Slash recently stopped by the Howard Stern Show to promote his new album and ended up discussing Velvet Revolver singer Scott Weiland‘s “uncontrollable diva” behavior. The iconic guitarist also shared his love for Nirvana and offered his thoughts on the grunge era that gave birth to Weiland’s career.
Howard Stern always attempts to plunge his guests into the subjects they’re least comfortable talking about, or at least the most controversial ones available for whomever is in the hot seat. When the new ‘America’s Got Talent’ judge sat down with the top-hatted guitarist we affectionately call Slash, he wasted no time getting down to brass tax on the whole Scott Weiland situation.
After being blindsided by, and vehemently denying, Weiland’s claims that he had rejoined Velvet Revolver, Slash gave Stern a better picture of why a second honeymoon with the erstwhile singer is out of the question. “Duff and I were like fresh out of detox right, and we thought, ‘We can fix this guy,’” said Slash of VR’s early days with Weiland. “You know what happened was, with all fairness to Scott, he was a mess when we got going, but we wrote a couple good songs.”
Slash continued, saying that Weiland’s substance abuse issues wasn’t the only contributing factor to their separation. “There was a lot of uncontrollable diva stuff. Serious rock star stuff…You’ve got this one guy that has decided he’s going to dictate to everybody what’s going to happen and not even show up,” said Slash. “I can’t find my shoes in my hotel room. I’m going to go get some coffee and wander down the street and then you can’t find him and it’s five minutes until showtime, it’s classic stuff.”
Slash further diagnosed the behavior as “extreme f—ing narcissism” before shouldering some of the blame for the demise of the band. “It’s not like I’m fucking innocent of all this s—, but there’s an extreme that you can’t go to that just makes everything a miserable process. With all due credit to Scott, there was a period in there where we all fell off the wagon, back in 2005. We were a hot mess.”
In the same interview, Slash dished on a beef between one of his former bandmates and a another grunge icon — that between Guns N’ Roses singer Axl Rose and Nirvana frontman Kurt Cobain. “Nirvana was great. I really, with all due respect to Kurt and Courtney and all that, there was some issues that happened having to do with Axl that I felt like they were totally right,” Slash said, likely referring to the brief, yet nasty exchange at the 1992 MTV Music Awards.
Unlike many musicians that rose to fame during the heyday of hair metal, Slash holds no ill will against grunge. “It was sort of that transition from hair bands and so on, which actually started ending after Guns made it anyway, it started to sort of dissipate. When they came in there was a new thing going on, but we were still playing stadiums. That was a cool period, but I don’t think that it had, there was all that talk like well grunge ended whatever, for us it had nothing to do with that.”
-Loudwire.com
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