Remembering Scott Weiland, 1967-2015

Bandmates remember the singer’s powerful presence and the dark side he couldn’t escape.

- David Fricke

Two days after Scott Weiland, the former singer of Stone Temple Pilots, was found dead in his bunk on a tour bus in Bloomington, Minnesota, the band’s guitarist Dean DeLeo was in his car when the radio started blasting “Creep,” from STP’s 1992 debut album, Core. “It really hit me hard,” DeLeo says of the song, a grinding ballad of bitter surrender on which Weiland delivers the devastating hook – “I’m half the man I used to be” – with a visceral conviction.

“It took me right back to when we cut the track,” the guitarist goes on, recalling how STP – Dean, Weiland, drummer Eric Kretz and bassist Robert DeLeo, Dean’s younger brother – nailed “Creep” in one evening at Rumbo Recorders in Los Angeles. “We started after dinner and listened back to it around 11:30. We had all these candles lit in the control room. The five of us” – the band and producer Brendan O’Brien – “all looked at each other just as the song finished. We knew we had captured something.”

Dean also notes something O’Brien told him after Weiland’s death, as they reminisced about the Core sessions: “Brendan said, ‘When that cat walked up to the mic, I knew we had a hit record.’ ”