Shooter Jennings Turned Down VR

Shooter Jennings Offered Velvet Revolver Job Twice!
Country rock star Shooter Jennings has confirmed that he has been offered the job of singer with Velvet Revolver – but has turned the band down twice!

Shooter, the son of country legend Waylon Jennings, was one of the men Classic Rock tipped as potential VR singers back in April of last year.

At that time Duff McKagan admitted that Jennings could make a good replacement: "Shooter’s great, actually," he told CR’s Scott Rowley. "That’s a good idea. He’s does a southern rock thing, but his old band was straight up kinda rock. He’s a talented guy man, he’s pretty awesome. He would be good."

In a new interview with Classic Rock, Jennings confirms that he was asked – but turned the band down. And not just once.

"They’ve asked me twice, dude," Jennings told CR’s Henry Yates. "I’ve done a couple of shows with those guys, and they asked me a couple of years ago and they asked me again last year to be the singer. And it pained my heart not to say yes, because those guys are the best players in the world. They’re literally one of the best bands I’ve ever heard and to be able to sing with them has been amazing. But I had a talk with them about it, and I would absolutely still, to this day, get in a room and jam with them, but first of all, I knew I was gonna be doing another record and that what I wanted to do was really special to me, and I didn’t feel I could stifle that."

"I didn’t feel like my next step should to be to go from feeling like my back was broken by Nashville to stepping into the shoes of Scott Weiland and singing that stuff," he continued. "I kinda said, if you wanna get together and do some stuff, that’d be fine, but I don’t know about me going out and singing those songs, and being the replacement for Scott Weiland, after Axl."

"You have to understand how big that is for me, because Guns N’ Roses was one of my favourite bands of all time," Jennings continued. "I was six years old when Appetite For Destruction came out and it was the coolest thing. I never liked Bon Jovi. I never liked hair metal. I never liked any of that. When I heard Guns N’ Roses, it was dangerous and it was mean, and that was why I wanted to move to LA. I wanted to be Axl stepping off the bus with the hayseed in his mouth."

"Duff, Slash, Matt and Dave have all become good friends and it’s no disrespect to them, but I just felt like it wasn’t my time to do that, y’know? For all the money it probably would have brought ..."