent releases.
The Velvet Revolver world tour began with 24 dates in America, playing the sorts of venues Guns N’ Roses had made their bones in nearly 20 years before, theatres and ballrooms, clubs and big halls. Contraband may have been Number 1 but the band were determined to start at the bottom and work their way up, building a solid fan base that reached beyond diehard Guns and Pilot fans, into a people-stratosphere all their own. They followed that with 22 shows around 15 countries in Europe. Headlining at the Hammersmith Apollo in London, the scene of GN’R’s early triumph 17 years before, they put on the most genuinely thrilling rock show seen there in many years. Led Zeppelin’s Jimmy Page was there, turning to his friend, the photographer Ross Halfin, as they left the building and exclaiming, ‘Now that’s what I call rock’n’roll!’
They carried on in this fashion for the next 12 months, selling out rammed theatres and auditoriums, and becoming the big draw on the 2005 Ozzfest summer tour. With two big hit singles to their name in ‘Slither’ and ‘Fall to Pieces’, the band had been eager to make the fourth and final single from Contraband. RCA had other ideas, though, and instead released ‘Dirty Little Thing’, which presented an issue with the next video, as they had already fleshed out a concept for ‘Sucker Train Blues’ – a part-animation performance piece that takes place on a speeding train, crowded with dancing, under-clad women. The band was bummed at the thought of ditching the idea. Then Scott said, ‘Hey, why don’t we use the same treatment, just use a different song?’ The result made it hard to tell the difference, but the single was not a hit.
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On tour in June 2005, Scott Weiland caused a minor stir in Germany, where the media accused him of wearing Nazi regalia on stage, an illegal act in Germany. Vigorously denying any Nazi sympathies, Weiland responded to the allegations by saying, ‘The Nazi SS hat that I wear in fact symbolises the loss of democracy and the shift to totalitarianism. One could make an argument that indeed the Government of the US is evolving into, or is already, a fascist police state, hiding under the guise of a republic.’ While nobody who knew him would ever mistake Weiland for a Nazi sympathiser, his explanation hung heavy from the weight of the sort of lazily contrived anti-authoritarianism one would expect to hear at a teenage punk show.
The RIAA certified Contraband as double-platinum in July, with the band latching on to the Ozzfest tour for August and September. Celebrations were soon quietened when Matt broke his hand in a water-skiing accident in August. He posted the following statement to fans: ‘Just wanted to say to all the fans that came to see Velvet Revolver on the last leg of the tour, including Ozzfest, how sorry I am that I couldn’t make it. It was very hard for me to sit on the sidelines while my band went out on the road without me. But it’s what they had to do and with my blessing. It was just a week before the tour when I went to my Mom’s house on Lake Havasu near the Colorado River. I was water skiing when I had a freak fall on the water skies by getting tangled in the ski rope and being dragged.’ The band brought in a former Ozzy Osbourne drummer, Brian Tichy, to handle Matt’s commitments until he himself had to leave for a tour with Billy Idol. The band then hired Mark Schulman, formerly the drummer with Simple Minds, for the remainder of their Ozzfest tour.
August would also prove contentious for other reasons. Later that month, Slash and Duff filed a suit against Axl in the federal court, alleging that Axl had changed the publisher of GN’R’s copyrighted songs and kept the royalties for himself. Earlier in the year, Axl had negotiated a multi-million-dollar deal with the Sanctuary Group – Axl’s new management, following the departure of Doug Goldstein – for the rights to GN’R’s back catalogue. Although this deal was reported by the press, Slash and Duff claimed that they had not been clued in to the details and argued that Axl had ‘omitted and concealed’ the scope of his dealings. It was their position that they weren’t aware of the scope of the deal until their royalty cheques stopped arriving. The lawsuit read: ‘Suffering an apparent attack of arrogance and ego … Rose recently decided that he is no longer willing to acknowledge the contributions of his former partners and band-mates in having created some of rock’s greatest hits.’ Duff’s lawyer, Glen Miskel, explained, ‘When the ASCAP cheque didn’t come, we called and they looked into it. We didn’t know all the facts at first.’
Yet while aggressively confronting Axl in the courts, in public, Slash still wore his chill, confrontation-avoiding persona. In February 2006, Slash said that he’d ‘always been supportive’ of his old singer and that he was as excited as anybody for the release of Chinese Democracy. If Slash offered such comments as something of an olive branch, Axl wasn’t having it. A month later, Axl filed a countersuit against Slash and Duff to clarify the property rights surrounding the copyrighted material in the GN’R back catalogue. Sanctuary issued an utterly scathing statement that branded Slash as ‘a consummate press, photo and media opportunist and manipulator’ who ‘has attacked Axl Rose on a number of levels’. The statement additionally alleged that ‘Slash has continually made negative and malicious statements about Axl [in the press] in order
to garner publicity for himself’, further accusing Duff and Slash of making ‘numerous false allegations about Axl … [and that] Mr Rose believes that once apprised of the true facts, the judge or jury deciding these lawsuits will rule in Axl’s favour on every issue before them’. The statement went on to allege that Slash and Duff’s lawsuit ‘attacks [Axl’s] integrity as Slash and Duff, in a vindictive attempt to aggrandise their own stature, rewrite history through false statements, which have been repeated by the media. Their attacks on Axl stand in sharp contrast to Rose’s conduct. Axl has at all times worked diligently to maintain the artistic integrity of the band by choosing with great care which properties to license Guns N’ Roses songs to.’
In true scorched-earth fashion, the statement went on to claim that Slash had turned up at Axl’s house in October to offer a truce. According to Sanctuary’s statement, ‘Slash came to inform Axl that “Duff was spineless”, “Scott [Weiland] was a fraud”, that he “hates Matt Sorum” and that in this on-going war, contest or whatever anyone wants to call it that Slash has waged against Axl for the better part of 20 years, that Axl has proven himself “the stronger”. Axl regrets having to spend time and energy on these distractions, but he has a responsibility to protect the Guns N’ Roses legacy and expose the truth,’ the statement continued. ‘Axl believes he has been left with no alternative but to respond to these lawsuits. It would have been Axl’s preference to resolve disputes with Slash and Duff in private. The courthouse is not his choice of forum. However, Axl could no longer sit quietly and allow the continuing dissemination of falsehoods and half-truths by his former band-mates.’
Never one to knowingly walk away from a fight, Weiland weighed in with an open letter to Axl that read: ‘Get in the ring. Go to the gym, motherfucker, or if you prefer, get a new wig, motherfucker. I think I’ll resist the urge to “stoop” to your level. Oh shit, here it comes, you fat, Botox-faced, wig-wearing fuck! Okay, I feel better now.’ Then he continued: ‘Don’t think for a second we don’t know where those words came from. Your unoriginal, uncreative little mind – the same mind that had to rely on its band-mates to write melodies and lyrics. Who’s the fraud now, bitch? Damn, I couldn’t imagine people writing for me. How many albums have you put out, man, and how long did it take the current configuration of this so-called “band” to make this album? How long? And without the only guys that validated the name.
‘How dare you! Shame on you! How dare you call our bass player “spineless”? We toured our album over a year and a half. How many shows have you played over the last ten years? Oh, that’s right – you bailed out on your long-awaited comeback tour, leaving your remaining fans feeling, shall we say, a trifle miffed?! I won’t even list what I’ve accomplished because I don’t need to. What we’re talking about here is a frightened little man who once thought he was king, but unfortunately this king without his court is nothing but a memory of the asshole he once was.’
Many months later, Beta Lebeis told the official GN’R website the following: ‘I was the one whom Slash spoke with when he came to Axl’s house in [October] 2005 and expressed his negative comments regarding the others in his new band.’ She went on: ‘Behind the scenes it is a very different story than what the public is told.’ Forced to respond, Slash now admitted in an interview with New Jersey’s Home News Tribune that, yes, he had visited Axl’s home in an effort to call a truce. ‘I actually did go to Axl’s house at one point, but I never saw him. I never talked to him. I left a note with his person over there having to do with the lawsuit that we were in. I don’t know how it got turned into what it got turned into.’
April 2006 found the members of Velvet Revolver returning to Earth long enough to consider producers for their second album, bringing in both pop and hip hop maestros Pharrell Williams and Lenny Kravitz. Duff said, ‘I’ve always been a huge fan of early Motown and soul and Prince, so to explore something like that with Pharrell would be amazing. There’s nothing like that out there. It’s uncharted territory. Dude, it’s going to be way cool. It’s going to be stinky. Pharrell’s a genius.’ There was also talk, however, of working with Rick Rubin, even of making the second album a concept album. In November, however, Velvet Revolver turned to the Midas touch of the Stone Temple Pilots’ former producer Brendan O’Brien. ‘We were really excited about six months ago, when we first began writing,’ Weiland explained. ‘Then we really kind of flat-lined for a while, We didn’t know which way we were going. Once Brendan came on board, it was kind of like a shot in the arm. It was a new energy.’
Serious work on the album, now titled Libertad – Spanish for ‘freedom’ – began in December. According to Weiland, he hadn’t been ‘this excited about a rock record since 1993, when I went into the studio to record [STP’s] Purple’, hailing Libertad as ‘a really inspired rock and roll album, but it’s got many textures. It’s multi-dimensional, which I think is one thing Brendan brings out in artists. I mean, [Slash, Dave, Duff and Matt] are amazing players, and they’re capable of anything. They’ve reached completely new heights, and pulled something out of themselves. Instead of doing what’s completely comfortable, what they’ve done before, they have gone to new places, emotionally, musically and spiritually.’
If publicly the musicians appeared inspired and energised, privately they had begun to fall apart, one man at a time. ‘I was clean and sober for two years and then I started drinking,’ Wei-land later confessed, ‘and that all seemed cool for about a year, but then it started escalating. During that time is when the guys started falling off the wagon. Matt relapsed and went into treatment, then Duff relapsed and went into treatment, and then Slash had his situation. So everybody in the band ended up falling off, except for Dave, of course. At that time I was maintaining my problem in a sane way and I really didn’t fall off intensely until my brother died.’ Indeed, while it had seemed like they had found new designs for living that insulated them from the cravings and emotional obsession over drinking and using, the success of Contraband had pushed them back over the edge. ‘I definitely went way down the fucking drain for a minute there after the Contraband record came out and we went on tour for two years,’ said Slash. ‘I started drinking heavily and revisited my opiate passion.’
Though Dave Kushner had been sober the longest of anyone in the group, Duff had always appeared to have transcended his alcoholism in the most inspirational sense, replacing drinking and self-destruction with a robust exercise and academic rigour. As the realities of success and touring began piling up, however, even the stolid bassist caved in. While touring, Duff said, he let the stress of trying to be the band’s decision-maker get to him. ‘I’ve had panic attacks since I was seventeen,’ he told his hometown newspaper, the Seattle Times, ‘so I keep a pack of Xanax on me, for stress. But I’m a drug addict and an alcoholic. A guy like me can’t take anything for stress. I got myself caught up in a nice habit for two weeks. Luckily, I had my kids and my wife; I didn’t let myself go too far. But I didn’t see that stuff coming. I’ve learned relapsing is part of recovery. I did twenty of those [Xanax] pills a day, and I’m thinking, “Hey, I’m not doing blow, I’m not drinking, I’m not doing heroin or Vicodin …”’
As 2007 unfolded, Weiland’s situation grew progressively darker. He split with his second wife, Mary Fosberg, his mother was diagnosed with cancer and his younger brother, Michael, died of an overdose. Michael’s death would cripple the singer, who was called to identify the body of the man he considered ‘the best friend I ever had’. Publicly he admitted to a brief slip-up, stating, ‘I had a setback after Michael, I had a coke binge, but then I put myself back in rehab.’ But comments from Slash and later interviews with Weiland suggested that the wounds ran far deeper. ‘I was suicidal,’ he told the Mail in 2008. ‘I wanted to kill myself. My wife kicked me out. I’d barely seen my two kids. I’d missed birthdays, Christmas, Easter. I wanted to stop, I just couldn’t. I’d go into detox, clean up and go fix again as soon as I got out. It was just horrible.’
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A few days after Michael Weiland’s fatal overdose, Daniel Sorum, Matt’s 11-year-old brother, passed away from brain-stem cancer. A day after the funeral in Minnesota, Matt had to fly back to meet the rest of the band to play a pair of Van Halen songs at their Rock and Roll Hall of Fame induction ceremony in New York City. They played a song by each of the two Van Halen singers – ‘Ain’t Talkin’ ’bout Love’ from the David Lee Roth era and ‘Runaround’ from the Sammy Hagar era. The event was not without drama. According to Weiland, Roth had wanted to sing ‘Jump’, one of Van Halen’s biggest hits. But the band demurred. ‘We felt from an artistic standpoint, and I’m being totally honest with you, that it wasn’t a song we felt comfortable with. We don’t have keyboards. To bring a keyboard on stage wouldn’t work for us. We said we’d do “Jamie’s Cryin’” or “You Really Got Me”, and he was adamant that wasn’t okay.’
The tension backstage was not helped by the personal crisis everyone in Velvet Revolver except Dave Kushner was now embroiled in. While Duff, Matt and Slash would all straighten out sooner rather than later, Weiland continued his terrifying slide backward. Slash reflected: ‘We all eventually came out of it and made the Libertad record, which I thought, musically, was a good record, but we lost Scott and we never regained that. I thought the overall spirit of everything was declining at that point …’
On Thursday, 3 May 2007, Velvet Revolver played a show at the Avalon, a small club at the top end of Sunset Strip, in the promotional run-up to the release of Libertad. It was a tribute show, for the benefit of Michael Weiland’s family, and Scott spoke of the passing of both his brother and Matt’s brother, saying, ‘It literally crushed us. It made this record happen for both of us.’ He turned his back to the crowd, and the band launched into Pink Floyd’s ‘Wish You Were Here’, with Matt singing harmony and a video screen above showing montages of Michael, his wife and his two daughters. The band debuted a number of tracks from Libertad, including ‘She Builds Quick Machines’, ‘The Last Fight’ and ‘Get Out the Door’, all of which would later be released as singles, plus another new song, ‘Just Sixteen’. Everybody said how great the gig was. How special the band was. But everyone in Velvet Revolver already sensed the band had turned a corner – and suddenly found themselves lost.
