The Rolling Stone Music Now podcast have released a previously unheard interview with late Stone Temple Pilots and Velvet Revolver frontman Scott Weiland to mark the two year anniversary of his death. In the introduction the host of the podcast mentions the eerie feeling of the interview, as Weiland frequently discusses death and drugs. The interview was conducted around the release of Velvet Revolver’s Libertad in 2007. Alternative Nation transcribed Weiland discussing his brother’s death.
“All I was doing was running from the responsibilities of being a father and being a husband. All I wanted the most was to finally be a man, but it was so hard to take that step, and begin that journey.
I felt like I was trapped in this eternal Peter Pan complex, and I really think being in a band, especially once you become a celebrity, it sort of enables you to stay in that mode, and to not accept responsibilities for your actions. If you’re making money for other people, why not? Rock stars are expected to fuck up and that, which is cool. There are certain parts, I don’t really regret anything I did, except for the emotional injury that I caused other people.
It really came crashing through when my brother died, seeing the reality and finality of it all, and how crushed I was, and how crushed my mother and my father were. They had to deal with that on a daily basis, the potential fear of that happening to either one of us for years. My wife as well, anytime that could happen to the father of our children. But when that happened to my brother, it all seemed horrifically real.
I always kind of felt I was unbreakable, like I was a cockroach or something. I could outlive an atomic bomb. When I got the call that a friend of my brother’s had found him dead, and I had to come over there because the police were over there. I saw him lying in his bed, I had to identify his body, and he had gone through and lived through the same sort of situations that I had. He lived through OD’s, he’d been busted, and made it through numerous arrests without going to prison. There it was, it was final. You can’t get any more real than that.”
