To me, anyone can form a band, so long as their guitarists know at least four chords, their bassist has a rudimentary understanding of time signatures, and they have a drummer who can smoke a cigarette and hold time simultaneously. Of course, this band almost never makes it out of the garage.
Even though anyone can form a band, it takes a special kind of talent to evolve that band, to wrap themselves in the cocoon of mid-range gear and cross-country trips in a beat up Econoline van that smells like weed and gas station burritos, before bursting from that cocoon surrounded by shimmering, hallucinogenic success. For this band, there needs to be a factor that no other band could dream of having.
In the case of Stone Temple Pilots, that factor was Scott Weiland.
I remember a time when I wanted to be Scott Weiland. I wanted to prance around on stage with my shirt off like I had musically-induced Parkinson’s. I wanted to stand my hair in Kool-Aid red spikes. I wanted to sing out of my throat (fuck the diaphragm). I wanted to smoke cigarettes in a dimly lit studio and write “Interstate Love Song.”
Without Scott Weiland, I may have never become a musician at all, despite the other personalities I admired that ultimately helped me have my own musical heyday. There was something unique about Scott. He had this opiate charisma and a knack for marrying his personality into his music. It was like he hid some pheromonal tone in the textures and nuance of every song he wrote. His words were like devil’s eyelashes, invasive and unknowingly catching a ride to wherever you may take them.
But, like many who have caught the dream like a falling star and fronted a successful, well-known band, Scott was not without his own demons. The drug addict Scott Weiland frequently clashed with the lyrical genius Scott Weiland and it was through those clashes that two life-altering reactions took place: the conception of some of the best music in a decade rich in it and the inevitable severance of his band.
These reactions affected his fans, as well as himself.
Stone Temple Pilots ultimately imploded because of substances stronger than Weiland’s willpower, but much like the mythological phoenix, Weiland was reborn — alongside former members of Guns N’ Roses and Wasted Youth — as the frontman for Velvet Revolver. Weiland messily bounced back and forth between projects following a 2008 reunion with his original masterwork, noting that he would like to front both bands. “If Maynard [James Keenan] can do it with A Perfect Circle and Tool, then there’s no reason I shouldn’t go and do it with both bands,” he once said.
It’s sad to see such talent stopped in its tracks. I personally don’t care that Weiland was a drug addict. He made some great music and in my view, at least compared to some of his contemporaries, he was criminally underrated. Having spent a lot of my life listening to Stone Temple Pilots, I would like to think I’m familiar with the nuance of their work. There are intricacies in their music that just don’t exist with other bands from the time.
The songwriting was such that Weiland’s voice cannot be replaced. I’ve listened to this new Stone Temple Pilots with Chester Bennington performing vocals. It’s shit. It’s shit because he’s not Scott Weiland.
I think, if anything, that’s Scott’s biggest musical contribution — there really isn’t anyone else like him. His voice complimented his writing, as did his band. That’s what I mourn — there is only one Scott Weiland and there will never be another. This specific configuration of sonic textures and guttural harmony will never come around again.
48-year-old Scott Weiland was found dead at around 9 p.m. on Wednesday, December 3, 2015, while at a Bloomington, Minn. tour stop with his band, the Wildabouts.
