Scott Weiland died on December 3, 2015, in Bloomington, Minnesota, at 48. He was touring with Scott Weiland & The Wildabouts, whose debut album, Blaster, had arrived earlier that year. It was another chapter in a career built around writing and recording with different musicians, from Stone Temple Pilots to Velvet Revolver.
Stone Temple Pilots’ 1992 debut, Core, grew out of songs the band had already developed through its live work. Looking back for The Skinny in 2010, Weiland recalled making demos in their own studio and selling them at shows. Recording for a major label with producer Brendan O’Brien was a new experience, but the songs reflected a band that had spent plenty of time playing together. “Plush” earned Best Hard Rock Performance With Vocal at the 1994 Grammys.
For 1994’s Purple, Weiland and his bandmates wanted to expand what STP could do. “Interstate Love Song” captured how quickly their writing partnership could work. In a March 2015 interview with LA Weekly, he recalled Robert DeLeo bringing the song’s foundation into a Hollywood rehearsal room. “I came up with the melody right away,” Weiland said. He estimated that they finished the song in roughly 90 minutes.
The changes continued on Tiny Music… Songs from the Vatican Gift Shop in 1996. The musicians moved into a mansion to live and record together, pursuing a less polished approach. Discussing “Big Bang Baby” with Classic Rock in 2015, Weiland pointed to the band’s glam influences and the humor in both the song and its video. He also singled out “Art School Girl” as playful. In 1998, he took on more of the playing and production himself for 12 Bar Blues, his solo debut. Weiland co-produced it and contributed guitar, bass and keyboards. “Barbarella” began with a four-track recorder and a beat he programmed on an inexpensive drum machine, he told Classic Rock. The demo then became the basis for a fuller studio recording, extending his work beyond the lead vocals listeners knew from STP.
Weiland joined Velvet Revolver in 2003, and the group’s debut, Contraband, reached No. 1 on the Billboard 200 in 2004. “Slither” brought him another Grammy when the band won Best Hard Rock Performance in 2005. A second album, Libertad, followed in 2007, completing the two studio albums he recorded with the group.
He reunited with Stone Temple Pilots in 2008 and sang on their self-titled 2010 album, the sixth studio record they made together. Explaining his approach to The Skinny, he described wanting to tell stories while leaving listeners room to find their own meanings in his lyrics.
With the Wildabouts, he kept making deliberate choices about how a record should sound. Discussing Blaster with LA Weekly, Weiland explained that the group experimented with fuzz pedals from different eras and let those textures shape the riffs. He described the album in terms of garage rock and glam. When asked which tracks he would put alongside his earlier work, he named “Circles,” “Modzilla” and “Way She Moves.”
