It seemed inevitable, but that doesn’t make it any less tragic.
Scott Weiland was found dead last night. He was 48.
An official statement on his Facebook page says the voice of Stone Temple Pilots and Velvet Revolver “passed away in his sleep” on his tour bus in the parking lot of a hotel in Bloomington, Minnesota. It’s too early for the official cause of death (at press time some are reporting cardiac arrest) but it’s all too easy to speculate what did him in. Weiland’s struggles with addiction, and the in-and-outs of rehab and courthouses that result from it, are well documented. He kept MTV News in business for years, and was the kind of celebrity who probably had a half-written obituary waiting for him at most major newspapers. But that doesn’t make his departure any less of a loss.
Weiland was one of the few bona fide rock ‘n’ roll stars of the 90s. At a time when it was extremely uncool to, say, slide around onstage shirtless with a feather boa or write songs that strippers wanted to dance to, Scott Weiland did. His deep baritone vocal yarl was as much the sound of grunge as Eddie Vedder and Kurt Cobain, even if Weiland was more like Steven Tyler than either of those guys – an unabashedly flamboyant frontman you didn’t need to be cool to relate to.
More than any other singer of the day (sorry, Chris Cornell), he was a sex symbol, one boot firmly planted in the Sunset Strip scene that alternative was supposed to have annihilated. When he ended up fronting Velvet Revolver in the 2000s with Slash and Duff from Guns N’ Roses, it made perfect sense. As big as he was (and those two bands sold millions), Weiland surely would have been a household name had his career happened in the 70s or 80s, a posters-on-the-wall superstar for the masses.
Throughout all of these times, he perhaps played the role of rock star all too well. In 2004, when Velvet Revolver made a video for the single Slither, Weiland had to get a day pass from rehab to be in it. The clip was shot in the Parisian catacombs, and Weiland looks skeletal himself, all skin and bones slinking around the walls of skulls like a man soon to join them. But he got another decade, and so did his fans, cheating death longer than most men with his problems, in his situation. But few would have bet he’d die of old age. And so here we are, writing words like “shocked” and “saddened” and “thinking of his family.” (Weiland leaves behind his wife, Jamie, and two teenaged children.)
Weiland’s final live performance was actually right here in Toronto on Tuesday, December 1, at Adelaide Hall with his current band the Wildabouts. A video posted on his official Facebook page from the gig shows them doing STP’s hit Vaseline, and it’s a relief to find it’s nothing like the disturbing clip that circulated this past spring of Weiland struggling to get through that number at a gig in Texas, looking deathly, dazed and confused. (The video caused much gossip it’s since been removed.) This time, he’s got his swagger back, and the modest crowd is basking in it. Just out of frame are the arms of one fan wildly air drumming. Pressed against the small stage, a blonde woman in full woo-hoo!!! mode reaches out to grab his legs. The audience is all cheers.
Though he died in the back of a bus in the middle of nowhere America, I like to think he went out like at that Toronto show, singing one of his great songs to the sound of applause.
Great “Vasoline” video from the show in Toronto at Adelaide Hall earlier this week, filmed by Doug Lewis.
Posted by Scott Weiland on Thursday, 3 December 2015
music@nowtoronto.com | @liisaladouceur
