Stone Temple Pilots members Robert and Dean DeLeo were interviewed on the Covino and Rich show last year, and the interview has finally been uploaded to YouTube. The surviving STP members discussed the legendary Scott Weiland.
Robert said he got ‘a little teary’ when the hosts played the STP classic “Wonderful.”
Dean said, “[Scott Weiland] was just extraordinary, he was great. I’m not so concerned what anyone else thinks, but for me, he was one of the greats. He was one of the very best.”
When asked about Weiland’s struggles, Dean was very honest.
“I’ll tell you what man, Scott just kept getting deeper and deeper, and farther and farther. I think Robert, Eric, and I were the three people in his life that didn’t co-sign his jive any longer. We were the last people he wanted to be around, so the separation just got farther and farther, the communication broke down more and more. Really, our relationship was very strained from, I don’t know, 2009. When we got back together, the first year went pretty well, he was really somewhat on his game, but you could see he was struggling.”
He added, “It just kept getting more and more out of control. Look, I joined the band in 1989 man, I think we spent half of our lives shoulder to shoulder, experiencing the best of the best, and the worst of the worst.”
“We spent half our lives trying. 20 years, it starts creeping into my home, into my family’s life, that jive. I become really miserable.”
Robert said, “I think addiction doesn’t lead you to honesty and the truth from other people, you kind of run from that, that’s what kind of happened. I think when you look at our history of touring, we toured Purple for only 4 months. It was 4 months of touring, then Tiny Music, the next record, it was 6 weeks, because we refused to go out there, he wasn’t in a condition to go out there and do that, we wanted to see him better. We didn’t take it out on the road and say, let’s beat it to [death], look what happened.”
Dean was asked what his initial reaction was when he first heard the news of Scott’s passing in December 2015.
“It was a different feeling hearing that news about Scott that night. I was actually in the studio, and I was away from my phone because I had a guitar in my hand most of the evening, and I looked down at my phone, and I literally had like 40 texts: ‘Is this true?’ I looked at it, and it was really like nothing I had ever experienced. It was like a piece of me fell out.”
The hosts then asked if they had considered reuniting with Weiland in 2015 during the brief period after Chester Bennington left the band and Weiland was still alive. Dean DeLeo adamantly said no.
“No, I think Scott did irreparable damage. I mean guys, look what you’re saying here, he’s dead. He killed himself. Everything that we could possibly say is irrelevant and a hypothetical. Scott was incapable of being the singer of this band, he was gone man.”
