Psychedelic Lunch

Welcome to our “Psychedelic Lunch”series, where we find out how deep the rabbit hole really goes and explore music and musicians from the 60’s to today. Enjoy the trip!

He was born Scott Kline, but his parents divorced when he was two years old. His mother changed his name to Scott Weiland after marrying Dave Weiland. Scott was never able to make a meaningful connection with his biological father, Kent Kline, and resented him for allowing his mother to change his name.

Weiland had a wildly addictive personality, which runs in his family: his uncle and his grandparents (all on his mother’s side) were alcoholics.

When he was 12 years old, he was raped by a male high school student who invited Scott to his house after school. Weiland said he repressed this memory for most of his life, but it came out during one of his rehab stints in the ’00s.

His was an alter boy in church. One of his duties was lighting candles, and later in life that became a source of comfort: he would often light candles for solace.

Weiland co-founded the Stone Temple Pilots in 1986. He was fired by the band on February 27, 2013 and replaced by Linkin Park’s Chester Bennington.

Scott Weiland joined the supergroup Velvet Revolver in 2003. The band consisted of former Guns N’ Roses members Slash, Duff McKagan, and Matt Sorum, plus Dave Kushner formerly of punk band Wasted Youth. In his autobiography Weiland admitted he wasn’t totally convinced by the initial tracks he was sent by the former members of Guns N Roses who formed the band, but warmed to the project when Duff McKagan, indicated the project could be lucrative. He wrote:

“They put some songs on a CD and my wife said: ‘They think you’ll like what they’re doing’. I didn’t it sounded like Bad Company and I never liked Bad Company. A week or so later another CD arrived with songs custom-designed for me. I wasn’t sure whether I wanted to hook up with these guys”.

“[But] Duff said: ‘There’s soundtrack stuff we’ve been asked to do, and the money’s great’. The money attracted me. I can’t call it the music of my soul. There was a certain commercial calculation behind it”.

Velvet Revolver has been on hiatus ever since Weiland’s acrimonious departure from the band in 2009.

In an interview, Weiland talked about his songwriting process and how it was consistent with each of his bands. “Every time I get together with a new group of guys and work stuff out, I want to feel the groove,” he said. “I want to feel the riffs and the beats as the song comes together. That inspires a melody, and then this overall feeling of the melody. And then it’s the song that inspires a lyrical idea.”

Scott Weiland was found dead on his tour bus on December 3, 2015 in Bloomington, Minnesota. The medical examiner determined it to be an accidental overdose of cocaine, ethanol, and methylenedioxyamphetamine. The Stone Temple Pilots frontman also had a history of asthma and multi-substance dependence, as well as atherosclerotic cardiovascular disease, which the office said may also have contributed to this death.