“If we really want to keep going with Scott,” he adds with a wounded but determined tone, “we have to be prepared for this.”Ī month earlier, sitting in the backstage catering room of Bryce Jordan Center, in State College, Pa., an hour before he’s due onstage with STP, Scott Weiland devours two steaks, a small mountain of vegetables and a Gargantuan helping of apple pie à la mode with the vigor and speed–10 minutes, tops–of someone whose only serious addiction is eating. You’ve been granted all the things in life you want to do, and when one person pulls the rug out from under you, it’s the worst. “Instead of Scott doing a run and selling his shoes for another hit, he called me.” Still, Dean says, “when you’ve got a person like this in your life, it’s hard. “This relapse wasn’t like past relapses,” Dean agrees.
“At that point, there wasn’t that type of communication that we have now. “It is a lot different than it was eight months ago,” Stewart insists. Looking back on it, I think he was really reaching out. “He indicated that things weren’t 100 percent,” Stewart says. And he wasn’t.”Īfter he spoke to Dean, Weiland also called Stone Temple Pilots’ manager, Steve Stewart. But the worst thing is that he could have been dead. “But the way it went down, it was much better than it could have been,” he suggests hopefully. But the whole camaraderie, the laughter, the music–it all hangs by a thread. “The last six weeks we had were so beautiful,” says Dean, 35. It was as if the long nightmare of Weiland’s addiction and the precarious state of the band’s career–Weiland’s arrest, in May 1995, on drug-possession charges his repeated attempts to get straight the tense recording sessions and scuttled tour plans–was finally passing away. On the road for the first time since 1994, STP were getting the best reviews of their career and seemed to be genuinely enjoying each other’s company, onstage and off. 14, in Cleveland, the band had wrapped up a successful 29-date stretch. We were bringing wives and family of the crew over to Hawaii for those shows.” What made it worse, Dean points out, was how well everything had been going right up to the point when he picked up that phone. “We had 30,000 fans we let down,” laments Dean, referring to the Alaska and Hawaii dates. 29 club show in Vancouver–a surprise “blind date” appearance promoted by Molson Breweries–had already been canceled because of a severe winter storm there.) Plans for more STP gigs, to begin in late February, were put on hold. The rest of STP–Dean DeLeo, drummer Eric Kretz and Dean’s younger brother, bassist Robert DeLeo–had no choice but to cancel the Anchorage show and two concerts scheduled for the following weekend, in Hawaii. By his own count, Weiland had already been in and out of drug-rehab programs 13 times in the last three years. 30, on his own volition, Weiland–a recent alumnus of the Impact Alcohol and Drug Treatment Center, in Pasadena, Califorinia–checked into an undisclosed rehabilitation facility. He said, ‘I’m going into treatment.’ I said, ‘I’d love to believe that.’ And on Monday, he checked himself in.” On Dec. “When I talked to him, I could hear his condition.
“Scott called and said, ‘I’m fucking up–I need help,'” DeLeo, the group’s guitarist, recalls grimly a few days later. After six weeks on tour with STP and more than six months of staying clean, of successfully fighting the dark urges that had once sucked him into the black hole of heroin addiction, Weiland, STP’s 29-year-old singer, had fallen off the wagon–hard. 29, shortly before Stone Temple Pilots were supposed to fly to Anchorage, Alaska, for a New Year’s Eve show. Dean DeLeo got the phone call at his Southern California home on Sunday, Dec.
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