Scott Weiland: Stone Temple Pilots, Jamie Weiland Remember Troubled Singer
At STP’s arena-packing height in the Nineties and as recently as this past spring, playing with the Wildabouts at SXSW, Weiland was one of rock’s most jubilantly aggressive frontmen – belting songs like STP’s “Dead & Bloated” through a bullhorn as he stalked the stage in a panther-like glide. “Dean, Eric and myself – we can roll people over,” says Robert DeLeo. “But Scott was leading us. He had the power and charisma. It was as if we were getting baptized every night.”
Weiland was also a singer of wide dramatic range – from the hissing irony of “Sex Type Thing,” on Core, to the plaintive clarity in “Sour Girl,” on STP’s 1999 release, No. 4 – as well as a witty, incisive lyricist who aimed his most unforgiving lines squarely at himself. “I made excuses for a million lies/But all I got was humble kidney pie,” Weiland sang in the 1996 STP song “Tumble in the Rough,” recorded during one of his worst periods of heroin addiction. In 2001, Weiland was diagnosed with bipolar disorder, which he noted wryly in an STP song that same year, “Bi-Polar Bear.” “There was a big mirror there for Scott,” Robert DeLeo says, “taking what he saw in himself, whether he liked it or not, and making it into something great musically.”
“He was well aware of where he was in his career, of how he got there,” says Weiland’s manager Tom Vitorino, who started working with the singer this past July. Vitorino recalls one early meeting with Weiland. “He said, ‘I’m sure you hear all this stuff about me. Why would you want to do this?’ I said, ‘Because you don’t have a talent problem.'”
Weiland was born Scott Richard Kline on October 27th, 1967, in San Jose, California. His parents divorced when he was two. Growing up in Chagrin Falls, Ohio, then Huntington Beach, California, Scott took the last name of his mother Sharon’s new husband, David Weiland, when she remarried. Weiland and Robert DeLeo, originally from New Jersey, met in 1985; by 1990, they were living and playing in Los Angeles with Dean and Kretz and had recorded demos of the future Core hits “Wicked Garden” and “Piece of Pie.”
Robert remembers writing songs with Weiland while the two had jobs across the street from each other on Sunset Boulevard. Robert worked at a guitar store; Weiland drove models to photo shoots. “I would call him and say, ‘Come over here,’ ” Robert says. “I’d have a melody, show that to Scott, and he’d make it his own right away.”
“Everything came easy to him – riding a horse, waterskiing, basketball,” says Dean. When STP had a cookout after filming the video for the Core single “Plush,” Weiland made jerk chicken that was “spectacular,” Dean raves. But the singer couldn’t stop “racing, worrying. He had a hard time accepting help, allowing himself to receive it.”
Weiland began experimenting with drugs in high school but first used heroin on STP’s late-1993 tour with the Butthole Surfers. He famously described the depths of his addiction in a 1997 Rolling Stone cover story: “I didn’t feel like I had a good enough rush unless I had one hand on the needle and one hand dialing 911.” Three years later, after seven months in prison for violating probation, he claimed his compulsion ran deeper – “this elation that comes from knowing that you nearly lost your life – and knowing that you’ve come through it.”