It's So Easy - Duff Mckagan [129]
Ah, yes. This was going to be easy, right? We could find a singer at the drop of a hat. Just put out an ad and have singers send tapes to a PO box. Shouldn’t take more than a couple months. Wrong. Oh, so wrong. As the months passed, we received hundreds of tapes and CDs from all over the world. We brought a few people in to audition live and a few were pretty interesting, but nobody quite fit.
We were writing a ton of songs, however, and that kept us going. We were also still hashing out our sound. Of course, we weren’t seeking to completely reinvent ourselves as current or hip. But for my part, I hadn’t been living in a musical vacuum. Playing with a bunch of different artists up in Seattle and forming Loaded had kept me in a good place as far as songwriting and seeing new bands. In fact, I seemed to be finding my way again as a player and songwriter, and it felt really, really good to continue doing so together with my old bandmates. We all brought good stuff to the table, and it showed.
I had known Scott Weiland for a while—Susan had introduced me to him and his wife, Mary, who was a friend of hers. 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 in common to talk about. But I didn’t consider him for the new band because he had a band.
As 2002 turned into 2003 and we neared the one-thousandth demo tape of our search for a singer, a state of desperation nearly took hold. The project had gone from something none of us had even thought about to something we all really wanted to continue. But shit, were we ever going to find a damn singer?
Then one day I got a call from one of our managers.
“I just heard that Stone Temple Pilots broke up,” he said. “You should call Scott.”
I was reluctant at first because Scott and I were friends in a completely different context and I wasn’t sure I wanted to cross that bridge. Besides, he still went through periods of pretty serious drug use and I hadn’t spent big chunks of time with anyone in full-habit mode for about eight years. Still, I did have a lot of sober time under my belt and no harm could come from just asking Scott if he would be interested.
I called him.
He was into it.
Here we go.
CHAPTER FIFTY-SIX
Scott came to our rehearsal studio and absolutely nailed it. He was head and shoulders above anybody else we had seen or heard. And he could hold his own on a stage with the big personalities in this band.
It was the first time that I had ever been in a situation where the band said, “Okay, we have all of this material—now go write your vocal parts.” But Scott had a great ability to listen to something and concurrently hear a different arrangement of it in his head. He took demos we had recorded of “Fall to Pieces,” “Set Me Free,” and “Big Machine” and went into his studio in Burbank. He sang over the first two. Then, with “Big Machine,” he twisted our arrangement into something he could really sink his teeth into and leave his mark on. He sort of turned the song upside down. It was clever. And it instilled confidence in us about Scott’s ability, despite his being strung out on opiates and various other supporting drugs.
A movie producer who had heard rumors about the band approached us about using “Set Me Free” as the end-title song in Ang Lee’s upcoming version of The Hulk, coming out in late June 2003. The deal gave us some breathing room. Everyone had some scratch, and we recouped some of the costs of our rehearsal space.
Things were really clicking. We settled on the name Velvet Revolver for the band. Matt and I were getting really tight as a rhythm section.