Big Empty: RIP Scott Weiland

Scott Weiland survived long enough so that his death carries no sense of doomed romance. He wasn’t cut down in his prime but during a long smeary sunset, a decline that culminated with him touring with a bunch of hired guns and playing all the cities he avoided in the ’90s. By not making it past age 48, Weiland’s passing does seem premature but it does not seem surprising. Weiland’s death seemed imminent for at least two decades — he was first busted for crack cocaine back in 1995 — but he managed to go in and out of rehab, spending a few years clean before descending back into darkness…the standard dance of an addict who never manages to shake his disease.

Rock & roll always has had its share of junkies and the ’90s were lousy with them. It was the decade of heroin chic, Trainspotting and grunge, all trends that gave the brown powder glamor and nearly every rocker who rode the dragon found some of that dangerous mystique clung to their image. Kurt Cobain and Layne Staley were painted as heirs to the throne of Keith Richards and Johnny Thunders, rebellious outlaws who found salvation in a needle, while the dabbling of Damon Albarn and Justine Frischmann was shrugged off as bohemian experimentation. Weiland never received a pass for his use. Some of that certainly stemmed from Stone Temple Pilots being seen as public enemies at the height of the alternative rock explosion, with Weiland in particular being singled out as a poseur. Such is the curse of the frontman: all the anger is channeled toward the singer at the lip of the stage.

Hailing from San Diego, a city never known as a hot spring of rock & roll, Stone Temple Pilots had no connection to the punk underground and happily chased the big brass ring, playing all the major label games on their quick road to multi-platinum super-stardom. One of the tricks Stone Temple Pilots pulled off is that they exploited sound and style of grunge, turning it into something palatable to masses who never cared one whit for tedious issues of credibility. Their 1992 debut Core hit as hard and heavy as metal but Weiland’s guttural delivery — and cryptically controversial lyrical topics — resembled Eddie Vedder, a comparison that was often delivered with a sneer in ’92 and ’93, but Pearl Jam wound up hiring STP’s producer Brendan O’Brien for their 1993 album Vs and worked with him ever since, which put the purported pioneers in the odd position of following their alleged clones. But who could blame them? Core sounded better than Ten: brawny and vibrant, shaded by weirdness lying just on the edges of the production. On Purple, Stone Temple Pilots allowed that oddness creep toward the center, letting Weiland’s taste for candied psychedelia and Bowie’s alien-pop come to the forefront. Weiland luxuriated in circular melodic hooks straight out of late ’60s Lennon, and when married to Dean DeLeo’s massive guitar riffs, the results were distinctive: tight, colorful, majestic hard rock steeped in the ’70s that nevertheless coded as alt-rock, even if no other group sounded like them on mid-’90s radio. The hits came — “Plush,” “Vasoline,” “Big Empty,” “Interstate Love Song” — but respect never followed, a situation that echoed the status of all the arena-rockers of the ’70s but Stone Temple Pilots’ rise coinciding with the temporary triumph of the American underground, so they wound up defining the role of real rock’s enemy.

To the rock cognoscenti — not just Pavement, whose dismissal of Stone Temple Pilots as “elegant bachelors” in “Range Life” seems a bit like sideways praise, but critics, other bands and many fans — STP were seen as the opposition, the embodiment of corporate rock that corrupted the underground in sake of making a buck. Those critics weren’t wrong! Stone Temple Pilots did exploit all the signifiers of underground rock — the tattoos and taboos, the ironic artwork and buried bonus tracks, the soul-baring unplugged renditions of rockers, all the moves that authentic rockers made during those early years of the Clinton administration. Stone Temple Pilots followed the same blueprint but were deemed inauthentic, likely because the group as a whole worshipped big, dumb hard rock too enthusiastically, enjoying every shopworn trope and zeroing on the cliches of grunge. Weiland shared affection for hard crunch but he also felt a gravitational pull toward toward the junky, disposable stomp of glam, the spacescapes of Ziggy Stardust, the minor key churn of psychedelic pomp and the tension between this and the DeLeo’s “meat and potatoes” rock pushed Stone Temple Pilots separated from all the other nascent active rockers and cumbersome post-rock clods: at their best — the period from Purple to Shangri-La-Dee-Da, usually only heard on the singles — they seemed lithe, nimble and a bit sexy.

Some posthumous tributes and obituaries zero in on these charms, the praise usually coalescing around 1996’s Tiny Music…Songs From The Vatican Gift Shop, a record that’s undoubtedly their best yet still not great, suffering dead ends and truncated ideas that threaten to snuff out their incandescent moments. This is where the tension between Weiland and the Deleos came to a head: the group could never find a common language they’d speak for more than three or five songs at a time. This disconnect is part of the reason the group began to splinter in the wake of Tiny Music, Weiland going on to release his 1997 solo debut 12 Bar Blues and the rest of the band regrouping with some forgotten singer for the equally forgotten (but not half bad) Talk Show, but the other problem was the drugs.

When Weiland was busted for crack in 1995, certain segments of the press almost treated the arrest as an affectation: the singer copped every other grunge move, so now he’s trying hard drugs, too. Even as the troubles piled up, Weiland’s addiction wasn’t taken seriously because he wasn’t taken seriously. It wasn’t that he wasn’t a voice of a generation like Kurt Cobain: he wasn’t viewed as a genuine artist, a’la Layne Staley. He wasn’t alone in this regard — many people didn’t take Shannon Hoon seriously either — but that roiling disdain followed Weiland throughout those initial trips to rehab in the late ’90s, when he was making the best music of his career both on his own and with STP. Like Tiny Music before it, 12 Bar Blues isn’t perfect but its misshapen glam-grunge remains fascinating: within its flaws, it’s possible to hear what Weiland wanted to achieve, some grand blend of Bowie and Lennon and the Sweet, and the failed ideas can be as are as compelling as the successes.

Maybe 12 Bar Blues didn’t gel due to its production or maybe due to Weiland’s addictions and the answer is likely not binary; the illness impeded creation. Either way, the singer reunited with his band for 1999’s No. 4 and stuck with them through 2001’s Shangri-La Dee Da, the highlights on both being among the best music the band (or Weiland) ever made: the menacing murk of “Down,” the candied “Church on Tuesday” and shimmering melancholia of “Sour Girl,” the pure pop of “Days of the Week.” Two albums were all it took for the band to fray again and even without knowing the specifics of the situation, two things were always clear: there were creative conflicts between the singer and the band, along with heavy personal baggage stemming from Weiland’s addiction and bipolar disorder, an illness that wasn’t diagnosed (or at least publicly revealed) until the 2000s but certainly affected him for years.

Whether the drugs were self-medication for the bipolar disorder or a parallel illness doesn’t matter much. During his last 15 years, Weiland battled both, sometimes surfacing for air thanks to family and loved ones, often getting sucked into the dank abyss of showbiz, his struggles apparent in his rocky creative output. Once he split from STP, he participated in the arranged marriage of Velvet Revolver, where exiled Guns N Roses members proved an inadequate foil for his serpentine charm, and once that group stumbled to an ignoble conclusion, he put out a patchy solo album (2008’s “Happy” In Galoshes) prior to an awkward 2010 STP reunion and, then, this year’s twin releases of Art Of Anarchy and the Wildabouts. He disowned AOA and in its aggro active rock, it does have an air of desperation, as if he resigned himself to singing with members of Disturbed because he had no other choice, but the Wildabouts’ Blaster often traded in the disreputable stomp that powered so much of his best work. Like all his records, Blaster barely hung together as an album, falling prey to Weiland’s usual blend of indifference, ambition and excess, crutches he leaned upon since Purple. These character flaws meant he never made one great — or even coherent — overall album but he ultimately wound up with ten or 12 great tracks along with other tantalizing and frustrating cuts that carried his unmistakable bruised, blistering psych-pop signature. Maybe he could’ve achieved more if he was clean, or if he surrounded himself with different musicians but he had a genuine chemistry with the DeLeos and Eric Kretz. Certainly, those three other Stone Temple Pilots needed him — their attempt to enlist Linkin Park’s Chester Bennington, the complete opposite of Weiland in taste and charisma, illustrated just how much — but he also needed them, for the four were expert magpies, thieving from the past and present to create trash-rock mini-masterpieces that capture the ’90s zeitgeist better than the era’s real rock precisely because they wound up cashing in on trends. But no matter how crass STP’s pander could be, there always was the sense that Weiland wanted more for himself. Maybe his intentions were muddled — his lyrics often were memorable for phrases, not linear thoughts — and maybe his debt to Bowie was so heavy it almost was a weight, but there always was an appealing questing undercurrent to his records, like he wanted something just out of his grasp. Unfortunately, whenever he found a way to grab it, he never could hold on long.