The musician John O’Brien, who passed away in August, was best friends with Dave “Slash Couldn’t Even Spell My Damn Name Correctly in his Autobiography” Kushner. And so the guitarist — unsurprisingly, the only member of Velvet Revolver to drop off the face of the planet when the band went on hiatus four years ago — organized a reunion of his most famous project for a memorial concert in O’Brien’s honor, which will take place on January 12 at the House of Blues in Los Angeles.

Yes, that means that Scott Weiland is going to be performing with Velvet Revolver again.

And while the gig is currently scheduled to be a one-off affair, now Kushner tells Rolling Stone that Weiland could ultimately end up coming back to the fold for good:

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(Photo Credit: Jennifer Pottheiser for iHeartRadio)

I admit, I was skeptical about Scott Weiland’s decision to release an album of Christmas songs. I fucking hate Christmas songs. But you know what? He pulls it off.

Last night I had the opportunity to see Scott Weiland perform a private show in an intimate, 100-person setting with an 8-piece jazz band backing him up. Weiland came out wearing a white tux, his hair-slicked back all Bing Crosby-like, sobriety level dubious at best. The first three songs were all Christmas classics from his new album and he delivered them with startling sincerity and flair, his smooth baritone fitting the part perfectly. Then things got weird: an obscure STP song (“Wonderful” from 2001′s Shangri-La Dee Da) and a cringe-worthy cover of Velvet Revolver’s “Do It For the Kids,” followed by a convincing version of “Vaseline” that brought things back to reality and an impromptu jam to close the set. But you know what? He really seemed most at home, most comfortable, singing those Christmas songs.

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Even if I haven’t exactly been thrilled with Slash’s post-Guns N’ Roses output, I never thought his guitar playing got bad; listening to No More Tears over the weekend, I was struck (again) by the fact that Zakk Wylde’s playing has become a parody of itself, but Slash still seems to have an endless arsenal of killer guitar solos left in him. If the dude could just get Izzy Stradlin to write him some decent songs, I have little doubt that the man would be able to turn me back into a fanboy faster than you can say “Saul Hudson.”

Case in point: “Kick it Up a Notch,” a new song Slash has recorded with a couple of cartoon characters. And, no, I don’t mean Axl Rose and Scott Weiland.

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May 18, 2011 – The amount of emotional damage in the Gramercy Theatre last night could fill an orphanage, with large bespectacled women and bleached blonde cardboard cutouts hardly co-mingling with stumbling drug casualties, rock n roll wannabees with overzealous intoxicated girlfriends, and Brads-from-Accounting, along with a morose minority of pitiable sad sacks. Evidently, Scott Weiland’s fanbase is a lot less glamorous and enviable than rock and fashion magazines let on.

In town for a Howard Stern Show inteview and a Barnes & Noble book signing on the release date of his “as told to” memoir “Not Dead And Not For Sale,” the Stone Temple Pilots frontman had also scheduled a solo gig at this small-ish venue. Only the truly naive or ignorant came expecting a show packed with STP and Velvet Revolver jams, though given the aforementioned motley assortment of attendees that might have been a sizable demographic. What even the most sensible of us didn’t expect was the meandering shitshow that we were to wait more than two hours for.

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Here’s an interesting excerpt from a recent interview with Sammy Hagar that was conducted by Forbes, your leading source for rock and metal news:

“I was asked at one time to be in Mötley Crüe. I was asked at one time to be in Pantera by their mangers. I was asked to be in Velvet Revolver when Scott Weiland quit and went back to the Stone Temple Pilots. I was waiting to be asked to be in Led Zeppelin to say no, since they were the greatest band on earth and no could replace Robert Plant. I was asked to be in Aerosmith and I said no. Certain bands and certain front man singers are more difficult to replace than others. Steven Tyler and that band have stayed together for forty years and you don’t to walk into something like that. They had one moment years ago, when they replaced Joe Smith, but it’s still always been Steven at the front of Aerosmith. You don’t replace that. When I came into Van Halen, it was easy because Dave wasn’t a great singer, but he was a good front man. In those times, I was selling out the same arena’s they were so it was like the combination of two forces and it worked but it’s a rare thing. We were all lucky that the fans accepted it and it got bigger. I would avoid bands that are going to break up pretty soon.”

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Well, according The Haunted’s Facebook page, that is:

Obviously this just an April Fools’ joke… but I would actually be all-for Dolving stepping into Scott Weiland’s shoes. As The Haunted’s latest album, Unseen, proves, Dolving has a great voice for hard rock, and he’s actually got cred.

Alas, it will never happen… but a fella can dream, can’t he?

-AR

Thanks to Fantasyoosh for the tip!

Andy McCoy, one of the founding members of Hanoi Rocks, wrote a book. In 2008. [Our own Corey Mitchell reviewed it in 2010. - Ed.] I read it pretty recently as it came to me with a bunch of Christmas/Hannukah/New Year’s loot. My family doesn’t celebrate anything, so we basically give each other presents because the year is over. Yeah, I don’t know. We put up a tree, too.

Anyway, I kind of dropped the ball on Andy, and that’s kind of a recurring thing these days, because every once in a while I get caught up on that “having a life thing.” I did finally read it, though, and I quite enjoyed it. To an extent. Now, I love books. Reading = fun times for me. I usually have three or four books I’m juggling and one of them is almost always a music biography. But Sherriff McCoy; Outlaw Legend of Hanoi Rocks goes on the pile of band books that really could’ve used a good edit.

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Corey Taylor performing “It’s So Easy” with Slash in 2009. Could this be what Velvet Revolver sounds like in the not-too-distant future?

Corey Taylor must really, really hate having free time on his hands. He’s already the vocalist for Slipknot and Stone Sour, and he nearly joined Anthrax in 2007. Then, in 2009, he revealed that he’d “had a meeting” with Velvet Revolver about taking Scott Weiland’s spot in the band, but that it “it just didn’t work — for whatever reason.”

Now VR’s search for a new singer has been heating up, with drummer Matt Sorum going so far as to tell an interviewer that “The guy we’re liking now is a young guy” who is “known” (e.g., not a noob they picked up on Hollywood Boulevard) and whose background is in “a little bit heavier rock ‘n’ roll than we are.” Naturally, this led to lots and lots of speculation as to this mystery singer’s identity, and the combination of clues — that the vocalist was not unknown, that he was younger than Slash and company, and that he traditionally sang for a band or bands that were heavier than VR — caused some spectators, like our friends at Metal Insider, to ponder the possibility that Taylor might the man for the job after all.

Now the story has taken another interesting turn. Billboard has done a new profile on Taylor, which begins thusly:

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One of these men will not be on the new Kyuss album. Guess which one?

Kyuss Lives!, the ridiculously monikered Kyuss non-reunion which replaces Josh Homme with some dude no one has ever heard of, are apparently “thinking of doing another record,” according to this interview with vocalist John Garcia. I object to the use of the word “another” because in case these dudes haven’t noticed, they’ve never made a record before, but I’d like to think that the phrase “thinking of”* means “it’s not written in stone yet,” “there’s still time to stop the madness,” and “we said this to gauge the reaction of fans, possibly as represented by an incredibly smart, exceedingly handsome Jewish blogger from New York.”

So, assuming that Garcia was, indeed, trying to get a message to me to see what my thoughts were, I’d like to now respond by saying: I don’t think this is a good idea.

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Axl Rose celebrated the two-year anniversary of Chinese Democracy‘s release by doing what he does best — no, not make music, silly. He sued somebody! Hey, dude’s gotta eat, and Democracy sales ain’t exactly paying for his next rental car, y’know?

According to 1up.com:

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12 looped seconds of “Checkmate,” one of 70-something songs from the Chinese Democracy sessions that will probably never see the light of day.

A couple of weeks ago Eyal wrote a great installment of “Jumping Darkness Parade” in which he asserted that “the only thing you can trust is for a person to be who they are, not who they tell you they are.” Past behavior is always the best indicator of future behavior.

And the past behavior of Axl Rose tells us that if we ever get a follow-up to Chinese Democracy, it won’t be for a very, very long time. It was four years in-between the release of Appetite for Destruction and Use Your Illusion, nearly two of which were spent just recording the latter albums, and all signs point to Axl being the source of the long wait; then it was SEVENTEEN more years before the release of Democracy. Even if you consider that Axl and all the various incarnations of GN’R didn’t start working on that album until roughly 1995, and the that recording was allegedly (finally) completed circa 2006, that’s STILL eleven years. Based on this information, I have worked out a mathematical formula for how long it will take Axl to record each subsequent Guns N’ Roses album, which is as follows:

TIME IT TOOK TO RECORD THE LAST ALBUM + NINE ADDITIONAL YEARS = TIME IT WILL TAKE TO RECORD THE NEXT ALBUM

According to this precise formula, if Axl Rose’s Rock N’ Roll Circus enters the studio to make a follow-up to Chinese Democracy in 2011, then the album will be released in 2031. By that time, Axl will be almost 70 years old, Dj Ashba will be almost 60 years old, and Slash will theoretically be 66 but, let’s face it, will more likely be dead (or, at least, still searching for a suitable replacement to take Scott Weiland’s spot in Velvet Revolver). There probably won’t be a MetalSucks in 2031, there almost certainly won’t be a record industry, and there definitely won’t be a Best Buy for Axl to con into carrying a record he has no intention of properly promoting. And I can’t for the life of me figure out who would fund such an endeavor anyway.

And yet Dj Ashba has the audacity to “promise” fans that the next album “won’t take as long” to record and release:

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And so is anyone who thinks this dipshit is really sober.

Mr. Weiland’s latest stunt is a recent radio interview in which he is clearly so fucked up that I’m amazed he was even able to hold a phone. (Maybe his assistant was holding it for him, or affixed one of those nifty headsets to Weiland’s noggin.) At one point, the DJ asks Weiland why he missed a particular show; here’s a transcript of the exchange that follows:

WEILAND: Um… [long pause]… Let’s see… I think that was the show where, um… there was a, um…

DJ: [encouraging, as if to a small child] You can do it.

WEILAND: …a foot, um… long… um… uhh… like, it’s like… normally, a stage is just, like, a flat stage…

DJ: [irritated] Riiiight.

WEILAND:…and this was a really high stage…

DJ: Okay…

WEILAND: …and I spun around, did a little James Brown move, and I slipped and fell into it about eight feet.

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Speaking of Slash: Vince and I caught his solo tour last month, and, for me at least, the big surprise of the evening — besides Vince’s brilliant revelation that Slash should start transitioning from rock and metal into blues as he gets older — is that Myles Kennedy is actually pretty awesome. He’s got a terrific set of pipes and a really incredible amount of range, and he’s a great front man. I think I read somewhere that he turned down the chance to be the new singer for Velvet Revolver, which is a bummer, ’cause he’d clearly do a great job (to say nothing of the fact that he’d be able to help them play old GN’R tunes that require a higher vocal register than that of Mr. Scott Weiland, which is all I really care about at this point anyway).

So for now, we have to settle for Kennedy being the frontman for Creed without Wife Beater instead of Guns without Rose. And Alter Bridge’s latest, the cleverly titled AB III, is now streaming here.

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Remember when Scott Weiland’s drug use forced the ever-talented DeLeo brothers out of the spotlight during their prime years and they hired a guy that sounded just like Weiland to record under the moniker Talk Show? Me too. That was almost 14 (!!) years ago, and whilst going through my CD collection I took a little stroll down memory lane.

The whole Talk Show fiasco — which also included STP drummer Eric Kretz — happened a year after STP released Tiny Music… Song From the Vatican Gift Shop. If that album isn’t a favorite of yours (as it is mine, but, ya know, I get why if it’s not) it’s certainly the weirdest album of their catalogue… we can only speculate as to what would’ve happened if the DeLeos had been able to follow Tiny Music with another STP album right away instead of taking a break.

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Our friend Amy Sciarretto from Noisecreep reports that Birmingham City University (in England, not Alabama) is naming an award after everyone’s favorite heavy metal grandpa: the Ozzy Osbourne Development Award “will be bestowed upon the student that makes the most significant progress on their degree in the Media and Communication/Music Industry degree.” I assume that the Osbourne family donated a nice chunk of change to get the award named after him, but this doesn’t really make that much sense to me. For one thing, I don’t know if Ozzy has really shown any musical development in, oh, the last hundred years or so, and as much as I admire a lot of his past work, you’ll never convince me that the bulk of the credit doesn’t lie with his collaborators – especially given that the dude doesn’t actually play an instrument. And beyond that, fuck has Ozzy got to do with media and communication? If we’re talking about his work with various reality shows and what have you, well, then, shouldn’t the award be named after Sharon, since we have her to thank for Ozzy’s wonderful non-music endeavors.

But whatever. This piece of news got me thinking: what other awards could we name after heavy metal musicians? And so, after the jump, my suggestions for new university kudos monikered in honor of various other members of the heavy metal community.

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I don’t think anybody with half a brain really ever believed that Scott Weiland was still sober. Sober people can take their coats off like a big boy, and Scott Weiland cannot. And sober people generally don’t fall off the stage and forget the words to, ironically, a song called “Dead and Bloated,” as their band mates exit the show “in apparent embarrassment and disgust.”

But that hasn’t stopped Scott Weiland from swearing up and down that he’s clean, and even writing a song about it.

So he probably feels at least a little embarrassed that STP bassist Robert DeLeo has now publicly admitted that Weiland is now “popping pills.”

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Past behavior is always the best indicator of future behavior. Which isn’t to say that people can’t change; they just usually don’t change, because, well, changing means taking a good, hard look in the mirror, admitting your faults to yourself, and then working on those faults. And most people just don’t wanna do that, ’cause, y’know. Even if the end result is good, the process kinda sucks.

Which is why I will never, ever again pay to see Stone Temple Pilots or any band featuring Scott Weiland, and why, even if I was offered a free ticket, I’d have to think long and hard about whether or not it was worth the schlep. Because watching that strung-out, off-key motherfucker try to take his coat off for five minutes is all the “performance art” I’ll never need this lifetime, thank you very much.

But Vince is a much bigger STP fan than I ever was, and I believe him that the band put on a killer show at SXSW a couple of weeks ago, and that Weiland “appeared sober.”

But I’m not convinced that Weiland actually is sober.

See, Blabbermouth had two interesting stories about Mr. Weiland over the weekend. In the first, he fell off the stage in Sioux City, Iowa:

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Some Stone Temple Pilots fansite has eighteen seconds of that band’s new single, “Between the Lines,” and what immediately jumped out at me about the clip – besides the fact that I can already tell Vince and I are not agree on whether or not this song blows – is that Scott Weiland sings the line “…when we used to take drugs.” That made me wonder if the titular lines aren’t just subtext (as is usually the case with the expression “read between the lines”) but lines of cocaine, but mostly it made me wonder why the hell Scott Weiland is still trying to convince people that he doesn’t take drugs anymore.

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I love Blabbermouth cuz it rules and it’s easier than actually going through my inbox and the bajillion press releases therein. Not only is it informative, but my stars, the entertainment value as well! Taunting sub-retards in the comments section is a Wednesday well-spent. Or if you’re the studious type, try to count how many headlines contain the words “Mustaine” and “forgive” and “David Ellefson.” Oh speaking of headlines, I think we all have played “The Blabbermouth Headline Game,” where you cycle through that little teaser box and marvel at its hilarious delusional bullshit. Let’s see, there’s usually a “Fanless Band Schedules Reunion Show” and a “Win Passes To Guns N’ Roses Guitarist Book Signing.” Those are beauties.

Then you’ve got the deceptively funny stuff, like“Band Wants to ‘Return To Our Roots’ On Sophomore Album“ or “MACHINEHEAD Frontman: ‘Our New Record Is Literally Gonna Rip Your Head Off and Shit In Your Mouth’.”

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All this talk about Slash’s upcoming solo album has got me playing “Fantasy Velvet Revolver” in my head once again. Though I still hold out hope that Axl’s idea of having Perry Farrell front the band comes to fruition, I know in my heart that there’s probably a better chance of Scott Weiland rejoining the band, which is admittedly a pretty remote possibility. Remote like Siberia.

So looking through the list of vocalists purportedly gracing the axeman’s new record, I see a number of qualified albeit unlikely candidates to fill Weiland’s still-vacant spot. Yeah, it would be a heavy music lover’s dream to have Ozzy Osbourne sing for the band, considering the craptastic nature of his last few solo albums. Realistically, that would be an unholy managerial nightmare with the potential capacity to yield a catastrophic clusterfuck to put the legal woes of Black Sabbath and Guns N’ Roses to shame. Dave Grohl’s too busy counting his money and playing geriatric rock with his idols to commit to yet another band. These days, Alice Cooper and Lemmy Kilmister have the commercial drawing power of, well, Alice Cooper and Lemmy Kilmister, and maybe would shift a few more units than a Velvet Revolver fronted by an unknown (anyone remember Eric Dover or Rod Jackson?) or that dude from Spacehog. Don’t even get me started on Fergie.

One other name on that list, however, actually makes sense…

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