Revolver Loaded

It's after midnight. The inky hills of the Midwest roll by us as the tour bus speeds down the interstate. Weiland talks about other things, like growing up in suburban Ohio, when a snow day meant an all-day session of Dungeons and Dragons. He slowly relaxes, and even laughs. No matter what we talk about, though, he keeps bringing the conversation back to addiction and its consequences, and his shoulders keep hunching up with tension.

Weiland's wife, Mary, kicked him out and filed for divorce, telling him that if he got clean, maybe she'd take him back. (They reconciled before the divorce was finalized.) "She sat on my chest and said, 'I don't need a fucking kid, I need a fucking man.' To get her back, I had to figure out how selfish I was. I'm not an asshole — I'm a good guy most of the time - but I was this completely selfish person." Weiland's brand of selfishness was the sort where he seriously considered suicide.

The Velvet song "Slither" describes those self-destructive urges. Weiland was caught in a tape loop of addiction, and suicide felt like the only way he'd be able to stop. Then he realized he couldn't kill himself because of how it would affect his children, which made him even more miserable; he didn't seem to have any options at all. "Eventually God intervened," he says. "In the shape of a black-and-white car."

Against their better judgment, Velvet Revolver are doing a "meet and greet" in Chicago. This means they sit behind a table in the Riviera Theater's basement, signing autographs for radio-station employees, record-company reps and three Chicago Bears. Sorum, as usual, is the most jovial. Slash, sweet but shy, clearly would rather be playing guitar — he always worries before a show that he'll forget how.

Handed a Velvet Revolver photo to sign, Weiland starts doodling on his own face, using a Sharpie to give himself a big mop of black curly hair. He shows off his handiwork, saying, "It's kind of weird, Slash, how you and I have the same hair."

Contraband has some excellent songs, especially the confessional power ballads "Fall to Pieces" and "Loving the Alien," but too many fast-and-sludgy songs that blur together. But onstage the music has an extra sheen of sweat. The group plays most of Contraband, plus two STP songs and three G n' R songs, including "Mr. Brownstone" and "It's So Easy" (selected not because of their druggy lyrics but because Weiland could handle those parts of Rose's vocal range). They even cover Nirvana's "Negative Creep" — although Kurt Cobain couldn't stand G n' R, and the very notion might have given him a stomachache.

After the show, Sorum, Kushner and McKagan go out to the empty theater to meet some fans who have lingered. One of them knew McKagan years ago, and she tells him a story about hanging out a decade earlier, when he was dating her friend Bobbi, who's currently dating Def Leppard's Joe Elliott. McKagan had fallen and fractured his ankle. As he was being wheeled into the hospital, McKagan threw money at the group, shouting, "Go buy a twelve-pack!"

McKagan listens in blank amazement; he doesn't remember it at all. So much of his life then was spent in an alcoholic blackout, he doesn't even remember marrying his first wife. "I was dating Bobbi?" he says finally. For Velvet Revolver, life as sober adults has many surprises, not least how their drunken reputations have lasted longer than their hangovers.

Sorum, as usual, doesn't worry about it. "If people have a problem with us not snorting coke and drinking Jack Daniel's? Fuck 'em. They ain't snorted half of Colombia, like I have."

[From Issue 952/953 — July 8, 2004]