Richard Patrick On Scott Weiland’s Drug Use: ‘He Went Back To His Normal Amount & His Heart Wasn’t Ready’

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I recently conducted an interview with Filter frontman Richard Patrick for Alternative Nation at the listening party in New York for Filter’s 7th studio album, Crazy Eyes, set for release on April 8, 2016. We will be publishing this interview in parts as separate news articles, and in this article Patrick discusses what he believes killed late Stone Temple Pilots frontman Scott Weiland, and the future of Army of Anyone, his supergroup with STP’s DeLeo brothers.

With so many recent losses in the world of hard rock, what are your thoughts on the passing of Stone Temple Pilots frontman, Scott Weiland?

I mean it was expected. I’ve been in recovery for a long time and people die every other week. It’s a sad place in America right now where kids are getting hooked on heroin. They go to rehab, then they come back out and then do heroin, overdose and die. That’s why I took to the internet. It was like, “Dude, what the fuck are you doing?” in talking about it in interviews. When I got sober, it was just one voicemail that really, really stuck in my head. It was this old girlfriend going, “You are a fucking loser. You’re fucking blowing it. You’re not getting away with it. You’re a fucking asshole. You’ve treated me like shit. I’ve got one fucking word. Rehab! Go to that fucking shit.

It was so mean, but it was so like, “Wow, she’s not holding back.” It was so honest that a couple of days later, I was in rehab and that was it. When it comes to Scott, it was not a shock. It wasn’t a surprise and it’s sad because he really was amazing, but he could never just hold onto being OK with himself. He could never self-diagnose himself as a person that was just addicted. There was a week where he was sober and I had seen his last interview. He was completely lucid. He wasn’t stuttering & he wasn’t slow. I think what happened was he went back to his normal amount and killed himself because his heart wasn’t ready for it. Just from observation and from knowing addiction, it looked like he kind of fell apart, went out, did some cocaine and it was just enough to kill him.

Upon the release of 2006’s Army of Anyone record, considering your prior collaborations with the DeLeo brothers from Stone Temple Pilots and drummer Ray Luzier, what was your experience like working with them and is their potential to create music with them in the future?

It was a true band. We’d go into rehearsal hall every other day and play the music. We did the demos kind of like the way I do records, which is just write with a computer and approximate the drums, but then we rehearsed it and were a band. So, it was very much like a band experience. I had never been in a band like that, but it was cool, I love it and maybe one day we’ll do another.

Army_of_Anyone_-_Cover_-_2006         Army.Of.Anyone

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