Former STONE TEMPLE PILOTS and VELVET REVOLVER frontman Scott Weiland kicked off his solo tour this past Friday, March 1 at The Machine Shop in Flint, Michigan. Fan-filmed video footage of the concert can be seen below.

"I'm really looking forward to it," Weiland recently said about the 20-city run of dates during which he is performing songs from the first two STONE TEMPLE PILOTS albums, 1992's "Core" and 1994's "Purple". "It's going to be really exciting — something completely new."

Regarding how the concept for the tour came about, Weiland said: "Well, originally, it was an idea I came up with for STP for the anniversary of 'Core' to do the 'Core' album in its entirety. The rest of the guys didn't want to do it. So, it was still something that there was a lot of public interest in. Having that said, the idea was brought up to me through management. I talked to the guys in my solo band, THE WILDABOUTS, and they were totally into it, as were the promoters. It worked out."

He added: "We're still going to do some of our space jams and have them correlate into some of our STP songs and a couple STP songs into a couple of the covers that we've done during our solo band stuff."

As for the upcoming studio CD, Weiland described it as "more of a rock 'n' roll album, as opposed to more of the sort of outside-the-box artistic sonic adventures that we've gone on in the past.

"The record that we're making, hopefully will attract more of the STP and VELVET REVOLVER fans. I think it will also help that we're doing this tour this way."

Weiland and THE WILDABOUTS have not yet secured a label deal for the upcoming album, which they are producing themselves. He says of the process: "[it] isn't hard, unless you have a group of guys like STP where every single person in the band is a producer. It's not as difficult in this situation. We're writing together. It's actually a lot easier. We're allowing everyone to put in their input and it's coming across much more as a rock 'n' roll record, but it's much more organic sounding."

THE WILDABOUTS consist of multi-instrumentalist Doug Grean, bassist Tommy Black, drummer Dan Thompson and guitarist Jeremy Brown.