Velvet Revolver had jumped onto the rock scene as a supergroup of giants. However, the band, who made their inception with big dreams in 2002, did not leave such good memories. Scott Weiland was the first to leave, returning to Stone Temple Pilots he missed.
Yet, the longing for his old band wasn’t the only problem. There were many issues between them and their bandmates in Revolver that they couldn’t solve. These problems would eventually drag on until the group disbanded. Moreover, his life was also upside down at that time. In 2007, Weiland wanted to enter a rehab facility voluntarily. After that, he was arrested for driving while under the influence of a substance, and many more bad incidents followed.
Thus, he couldn’t stop taking drugs. At such times, one of the crucial things he needed in his life was support from relatives, but Weiland couldn’t find it. On the contrary, he felt like his bandmates were holding him back. Velvet Revolver was continuing its musical journey, but his bandmates stopped talking to Scott Weiland, and the arguments continued. They eventually came to such a point to be no longer manageable.
For Weiland, who was already in a difficult time, the last straw overflowed, and while performing in Glasgow in 2008, he announced that it would be Velvet’s final show. Yet, he had no idea that his bandmates were already planning to fire him. We don’t know much about their problems at the time, but in his memoir ‘Not Dead & Not for Sale,’ Scott clarified some points about what these problems really were, which were put aside under the cliché title of ‘in-group problems.’
“I was running wild during the second Velvet Revolver tour [in 2007],” Weiland wrote, remembering the times close to the end. “At the beginning of the tour, I was okay, but then a single line of coke in England did the trick. I snorted it. And soon, the demons were back. Thus began another decline… I was out there again, going to dangerous places to buy substances. All this was done in secret; the guys in Velvet Revolver didn’t know I was using.”
He continued, “When I told the guys that we’d have to miss a couple of gigs because I needed treatment, their reaction shocked me. They told me I’d have to pay them for those cancellations — in full. I reminded them that when they had relapsed and needed rehab, I had supported them completely. It made no difference to them…. It didn’t matter that Velvet Revolver had sold some five or six million records. I was out.”
Whatever happened behind closed doors, Velvet Revolver’s glorious lineup soon disbanded. Weiland had returned to his old friend, Stone Temple Pilots. Of course, the other band members were the last names to be unemployed, and they continued their musical journeys in different ways. Velvet Revolver, on the other hand, was taken to the dusty shelves of history as a bitter memory, even though the band had some really good times and received critical acclaim.
