SCOTT WEILAND On VELVET REVOLVER Debut: 'This Album Has The Utmost Potential To Be Influential'

Canadian Press is reporting that VELVET REVOLVER showed up late to a news conference in Toronto Friday (May 21),and chain-smoked their way through 45 minutes of Q&As, using enough curse words to render half their comments unusable to most media outlets.

"It's fast. It's ferocious. It's like drinking lightning in a bottle," singer Scott Weiland (ex-STONE TEMPLE PILOTS) said of the band's upcoming album, "Contraband", due on June 8 through RCA Records. "This album has the utmost potential . . . to be influential, to explode and be a massive album just like THE PIXIES were."

VELVET REVOLVER bassist Duff McKagan (ex-GUNS N' ROSES) said while he was going back to school a couple of years ago, fellow students often said they felt ripped off by the current landscape of bands.

"They'd say, 'Our generation doesn't have a rock band. We don't have rock 'n' roll.' They're buying records that are 20 years old," he said.

"There's a whole new young generation that's just starving for something that's pure and unadulterated."

The blame, McKagan said, lies with the mega-mergers of media corporations that started in the mid 1990s.

"With the advent of these mergers these labels were all owned by a huge umbrella corporation of stock holders. That in turn made all these pop paint-by-numbers garbage (groups). That's what was spoonfed to a whole generation. There will be revolt at some point and there will be change."

"Rock 'n' roll is about a sense of freedom," added guitarist Slash. "When the corporate (people) get a hold of it, it becomes very contained, very predictable. It loses its human edge."