[Amy]

Scott Weiland, the singer of Stone Temple Pilots and Velvet Revolver who spent much of his life battling substance abuse, is dead at 48.

Weiland, on tour with his group Scott Weiland and the Wildabouts, was found dead on his tour bus in Minnesota, as TMZ first reported and the Los Angeles Times confirmed with his wife. The cause of his death was not immediately known.

Much of the world learned of Weiland’s demise from Dave Navarro, famed guitar player of Jane’s Addiction, who tweeted the news. A message confirming his death also appeared on his Instagram account.

Just learned our friend Scott Weiland has died. So gutted, I am thinking of his family tonight.

— Dave Navarro (@DaveNavarro) December 4, 2015

Weiland was to play a show in Rochester, Minn., Friday evening. His show outside of Minneapolis on Thursday was canceled “due to slow ticket sales,” as Jon Bream of the Minneapolis Star Tribune reported.

Weiland came at fame sideways: His most renowned group, Stone Temple Pilots, was at first a Pearl Jam soundalike that many thought eventually transcended tribute-band status. But once the singer found fame on his own terms, his personal demons always made it seem he could squander it at any time. As, indeed, he sometimes did.

“We were written off as the band of disastrous dysfunction with too many personal problems to survive,” Weiland wrote in his 2011 memoir, “Not Dead & Not For Sale.” “Or rather, I was written off as the guy whose hopeless addictions had – and would always – ruin everything for everyone.”


Weiland was born in Santa Cruz, Calif., in 1967. His name at birth was Scott Kline; when his parents divorced when he was 2 and his mother remarried, he took his stepfather’s surname. Weiland wrote that his “new dad was a good guy whose middle name was discipline” while his biological one was “a cool dude who drove a Pepsi truck for a living but smoked dope at night and listened to the Doors.”

The singer chose to emulate the latter. Living with his dad during the summer, he chugged his first beers in the sixth grade.

“I liked the feeling of entering an alternate energy field,” he wrote. “I liked the psychological and chemical rearrangement brought on by the alcohol.” By seventh grade, he was drinking alone.

Childhood and adolescence brought further troubles. Weiland was diagnosed with ADD. His mother turned out to be an alcoholic. And at 12, he was raped by a high-school senior.

“This was a memory I suppressed until only a few years ago when, in rehab, it came flooding back,” he wrote in 2011. “… The dude raped me. It was quick, not pleasant. I was too scared to tell anyone.”

Weiland’s mother and stepfather also checked him into a mental hospital for a three-month stay at 16 — without telling him ahead of time. Two policemen and two paramedics showed up at his high school, and whisked him away without explanation.

“Just say what they want you to say, I thought to myself, and get the hell out of here,” he wrote. “‘I am a substance abuser,’ I said. I got out.”

All was not despair, however. A promising quarterback, Weiland was sidelined by an injury when he discovered rock-and-roll. Inspired by the Sex Pistols, the Clash, Echo and the Bunnymen and Queen, he started his own postpunk band that made waves in Orange County before he relocated to Los Angeles.

There and in San Diego, Stone Temple Pilots — or STP, as they came to be known — coalesced. And, as grunge swept the nation — and A&R men swept the nation looking for more of it — the band signed to Atlantic Records in 1992.

“We were ecstatic, but we were also dead serious about crafting and playing the kind of self-reflective rock that we respected,” Weiland wrote. “We weren’t going to do crap; and we weren’t going to be imitators.”

Yet “Core,” STP’s debut, was widely viewed as nothing but imitation. Weiland, with a growl that came very close to that of Eddie Vedder of Pearl Jam, was the biggest target.

“Yet another ’70s-revival grunge-rock act, the Stone Temple Pilots sound like such Seattleites as Nirvana and Soundgarden, but like Pearl Jam they throw in a little R.E.M. just to be safe,” Mark Jenkins wrote in The Washington Post in 1992. “… Vaguely angry, the Pilots denounce religion, authority and apathy in their lyrics; in the album’s liner notes, the band also attacks mass-media entertainment (hmmm . . .) and the ‘dead and bloated nation of sleepwalkers.’ Their own worldview isn’t much of an alternative, though, and as a musical platform ‘Core’ could hardly be called progressive.”

MORE HERE

[Azimuth]

What a troubled soul, I hope he's at peace.

[Amy]

I loved STP! He was struggling the last time we saw them in concert. Rough lifestyle.

[Oswald2001]

A tortured soul and notorious druggie.

RIP, brother.

[Wildrice]

RIP BRO

still rocked stp on my ipod even in 2015

[Pyramid_Head]

This is just devastating...R.I.P Scott.

[Morbid75]

That is a shame. It is a very rough lifestyle.

[cloud9]

STP has been one of my favorite bands since the early 90's. I always hoped Scott would eventually overcome his demons and not end up like so many other talented musicians of that era. Very sad. RIP Scott, you'll rock on forever.

[hell_bent]

Why couldn't it be Justin Beiber!!!!

[blindguymcsqzy]

Shit... Rest in peace man...