Congratulations, man - sounds like an amazing once in a lifetime experience and a nice write-up! Thanks for sharing. Pop's Love Suicide - one of my favorite STP tracks ever, never thought I'd hear it live again, and it sounded great!
If I had to pick a side in this whole thing, I'm definitely "Team Weiland," but I don't get what all the hate is about. Chester sounds great, and they are definitely showing that they will do some deep cuts on this tour. If anything, I view this more as a side project along the lines of Talk Show and AoA. I'd rather they change the name also, but they are STP "WITH" CB so why not just embrace it and enjoy the new music instead of getting fired up about semantics?
I've seen both Talk Show and AoA live, with STP covers played both times, and how else is the singer supposed to sing it? There's no way it's not going to sound somewhat like Weiland because of his signature style and melody composition. Dave Coutts and Richard Patrick didn't do any better or worse of a job and neither got the same sort of criticism. Just like Weiland sounding Axl-y when VR covered GNR, there's no way around it, especially with the same band playing the instruments as opposed to a different band ala the Wildabouts