Guns N’ Roses guitarist Slash discussed Lenny Kravitz getting a riff from him in a new Guardian interview.
The story goes that Slash took the riff of Always on the Run to Lenny Kravitz because Adler wasn’t a funky enough drummer to play along with it. “I don’t recall ever saying that,” Slash says with a raised eyebrow. “It was a riff that I came up with that I didn’t present it Guns N’ Roses because it didn’t seem appropriate.” The truth is that Kravitz heard Slash playing the riff while working on his second album, Mama Said, and asked if he could have it. “It was a free piece of property, so …”
Velvet Revolver fired Scott Weiland 10 years ago this month in April 2008 which effectively ended the band as they never performed live again outside of a one off reunion show with Weiland in 2012. But a decade later, Dave Kushner has revealed that the band came very close to continuing with a new singer.
Dave Kushner revealed in a recent Fueled By Death Cast interview that Velvet Revolver hired Franky Perez to replace Scott Weiland during their year and a half singer search in 2008-2010. Perez didn’t work out though and was let go, and Velvet Revolver never continued. He also revealed for the first time that there were talks with Lenny Kravitz, and that Velvet Revolver tried out Royston Langston from Spacehog and Ian Thornley from Big Wreck. Alternative Nation transcribed Kushner’s comments.
“We had this guy Franky Perez, who is still a good friend of mine, who is a fucking amazing singer. We actually told him he was in the band, he was the only guy who actually got hired, we kept recording with him. It just kind of – the longer we worked with him, the less it felt right. There were other factors, I think Slash was getting ready to do a solo record. I think his head was already over there at that point.”
“We worked with the singer from Big Wreck, we worked with the singer from Spacehog. We didn’t work with Lenny Kravitz, but there was some talk of us doing stuff with him. There was a lot of talk, there were a lot of dudes trying to get that job too, like the first time, but obviously at that point people knew. It just didn’t happen.”
“So Franky Perez got hired by the band. He moves from Las Vegas to LA, he has no money, then all of a sudden he’s not in the band. I felt horrible for him, because I was always kind of the underdog in the band. I was like, ‘Oh dude, that’s so fucked up.’”
He mentioned that Perez ended up moving close to him, and they continued to write songs and work together even after Velvet Revolver.
Appetite for Distortion recently had a major episode. Big show, 2 interviews. First up, special co-host Geoff from GNR Central helps interview Freekbass. Freek tells us all about the Cincinnati funk scene and his work with Buckethead. Also he details how his new band, Headtronics, formed. One of his Headtronics bandmates is our second guest…Richard Fortus.
Guns N’ Roses’ Richard Fortus joins us later in the episode to talk about this new band, answers your fan-submitted questions, and if he likes knowing that his interviews go viral!
Listen to “Ep. 104 – Richard Fortus and Freekbass talk Headtronics” on Spreaker.
