0.15.2 - Then in June reformed without me, but they've got a different name
However, having just finished my full R.E.M. discography write up, I didn't immediately have a new topic to jump to, and I needed something that was relatively small scale and self contained so I could get it done by Friday morning, and still leave myself some time for some drum practice before Catherine arrives back from her almost two week vacation and I have to pick her up (I don't hit my drums before 10am out of courtesy to the neighbours, who I am sure curse my name every time I start up regardless of what time it is). I thought about doing something to do with houses and cleaning (but that way Madness lies, and no-one wants that); I thought about picking some albums with 'heat' themes since our central heating boiler broke down on Wednesday and I am waiting for a repairman to arrive today so we can do things like "wash dishes in hot water" and "run a bath" and "have working radiators" again. The fact that I've been sleeping with a hot water bottle in the bed with me at the start of April is testament to how unseasonably chilly some of the past few days have been, and also how much I take for granted having a warm house.
So, without immediate inspiration, I was spinning my wheels on the internet looking for something when I discovered, almost incidentally to something else I was looking at, that the late Chester Bennington of Linkin Park replaced, for a brief time, lead singer Scott Weiland in Stone Temple Pilots; Sadly, that incarnation of STP never released a full album (only an EP, and those don't count), so I couldn't listen to that, but it did lead to too a couple of groups with helpfully small discographies (for the purposes of keeping this exercise to a reasonable size who had to answer the question - what do you do when your lead singer leaves or fires the band?
If you're a sports team, and your Quarterback disappears off into retirement, or your star Running Back decides he's going to try playing baseball for a season, that's a bummer, but it's not an insoluble problem - there's an established market of free agent players out there ready to slide into that role, learn the playbook, practice with the team, and head on out for a new season. But the way someone throws a ball, and the style and delivery of a vocal performance, the energy and lyricism of a band is often intimately tied to the presence of their lead vocalist. So when your band's vocal identity quits, what happens to your career, and the music you made together? Is that just done now? It's not like there's a free agent market for singers....is there?
I've got a huge amount of time and respect for Zack de la Rocha; there's a short list of people who are unwavering in their advocacy for social justice in both their performance and actions, and he is definitely on it. But there's an obvious, inevitable tension between being a singer in a rock band, with record labels and tours and obligations, and being a vocal advocate against the things they represent. So when conflicts arose between him, the band, and their record label about their album Renegades, Zack split, leaving a band in place with a void where their singer used to be. With the rest of Rage wanting to continue playing together, legendary rock producer Rick Rubin told them to do two things - first, go to group therapy, two, call Chris Cornell.
Soundgarden had broken up in the late 90s and Chris Cornell had started producing solo material (including a song on the frankly slightly insane Mission Impossible II soundtrack). Rage-minus-Zack and Chris-minus-Soundgarden were two puzzle pieces that found a way to fit together, without really sounding like either previous band. So Audioslave were born. They could maybe have spent more time coming up with a better band name, but naming things is hard and really in this case, didn't matter too much - people who knew either or both bands were going to check them out regardless of how much their band name sounded like an edgy AIM screen name.
I have vivid memories of sitting in the back room of D's parents house with MTV on in the background when they played 'Cochise' for the first time. As a statement of intent for a band emerging from the wreckage of two breakups to form something different, but still familiar, it was flawless in its execution. The video is pure promotion; I like to think that this was how the initial meeting between them went - Rick Rubin just telling the members of Rage "Hey, Chris Cornell is at the top of this giant scaffold with some instruments; we have fireworks planned. Go play something."
What I find interesting about Audioslave is the ways in which the parts fuse together; Replacing Zack's rap cadence and ferocity changes the tone of the band's playing and performance; absent the prog stylings and thematic shifting of Soundgarden's performance, Chris Cornell's vocals gravitate to a kind of 'Classic Rock' style which bands like Queens of the Stone Age and Foo Fighters would also carry the torch for in the face of the rise of Nu Metal. Audioslave is a great rock album; I've said many times that Chris Cornell is probably first amongst the list of male vocalists I wish I could sing like - there's a timbre in his vocals that just does something to my brain that I can't really put into words. Whenever I get a chance, there are songs off this album which are karaoke favourites for me - I mentioned last week about singing Like A Stone on a date with Catherine; I Am The Highway is another song I love to try and sing along to, and I learned the guitar part to as well back in the day (I'm not sure I'd get anywhere close to playing it now without some serious practice though).
When they released Out Of Exile and toured the UK on the back of it, I was there, in Manchester Arena to see them perform. While I didn't have to, I would have moved heaven and earth to see this show, just because I'd never seen either Rage or Soundgarden live, something that continues to haunt me, and this show was the closest I would ever get (in later performances than this one, they would include Rage and Soundgarden songs in the set lists - but no, I was denied any chance to see Black Hole Sun or Killing In The Name performed live). It's also where I started to wonder how much momentum this project had; there are a bunch of tracks on the album that I like (The Worm, Yesterday to Tomorrow, No 1 Zero) but there's a degree of reversion to type present here - instead of the unified whole produced by the first album, there's a number of songs which sound like Rage (Man or Animal, Drown Me Slowly) and songs which sound like Soundgarden (the ones above) mixed in with some classic rock balladeering which lacks some of the punch of the previous album. It's like a studio exec told them "Like A Stone was a hit, try and write that again a few times on this album would you?".
By the time Revelations came out, it was clear that somehow they'd run out of road. Maybe it was Chris Cornell dealing with some of his personal demons, maybe they just collectively couldn't find the spark of excitement which had propelled them forwards in 2002. Revelations isn't a terrible album by any means, and there are songs on there I still enjoy (particularly Nothing Left To Say But Goodbye which, but for a single positional difference in the track listing, would have been a fitting self-penned epitaph for the band itself), but I'm pretty sure there is no-one on Earth for whom this is their favourite album. So it worked for a time, this attempt to graft two bands together, and when it worked, it produced some of my favourite rock songs, but nothing gold can stay, and after 2008 the members drifted apart, with reunions of Soundgarden and Rage Against The Machine in their future.
From one troubled lead singer who I wish I could sing like, to another.
The running joke amongst my friend group in the late 90's was that the reason Stone Temple Pilots albums were so sporadic, and they never toured, was that they had to fit in recording sessions in between lead singer Scott Weiland's court-mandated trips to rehab. Addiction is a disease, one which Scott had very little control over, and it's one of the biggest regrets of my live music experience that I never even had the opportunity to see him life before it eventually cost him his life in 2015.
When your lead singer lives in thrall to his substance abuse addiction, that's going to be an inevitable cause of tension in a band trying to do things like write songs, produce albums, go on tour, and do interviews. Eventually, the DeLeo brothers, musical force behind Stone Temple Pilots, had run out of patience with their often-absent frontman, and fired him from the band.
Meanwhile, in a different room, Guns N' Roses frontman Axl Rose, another figure it might be charitable to say was challenging to work with, was in the process of gradually firing the majority of his band - Slash, Duff McKagan and Matt Sorum. No longer Guns N' Roses but still wanting to play together, the fired musicians gradually coalesced around the idea of functionally replacing Axl Rose with another incredibly mercurial, unreliable, but vocally talented frontman to form a new band.
I wonder if, at any point, the fact that when the band sent Weiland music for him to produce vocals over in his studio and he was promptly arrested for possession and had to record several of the vocal tracks after being released from prison, it flew any red flags for them? After a decade or more of working with Axl Rose, perhaps their calibration of what to reasonably expect from people was so out of whack that it seemed pretty reasonable?
Despite being entirely inside the age range for a typical Guns n' Roses appreciator, I never really travelled that path. I listened to them with general disinterest, but no active disdain. I think if you were a teen in the early 90's you either went the grunge route and rejected the hair metal trends of the previous years (as I did), or you remained attached to them through the insane bombast of bands like G'nR. I have never owned a legit copy of any G'nR album, and considering the prolific and unrestrained nature of my CD purchasing between 1990 and 2010, that says a lot. So when Velvet Revolver appeared on the radio, I didn't really clock who they were. I said to a friend once at a club that Slither sounded like Stone Temple Pilots made a hair metal song, and was told that basically that is exactly what had happened.
So I was torn. My love for the first three (maybe four) Stone Temple Pilots albums runs deep, and like Chris Cornell, there's an aspect to Scott Weilands singing that grabs a part of my brain and doesn't let go; however, that was juxtaposed against my complete indifference towards the musical style they performed in. In the days before streaming services existed to allow the instant and zero-cost try-before-you-buy approach of just listening to something once to see if you like it, I did what every penniless and morally dubious internet denizen did at the time, and found a torrent site with the album posted on it.
Like Audioslave, Contraband appears as a statement of intent, a bunch of high energy songs announcing a new arrival in the hair metal pantheon. I didn't care for it, and still don't. Unlike Audioslave, Velvet Revolver to me never really sounded like anything other than their parts; some songs sounded more like STP than GnR, and those I liked more, some went the other way, and those I like less. A couple of times through the album, almost certainly while playing World of Warcraft for hours on end (I knew how to use my time well back then), I decided it was not for me, and deleted it. as a result, I never even gave Libertad a chance, which (having now listened to it) was the sensible and correct option. I'm certain there are Velvet Revolver fans which will tell me there's significant differences between the two records, but for me it just sounds like more chaotic veering between the musical styles of two diametrically opposed musical ideologies.
In 2008, Scott Weiland was fired from Velvet Revolver after the inevitable problems which plagued his career continued to unravel his life around him. Within a few years, his addiction would claim his life, and the remaining members would reunite back with Guns n' Roses for the next round of their sparring match/love affair with their old lead singer.
Did we learn anything? Talented singers are hard to come by, sometimes just jamming the component parts of two bands together can work, but not for long, and that too many people in the 90's music industry are no longer with us; so when you see magazines or the internet calling musicians soft for taking a break, or being honest about their mental health, celebrate the possibility that they won't have to sacrifice everything they are for the chance to be famous for a moment.
* I mean, it's unhinged. Limp Bizkit sampling the iconic Mission Impossible theme and really just dragging it through the mud. Has there ever been a track listing where Tori Amos has belonged less than this one? Uncle Kracker produced by Kid Rock? Is that a selling point? The Foo Fighters teaming with Brian May to cover 'Have A Cigar', a down-tempo Pink Floyd song with really pretty basic guitars primarly driven by the synth line? Baffling, utterly deranged.
