Scott Weiland’s known for his susceptibility to fame whoring, with varying intensity in tandem with the depth of his drug use at the time. In his new memoir Not Dead & Not For Sale, the Stone Temple Pilots singer and ex-Velvet Revolver frontman reveals some disturbingly candid details about his personal life and musical career to push that paper. These revelations include his real reason for joining Velvet Revolver (money), his heroin hijinks with Courtney “I’m not crazy!” Love and a story about being raped when he was 12 years old.
It’s a tragically ugly point in the arc of substance-addled celebrity when the star cannibalizes his own image and pulls the curtain all the way back to show the warts-and-all faux-wizard working the controls. It was only a matter of time before Weiland took his next step to the cash-cow slaughterhouse, but it strikes this particular Rock fan as cheap & sleazy that the man would choose this purgatorial point in his career to share such bizarre secrets.
A few quotable Weiland excerpts from the book:
On Being Raped:
As a 12 year-old kid in Ohio, Weiland says a “big muscular guy, a high school senior… rode the bus with me every day to school… invited me to his house. The dude raped me. It was quick, not pleasant. I was too scared to tell anyone. ‘Tell anyone,’ he warned, ‘and you’ll never have another friend in this school. I’ll ruin your fuckin’ reputation.’ Adds Weiland, “This is a memory I suppressed until only a few years ago when, in rehab, it came flooding back. Therapy will do that to you.”
On Velvet Revolver’s ‘Commercial Calculation’:
Scott took the frontman job for money, plain and simple. The band “put some songs on a CD [for me] … 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. Duff said, ‘There’s soundtrack stuff we’ve been asked to do, and the money’s great.’ The money attracted me. [But] I can’t call it the music of my soul. There was a certain commercial calculation behind it. Velvet Revolver was essentially a manufactured product… we came out of necessity, not artistic purpose.”
How Velvet Revolver wasn’t as compassionate about his drug abuse as he’d have hoped:
“I was running wild during the second Velvet Revolver tour [in 2007],” writes Weiland. “At the beginning of the tour, I was okay, but then a single line of coke in England did the trick. I snorted it. And soon the demons were back. Thus began another decline… I was out there again, going to dangerous places to buy substances. All this was done in secret; the guys in Velvet Revolver didn’t know I was using. When I told the guys that we’d have to miss a couple of gigs because I needed treatment, their reaction shocked me. They told me I’d have to pay them for those cancellations — in full. I reminded them that when they had relapsed and needed rehab, I had supported them completely. It made no difference to them…. It didn’t matter that Velvet Revolver had sold some five or six million records. I was out.”
On Courtney Love:
Weiland was so completely jacked in his addiction that he leaped from a moving car to score heroin, and ended up at the Chateau Marmont hotel in Los Angeles. “That’s where I ran into another one of my dealer’s best customers, Courtney Love,” he writes. “She was with Amanda de Cadenet, the photographer/socialite. As fate would have it, their room was next to mine. That night Courtney and I got high as she and Amanda dressed for dinner at the home of Jack Nicholson. For a while, Ms. Love inserted herself into my ever-more-erratic story. We were never lovers but were rather close at the start.”
Once you’ve had a shower and washed that grime off of you, many more doses of Rock N Roll manipulation and debauchery can be found in Not Dead & Not For Sale.
