Scott Weiland: Brooding, troubled but compelling frontman with Stone Temple Pilots and supergroup Velvet Revolver

Psychologists would have a field day trying to establish what triggered Weiland’s demons

Weiland on stage with Velvet Revolver at the Live 8 concert in Hyde Park in 2005 (AP)

Whether you conversed with him in the plush confines of the Metropolitan hotel, just off London’s Hyde Park, or watched him holler into his trademark megaphone on the stage of the London Forum, as I did in 2001, there was a palpable sense of menace and frustration about Scott Weiland, who was found dead on his tour bus in Bloomington, Minnesota, just before he was to go on stage with his band, the Wildabouts.

The brooding frontman with the grunge band Stone Temple Pilots and Velvet Revolver, the supergroup he formed with three members of Guns N’Roses, didn’t seem to come with an off-switch as he went from rehab to relapse to recording studio. That he managed to make over a dozen angsty, oddly appealing, albums in the space of twice as many years, and contribute memorable cover versions and original material to a host of Hollywood film soundtracks including The Crow, Tank Girl, The Hulk and the 2003 remake of The Italian Job, is all the more remarkable and testament to his strong creative urges, despite his recurrent reliance on cocaine, heroin and the lethal cocktail of both, speedballs.

“I always felt that I was caught up in my own contradiction,” said the vocalist who, in 2011, published a candid memoir documenting his trials and tribulations, including prison stints, Not Dead & Not For Sale (written with David Ritz). “I was never quite sure where I fitted in. I numbed myself to the situation.”

Psychologists would have a field day trying to establish what triggered Weiland’s demons. He was born Scott Kline in San Jose, California, in 1967 but his parents divorced when he was two, and he and his younger brother Michael were adopted by his stepfather David Weiland three years later. The transition from a bohemian household to a more conservative one proved easy enough, as did the family’s move to Ohio. However, as revealed in his autobiography, in the late 1970s he was sexually abused by an older high school student and the clouds only partially lifted after the Weilands returned to California.

“I was never a totally happy kid. I always had a lot of sadness. That didn’t have anything to do with my family. It had to do with what was going on inside me,” said the gruff-voiced singer, who was subsequently diagnosed with bipolar disorder.

Like many teenagers with similar problems, he sought refuge in sport – wrestling, football – but mostly in music. “I idolised people like David Bowie and John Lennon, even Iggy Pop, who were cartoonesque in their own way,” he said of the stars whose stage presence and lyrical playfulness he would seek to emulate. In 1986, he met Robert DeLeo, a flashy bass player, at a concert by the Californian punk rock group Black Flag and they decided to form their own band, originally called Swing and then Mighty Joe Young. This granted Weiland a licence to misbehave and party. “When I tried alcohol for the first time and various other drugs, I felt like I could fit in,” he said. “Or maybe I just didn’t give a shit. All of a sudden, I had a reason for feeling good about being an outsider.”

With the addition of Eric Kretz on drums and DeLeo’s older brother Dean on guitar, after playing around with the initials of the motor oil company STP they came up with the name Stone Temple Pilots and recorded a wide-ranging demo tape that found its way to Atlantic in 1992. Released in the autumn, their debut album, Core, saw them dismissed as grunge-bandwagon jumpers and mere Nirvana and Pearl Jam-copyists, but Weiland turned out to be a compelling frontman, not quite in the league of Kurt Cobain or Eddie Vedder, yet certainly the equal of Layne Staley of Alice in Chains.

The Top 40 success of the trenchant single “Plush” enabled Stone Temple Pilots to eclipse Megadeth, one of the four big thrash metal bands they went out supporting at the time. “At the start, we were playing to heavy metal fans who didn’t know what to make of us, but by the end we had our own crowd,” he reflected about the track that won the Grammy Award for Best Hard Rock Performance in 1994.

But for Weiland’s foibles, which periodically derailed Stone Temple Pilots, one wonders how much more the group who could have achieved with their next five albums, which still made the charts and sold in their millions, particularly Purple (1994) and No 4 (1999). In 2001, for the Family Values tour (!), the band drafted Chester Bennington of nu-metal band Linkin Park in his stead.

In 2003, Weiland teamed up with the erstwhile members of Guns N’Roses Duff McKagan (bass), Slash (guitar) and Matt Sorum (drums), as well as Dave Kushner of Wasted Youth (guitar), to form Velvet Revolver, a supergroup whose pedigree gave them a standing start, despite their infamy. “We were written off as the band of disastrous dysfunction with too many personal problems to survive,” he said. “Or rather, I was written off as the guy whose hopeless addictions had – and would always – ruin everything for everyone.”

Against all the odds, the quintet secured a deal with a showcase of covers and one single original composition, the powerful “Set Me Free’’. As he recalled, “it was enough to start a bidding war for the band. This was on the Hulk soundtrack. Along with ‘Slither’, this was one of the songs that really turned people on to Velvet Revolver.”

Yet Weiland sabotaged the group’s rise after a brace of albums – Contraband (2004) and Libertad (2007) – when, in Glasgow, in 2008, he announced he was leaving. That year, he launched his own outfit, the appropriately named Wildabouts, to back him on Blaster, his fourth solo album.

Self-aware and given to huge mood swings, in 2011 Weiland released a Christmas album entitled The Most Wonderful Time Of The Year. “I know this album took people by surprise, but I’ve always wanted to do an album of Christmas standards in a traditional style,” he said. “It was a really excellent experience.”

PIERRE PERRONE

Scott Richard Kline (Scott Weiland), singer, songwriter and musician: born San Jose, California 27 October 1967; married 1994 Janina Castaneda (divorced 2000), 2000 Mary Forsberg (marriage dissolved; one daughter, one son), 2013 Jamie Wachtel; died Bloomington, Minnesota 3 December 2015.