Scott Weiland, singer with Stone Temple Pilots and formerly of Velvet Revolver, has let it all pour forth in his new autobiography Not Dead & Not for Sale, including details of his being raped as a child, his drug addiction and his encounters with Courtney Love.
Spin feature some choice cuts from the book, which is published through Scribner and in partnership with author David Ritz.
The rape occurred when Weiland was 12 years old and living in Ohio. He writes that a “big muscular guy, a high school senior… [who] rode the bus with me every day to school… invited me to his house. The dude raped me. It was quick, not pleasant. I was too scared to tell anyone. ‘Tell anyone,’ he warned, ‘and you’ll never have another friend in this school. I’ll ruin your fuckin’ reputation.’ … This is a memory I suppressed until only a few years ago when, in rehab, it came flooding back. Therapy will do that to you.”
On his drug problems re-emerging while on tour with Velvet Revolver, he said, “I was running wild during the second Velvet Revolver tour [in 2007]… At the beginning of the tour, I was okay, but then a single line of coke in England did the trick. I snorted it. And soon the demons were back. Thus began another decline… I was out there again, going to dangerous places to buy substances. All this was done in secret; the guys in Velvet Revolver didn’t know I was using. When I told the guys that we’d have to miss a couple of gigs because I needed treatment, their reaction shocked me. They told me I’d have to pay them for those cancellations – in full. I reminded them that when they had relapsed and needed rehab, I had supported them completely. It made no difference to them…. It didn’t matter that Velvet Revolver had sold some five or six million records. I was out.”
Weiland crossed paths with Courtney Love at a Los Angeles hotel in his Pilots days, inevitably through their common interest in drugs. He writes, “She [Love] was with Amanda de Cadenet, the photographer/socialite. As fate would have it, their room was next to mine. That night Courtney and I got high as she and Amanda dressed for dinner at the home of Jack Nicholson. For a while, Ms. Love inserted herself into my ever-more-erratic story. We were never lovers but were rather close at the start.”
