Scott Weiland Q&A: Stone Temple Pilots Frontman Talks Axl Rose, STP's Reunion and Tight Jeans

Did that call from Dean come at a time when things were already falling apart with Velvet Revolver?
No, things at that time were working quite well with Velvet Revolver and I didn't want to mention it to them until there was a plan and a couple gigs that were actually booked. Slash and I were usually the ones who talked to each other first about things, then we'd go to the rest of the guys. And, unfortunately because of certain people's egos, it ? I walked into a situation where there was a lot of baggage. I had a lot of baggage walking into my situation. I was in a band where at the end, it was pretty much three against one. And so I'm pretty sure that it felt that way to Axl as well. I have to say this, and I'm not just saying this now because of my situation I went through, but I heard a lot of great Guns n' Roses stories you guys in the press will never hear. Everyone has made Axl out to be this horrendously crazy person, this bad guy, and I don't know him very well at all. He and I for whatever reason got almost tricked into this little media spat for a moment because one of our band members happened to run into him and said that he said something. So, my point being that having been in a band with Velvet Revolver now for five and a half years, I'm not quite so sure that it was all Axl's fault.

It's like, why does it always have to be the lead singer. Matt Sorum in front of my face, he was the sweetest guy in the world. But there were some times, out of the blue, the guy just randomly hated me. We all carried our own baggage in that band. In a sense, that's why people were intrigued, you know, especially for the first couple of years. Because they were kind of waiting on the trainwreck to happen. They just thought it would happen a lot sooner.

To a certain degree, because there was all that baggage, for Velvet Revolver to pull together two really great albums was impressive.
Yeah, yeah. Especially on the second one. I really feel proud of the second album we made. We put all of our problems aside, egos aside, and we became a band, and it wasn't about being Guns n? Roses and STP. It was about being a completely different band. Not many people are able to say that they had in their professional career the chance to perform in two bands that won Grammys and were multiplatinum bands. But with STP, you know, these were, you know, the best friends of my life. I grew up with these guys while we were teenagers. It's a whole other thing.

Coming back into STP, was it all hard to get over the old issues?
Well, it was. It really was. A lot of it had to do with the fact that like on one tour, Dean and I would be drug buddies. Dean and I would be like Keith and Mick on some tours, and then he'd come home for a week break and we'd go back on tour and I'd still be runnin', rippin' and roarin' 'cause that's the way it rolls, as far as I'm concerned. And he had allegedly stopped, and he'd be like, "Whatcha doin' man?"