SXSW Review and Analysis: Scott Weiland at the Parish, March 21, 2015

SXSW Review and Analysis: Scott Weiland at the Parish, March 21, 2015. 

Today marks a special milestone with SLIS: here’s our first full length post from a contributor other than myself, my good friend Dave Dierksen, who gives a refreshingly honest appraisal and commentary of Scott Weiland’s SXSW showcase. Enjoy!

I have a SXSW playbook full of guidelines. One day I will publish it to the interest of exactly no one. One of those guidelines is that you should always try to catch at least one veteran performer that you love. SXSW is primarily about discovering new music for me, but they always bring in someone from my past to sweeten the whole experience. If I can, I like to catch these artists on the last night, to serve as de facto headliners of the chaos. Toadies performing Rubberneck last year was wonderful, and John Fogerty’s Saturday performance in 2013 isn’t just my favorite SXSW performance ever, it’s probably a Top 20 all-time show for me.

So this year, probably the best option for that kind of show, certainly for this blog’s proprietor, was The Church. But for various reasons, the chief one being geography-related, I was left with Scott “well-it-should-at-least-be-interesting” Weiland.

I find it a little ironic that at a SXSW inundated with celebrated 90s revivalist projects, here we also have Weiland, whose ex-band Stone Temple Pilots was reviled for playing much the same kind of music. Of course the difference is, back then, STP was accused of being opportunistic wannabes, not reminding us of the good ol’ days.

(SIDE NOTE: Luckily for Nirvana, the Pixies weren’t that popular in 1991.)

And yes, some of the critical finger-pointing about inauthenticity was perhaps warranted, but it wasn’t the complete story either.

Did Stone Temple Pilots sound like other bands of the era? Many times yes, especially on their first record Core. But that record was released in September, 1992, barely a year after the explosion of Nevermind. STP had been a band since 1985. Now I’m not saying they were ever writing innovative material à la the Pixies, but the idea that STP was immaculately conceived from an Eddie Vedder wet dream seems a little unfair to me. I think it more likely that like many bands of that time, they were doing their thing, and that thing happened to coincide with the flavor of the moment. I’m curious how many A&R guys got stiffies the first time they heard “Sex Type Thing.”

On subsequent records, STP would step out of the grunge pit a little, mining the depths of their childhood heroes Kiss, Bowie, the Stones and Zeppelin. Sometimes egregiously so. You could knock them for ripping off the greats, but then again, you could knock a lot of their peers for the same crimes.

What I liked about STP was that unlike the bands of the day that had fairly solid sonic identities, STP kind of pulled shit from everywhere. And they really went for it too. Compare Weiland’s vocals on “Sex Type Thing” to the vox on “Plush” to the vox on “Big Bang Baby.” The dude was a vocal chameleon. You can hate on the blatant lifts from other bands, but I thought it was cool you could never pinpoint what the next track on the record was going to sound like (well, at least post-Core).

The other thing about STP – at one time, they were a great damn live band. I remember in 1993, standing in front of the stage at a tightly packed amphitheater. When they hit the stage, you could feel the crowd surge. I was suddenly very scared. Chk-chk-chk-SMACK! Snare hit on the 4 to launch hard rockin’ “Crackerman.” I was immediately lifted off the ground as the audience spontaneously exploded. My friends were gone, not to be seen until after the show. I thought I was going to die. It was awesome.

A year later, they were a much bigger band, touring the Purple record, and that show still ranks high on my list of the best I’ve ever seen. And Scott Weiland was largely responsible for that. He danced, vamped, and oozed charisma. The dude knew how to get a crowd going, and if the music wasn’t original, at least a lot of the songs were good.

Sooooooooooo…. um, twenty-one years later…

No need to rehash in detail the various drug addictions, the arrests, the lawsuits, the terrible solo album, etc. Really, for me, I just hate how Weiland derailed a maybe-not-great-but-still-pretty-good rock and roll band TWICE. Man, I feel bad for Eric Kretz and the DeLeo brothers. I don’t know much about them, but they seemed like cool dudes, and this jackass just couldn’t handle his shit.

(SIDE NOTE: As many reading this probably already know, STP has a newish singer in Linkin Park’s Chester Bennington. I initially thought it was a strange choice, but now I totally get it. Bennington is a guy who has had heaps of negativity hurled at him. I myself have disparaged Linkin Park on numerous occasions over the years, something I actually feel bad about, because life’s too short wasting your breath on bands you don’t like.

But just like STP, Linkin Park was largely derided for supposedly riding the coattails of a fad du jour (in this case, nu metal). But you know what? His band, whatever you think about them, is still successful. They’re still getting it done. This dude is a professional. He never let the lifestyle derail his band’s success. How refreshing must that be for STP after living with Scott Weiland for so long? It also makes good business sense because I don’t think anyone cares about Stone Temple Pilots without Scott Weiland (see Talk Show).

BUT, Bennington has a built-in fan base that might bring new fans to the STP fold and at least keep them afloat. And as for Bennington, you know he’s not doing this for the money, which means he genuinely loves this band. He actually has a passion for the music. This relationship is about as much a win-win as you can pull out of the Weiland wreckage).

And we’re back!

Millions of miles upon millions of miles of snark-infested commentary have been written about Scott Weiland. I added a few inches myself in the hours before his showcase at the Parish, cracking jokes via text about what was sure to be something far from stellar. And while I generally hate snark because it’s just too easy to throw at the wall in lieu of legit criticism, the guy has become hard to root for.

But here’s the deal. While I expected the show to be bad (a rat couldn’t limbo under the bar I set), I honestly didn’t want it to be bad. I don’t go to events hoping they’ll suck. And I also think this culture’s rubbernecking of celebrity meltdowns doesn’t speak well to us as a species. I genuinely set the bar so low with the hopes that my expectations would be greatly exceeded. That the new solo material would be badass. That I’d get to hear a few old songs I used to love. That I’d get the old school on-stage Scott Weiland and forget, at least for a brief moment, about his off-stage dip-shittery.

And now after the fact, I wish the show had been terrible. I wish it had gone off the rails with Weiland stripping naked and throwing feces at the crowd. Full disclosure: I didn’t stay until the end, so this might have happened. And if you feel that a review of a show at which I didn’t stay until the end seems unethical, then I apologize. But I just couldn’t do it – explanation to follow.

It’s sad and oddly fitting that this will likely be the last time I see Scott Weiland perform live, and that he opened the show with “Crackerman.” I think it goes without saying that the crowd didn’t spontaneously explode. And nor would it be fair to expect that of an aging crowd consisting of old STP fans and the aforementioned rubberneckers. But never would I have expected such a joyless, workmanlike performance of such a highly energetic song. Did he sing through the megaphone? Yes, of course, but it appeared to pain him. The megaphone was always a gimmick, but Weiland used to sell it with aplomb. Now it looks silly, because Weiland looks like he himself feels silly holding it.

And his voice. There was always a sneer to the “Roooaaaamin, rooooooamin home” refrain of “Crackerman”, but on this night it came out nasally and obnoxiously over-the-top. I wondered if he was trolling us from the get go (and by trolling, I mean both the newer slang version of the word as well as the more traditional monster-under-the-bridge meaning).

I can’t provide you a play-by-play of the new material because doing so would require a super human ability to remember what basically boils down to the audio equivalent of under-cooked gruel.

With one exception. One of the new songs’ riffs was so close to that of “Sex Type Thing” that I saw heads across the audience turning in puzzlement, like a herd of Boston Terriers confused by the cries of an infant. Maybe John Fogerty can rip his old songs off and get away with it, but Scott Weiland ripping off his old band – one that wasn’t all that original to begin with – just looked cheap and easy.

As the set continued with passionless, clichéd choreography, I imagined the wiry Weiland tuning us all out, getting lost in his own head, where the words of the Talking Heads became a mantra: “Same as it ever was. Same as it ever was.” During a particularly butchered version of “Big Bang Baby”, I watched the bored look of his bandmates, hilariously dubbed The Wildabouts. What were they thinking? Maybe something along the lines of, “Keep going. You have mouths to feed.” Or maybe it was just an off-night. Hard to say.

I reckon it was about seven songs into the set when Weiland somberly joked: “Here’s a song you all don’t know because we wrote it this morning.” They launched into “Vasoline,” one of the few STP songs that could actually be described as sounding like STP and not anyone else. I admit it was a brief glimmer of life among a sea of lowlights. It was the one song where Weiland at least seemed sort of engaged.

But after that came the “unplugged” portion of the set, where all the bandmates took up seats and grabbed acoustic guitars. Weiland sat on a stool, blankly pointed down, and said, “This is the rocking chair.” Now I can’t say definitively what he meant by that statement; I can only give my own interpretation. What I thought he was referencing was the big rocking chair he sat in during the band’s MTV Unplugged appearance. To me, I was hearing, “Remember this? Remember that time I was a big rock star, and I was on MTV and sat in this cool rocking chair while playing our big hits? And now this is where I’m at. No more rocking chair.” Maybe I’m overthinking it, but it still depressed me. They began a song called “Circles,” a title as forgettable as the song itself.

And that’s when I looked at the time and realized an artist I actually really cared about was minutes away from starting her set a couple of blocks away. So I left to see something that actually felt vital. I didn’t care, and was in fact glad, that I wouldn’t hear any more lifeless new songs or good old songs forced through the shredder of indifference. I wish it had been terrible. At least that would have felt more like rock and roll.

— David Dierksen

Thanks to Dave for a killer piece. For more SLIS SXSW coverage, click here for my Failure Yahoo Showcase review, and click here for my review of The Church at Emo’s.