The New Velvets (Cale, Reed, Tucker, and Morrison eat your hearts out!)

"We’re like a bunch of fucking pirates out here," Matt Sorum says with a laugh when asked how his band’s - Velvet Revolver – tour has been going. "I haven’t shaved or showered in who knows how long, and I can’t remember the last time I changed my fucking clothes. But it’s all for a good cause.

Which is?

"Rock and roll, man," Sorum says excitedly, "rock and fucking roll."

It’s been a good year indeed for rock and roll Velvet Revolver style. The band’s debut album Contraband was critically well received and has spent its fair share atop the album charts while selling a couple of million units. It has also garnered the band a GrammyAward Nomination for Best Rock Album and an actual Grammy Award for Best Hard Rock Performance for the propulsive single "Slither" – new territory for the members of a band that some see as a crass money-grab super group.

"Guns’n’Roses" never won a fucking Grammy," Sorum says somewhat playfully. Sorum is the Use Your Illusion-era Guns’n’Roses drummer who along with fellow ex-Guns Duff McKagan and the inimitable Slash form two thirds of Velvet Revolver (ex-Suicidal Tendencies guitarist Dave Kushner and the doubly-inimitable Scott Weiland, formerly of Stone Temple Pilots, round out the Velvet roster).

"Yeah, a lot of people talked about this band like we had some sort of pretense when we formed it," Sorum says. "And there are those who want to paint us as some sort of retro/rehash deal. But to them I say "fuck you!"

"This band is something entirely new. It’s an original and forward thinking modern rock and roll band," explains Sorum. "Sure we all have a history with other bands, but when that time is over and you want to keep doing what it is that you do, you turn to those guys who you know. I knew Duff and Slash, of course. And when this entire thing got started it was because of Duff and Slash and myself being onstage together and feeling it, you know? I mean just feeling that energy was still there. And it felt fucking good, man."

But when a part of that history is something as large as Guns’n’Roses or as successful as Stone Temple Pilots, and your story is littered with all of the inglorious adjuncts of the rock and roll lifestyle (sex, drugs, rock’n’roll, etc.), and when you operate in the rather enormous (and annoying) shadow of one W. Axl Rose, rock and roll’s befuddling Howard Hughes, well then, people are bound to make comparisons and ask questions.

"We all knew that from the very beginning," Sorum says with a sigh. "Of course we did. And I am certainly not here to deny the past or to disparage Axl at all. Let’s face it, when Guns was at its peak it was one of the greatest rock bands of all time, and Axl was as great a rock and roll front man as there ever was. There is no doubt about that whatsoever. People loved Guns. Hell, people loved STP too."

So how does one break from the bonds of such a celebrated past? How do you resist the temptation to milk it for all it’s worth? What must happen that you find yourself at a point where you can finally let go of it all?

"It’s not easy," Sorum confesses. "And it was certainly tougher on Slash and Duff because they were there from the very beginning. The hope that Guns might be resurrected was always lingering in the back of our minds for quite some time, but then Axl took that band using the Guns name on MTV. I sat there and watched it and then picked up the phone and called Duff and said "Did you see that?" And he was like, "yeah, man." Then I called Slash and was like, "man, did you see that?" And he just said, "Yeah." And that was that. Axl doing that MTV gig was like this burden being lifted from our backs. It was over, and we all knew it."

But these five cats who formed Velvet Revolver also knew it was a chance to start all over – on many levels. The three from Guns’n’Roses could toss the last few shovels of dirt on a past that had haunted them like a repulsive step mother. Weiland could try and use Velvet Revolver as a demarcation line in his treacherous and very public battles with addiction. And Dave Kushner has perhaps finally found the rock and roll home he deserves (his career, a vagabonds stroll through nearly a half dozen bands and projects, has never allowed justice to be given his inarguable talents – he is the glue of Revolvers sound).

And while Velvet Revolver doesn’t shy away from the music of their past ("we play most all of our album, but yeah, we aren’t afraid to throw in a couple of Guns or Stone Temple songs, those songs are ours to. They’re part of our background," Sorum says.), the band looks very much to their future together.

"The road has truly made us a band now," Sorum says confidently. "We’re out here in the trenches, moving forward inch by inch, playing rock and roll they way we think…no, make that we know…we’re playing rock and roll the way we know it should be played."

back