Velvet Revolver had all the appearances of a rowdy, bad-boy rock band Tuesday at the First Midwest Bank Amphitheatre. Crashed cars, lingerie-clad women and serial killers flashed on a projection screen. Skull-and-crossbones symbols adorned the musicians' apparel. Songs boasted of illicit fantasies, stalkers and pills. "We will provide the sex, drugs and rock 'n' roll" vocalist Scott Weiland announced early on in the 100-minute performance. Yet Velvet Revolver's sound rarely followed suit, its polished thudding and glam posturing rarely ceding to spontaneity or grit.
Three years removed from its multiplatinum debut, the hard-rock supergroup comprising former Guns N' Roses and Stone Temple Pilots members is showing symptoms of a boardroom-assembled band whose formation was chronicled for a reality-TV show. Instead of stemming from debauched antics or oversize egos, the defects come from a creative shortfall that indicates the quintet is less than the promised sum of its talented parts.
FOR THE RECORD - This story contains corrected material, published Sept. 1, 2007.
Blandness cast a pall over a majority of the Los Angeles quintet's originals, whose highlights were the bluesy solos afforded Slash. With his black top hat, ash-dangling cigarettes and face-draping curls, the guitarist remains a visual icon. His melodic fluidity and corkscrew riffs carried "Set Me Free" and "She Builds Quick Machines" but were no match for clunkers such as "She Mine" and "Get Out the Door."
A semi-unplugged set that found the band seated on bar stools coasting through deflated ballads didn't hold answers for the energy shortage. Neither did a by-the-numbers Weiland, whose flailing-limb movements resembled that of a cockroach knocked on its back. Relief came in the form of members' collective pasts, with a half-dozen Guns N' Roses and Stone Temple Pilots anthems oozing the sleazy swagger and arena-pleasing hooks missing from Velvet Revolver's own tunes.
Aptly, "Patience" drew the biggest reaction from the sparse crowd. For a moment, all the fans had to do was close their eyes and they were at the July 1991 Tinley Park concert that was called because of a band-incited riot several days earlier in St. Louis (this sentence as published has been corrected in this text). But that was back when three of the guys onstage Tuesday were still genuinely dangerous and weren't satisfied by simply pretending.