Welcome to another edition of Who Named the Band? - the latest in an ongoing and possibly pointless series that seeks to understand the deeper meaning behind the naming of things which by nature defy naming, to get a glimpse into the minds of the musicians who must name them anyway.

We have a special guest this week - Velvet Revolver.

Carrying on the grand tradition of rock 'n' roll badassery and excess not seen in many new bands since the bad old '80s, this mix-and-match that clicked consists of the guitarist, bassist and a drummer from Guns N' Roses (Slash, Duff McKagan and Matt Sorum, respectively), the guitarist from Suicidal Tendencies (David Kushner) and the singer from Stone Temple Pilots (Scott Weiland).

They have to be doing something right.

The band won a Grammy in February for "best hard rock performance." They will rock Rexall Place on Tuesday, performing selections from their debut album, Contraband, the name of which may also reveal the minds of its creators. Or not.

Slash, a.k.a. Saul Hudson, who was just named the best guitarist by Esquire magazine, which ought to know, explains who named the band: "I came up with the Revolver part and Scott added the Velvet part. It was at the 11th hour. It was the night before we had to do this press conference where we were playing at and we only knew six songs, and we had to have a name."

Followers of Who Named the Band? may note the nomenclatural similarity between Velvet Revolver and Guns N' Roses - a firearm paired with something soft.

BANDWAGON

Slash responds, "You know, I didn't think about that until somebody from the press brought it up to me and I was like, 'Oh, boy, now we get to ride that bandwagon for a while.' My answer to that is that I thought it sounded more like the Sex Pistols."

The press - or "you f----ers," as he refers to us without a hint of malice - also tends to dredge up the musical past.

Hey, we're just doing our job.

While Slash at first refuses to answer any Axl Rose-related questions in a recent phone interview, he does later allow that he saw his old singer a while back, but they haven't actually spoken in eight years.

Some fans are understandably disappointed that original G&R is no more, frustrated that the release date of the new G&R album has apparently been pushed back to when hell freezes over. Slash seems a bit fedup with questions about his past, wishing to avoid negativity, but knows that the more you try to run from your past, the more you run into your past.

(A transcript of this interview excises Slash's frequent, perhaps even unconscious use of the f-word in every grammatical way. So as you read his quotes, just add it wherever you like.)

"I'm proud of my heritage with Guns, but at the same time there's a point where you have to move on - especially if you've quit the band," Slash laughs.

RECOGNIZED

"It took a while to not be recognized as Slash from Guns N' Roses, but then it's an honour to be recognized as Slash from Guns N' Roses, so what are you going to do? But as soon as this band started touring, I started getting recognized as Slash from Velvet Revolver, so it goes both ways."

Besides, he adds, maybe 75% of the people who turn up at Velvet Revolver concerts have neither seen Stone Temple Pilots nor Guns N' Roses, "But they know that there's something going on that's raw and exciting - and that's why they're there."

The formation of Velvet Revolver came after 10 gruelling months of auditions, preceded by several years of puttering around Los Angeles, jamming.

Slash says he became more and more disillusioned in "trying to find anybody that even had an inkling of what I would consider rock 'n' roll is all about." He points to a dark time in the mid-to-late '90s when rock had turned into "commercially motivated swill."

He reunited with Matt and Duff for a one-off tribute show for the late Randy Castillo and realized that he already had the makings of a great band right in front of his face all this time. Weiland was their first choice for the singer, but he was unavailable since he was still singing with the Stone Temple Pilots.

GARAGE BAND

The auditions commenced in a "garage band" manner, Slash says. They did everything to find worthy contenders short of posting a "singer wanted for serious rock band; no egos" ad in the local music store. The response was not encouraging.

"You should've heard some of the tapes we got," Slash says. "It was either 75 Axl wannabes or all these people who couldn't sing."

When Stone Temple Pilots broke up, Slash couldn't get Weiland on the phone fast enough.

They sent him a demo, he added his parts and the results were exactly what they wanted.

"Once we started working together, it just happened," Slash says. "It was really spontaneous, it was almost cosmic the way this thing came together."

Weiland, of course, had problems of his own. He was on probation for various drug-related offences when the band formed. He had to get special permission to tour and was still struggling with heroin addiction. Were the old Guns N' Roses boys worried about their new singer's history?

Slash answers, "Given our collective histories, no. It was a tangible thing I knew we could deal with because everybody had been through it already. And Scott always wanted to deal with it himself, so we all rallied around Scott and all sort of did it together. It was an important bonding experience that brought us closer together as a band and at the same put our own chemical abuses in check."

While Slash admits he's toned it down now that he has two young children - plus he turns 40 in July, 19 years more than he thought he'd ever live, he laughs - the substance-abuse issue in rock 'n' roll is a fine line.

"It gets to the point where the drugs affect what it is what you do, your music. Then you have to regroup. I think that having gone through that enough times you either know what you're doing and you just stop doing it at all. I'm somewhere in-between that.

GOOD BAND

"The most important thing was always being a good band and being a good player. That was first and foremost, regardless of what people may have thought. If you wake up on the morning and realize you can't get it together to play, that's when you have to stop and figure out what's what. Also, a lot of the old habits just get boring after a while. Still," he adds with a chuckle, "what I could consider moderation would be somebody else's excess." Like the saying goes, everything in moderation - even moderation.

SAME FACE, NEW BAND!

There's a new face of rock 'n' roll - featuring the same old faces!

Velvet Revolver is just one of the many products of a jumbled rock scene that consists of different musicians "leftover" from bands that broke up, disintegrated or were dormant for a time. Some are side projects. In this case, V-R is three parts Guns N' Roses, one part Stone Temple Pilots and one part Suicidal Tendencies. Here are some other bands whose parts you may recognize more than their sums, though this is not always the case:

AUDIOSLAVE: One part Soundgarden, three parts Rage Against the Machine. New album coming soon.

A PERFECT CIRCLE: One part Tool, one part Marilyn Manson, one part Smashing Pumpkins.

ZWAN: Two parts Smashing Pumpkins, one part A Perfect Circle.

FOO FIGHTERS: One part Nirvana, one part the Germs.

BLACK LABEL SOCIETY: One part Ozzy Osbourne band, one part Crowbar.

MOTHER LOVE BONE: Three parts Pearl Jam, one part Temple of the Dog.

JANE'S ADDICTION: One part Red Hot Chili Peppers, one part Porno for Pyros.

SUPERJOINT RITUAL: One part Pantera, one part Corrosion of Conformity, one part Hank Williams III.

C'MON: One part Change of Heart, one part Nashville Pussy. One of several Canadian change-up bands.

ALTER BRIDGE: Three parts Creed, one part the Mayfield Four.

TANTRIC: Three parts Days of the New, one part the Merge.

QUEENS OF THE STONE AGE: One part Kyuss, one part Screaming Trees, one part Soundgarden, one part Nirvana, you name it.