Not Dead & Not For Sale by Scott Weiland Read Free Book Online

success. We were ecstatic, but we were also dead serious about crafting and playing the kind of selfreflective rock that we respected. We weren’t going to do crap; and we weren’t going to be imitators. We thought we had an original voice, original stories, and an original sound. We wanted to get to the essential elements of what we were all about—the core of our music—so we called the record Core . We had merged our musical sensibilities and forged something new. Of course we had influences—the Stones, Pink Floyd, Metallica, the Beatles, Zep, and a dozen other bands. But the whole of STP turned out to be far greater than the sum of our parts; it turned out to be visceral—a little strange, sometimes lyrical, and always intense. We loved Core .

    The critics hated it; the critics pulverized us; the critics loved pulverizing us. Today, I can talk about the critics’ murderous response to our work with a certain distance. Today, I don’t give a shit. But back then, I cared. I was a serious musician looking for serious critics to take us seriously. Robert, Eric, and especially Dean, who was superserious about rock history, felt the same. So when the writers dumped on us, it was a definite drag. I actually called Danny Goldberg, the president of Atlantic, to explain my plight and point. He said, “Don’t worry. I used to be the publicist for Zeppelin, and, for their first years, it was the same for them. Now look at how they’re viewed—as legends.”
    Critical flop but commercial smash—that’s the story of Core . The record started selling, and, some eight million copies later, has never stopped. Neither did the critics stop criticizing. “Sex Type Thing,” a big hit single off the record, was characterized by some closed-minded morons as a date-rape song. Some actually said that we were promoting date rape. Because the song was written in the voice of the deranged character, there were critics who presumed I was that character. That’s like saying that there’s no difference between a first-person character created by a writer and the writer himself. The assumption is ridiculous. I wanted to point out the craziness of that criticism, so before getting out onstage and performing “Sex Type Thing,” I smeared lipstick across my mouth and slipped on a dress.
    It was a big moment. After MTV’s Spring Break , we flew across the pond for a couple of days of promotion and concerts. The drag version of “Sex Type Thing” became performance art. After a few bars of the song clicked in, we saw the openmouthed, wide-eyed looks from all the shirtless macho men in the crowd. But then, even though I’m not sure those guys got our irony, they started slam dancing, moshing, and crowd surfing—a big hint that we were beginning to make waves. We felt justified. Our message was getting across…AMEN!

    Halloween night. As you can see, I’m the one who looks like Cheryl Tiegs.

1992 . WE WERE TOURING AND “SEX TYPE THING” was out as a single. The tour consisted of us taking turns driving an RV while crisscrossing the country playing small clubs. Our first show was in Orange County with my Huntington Beach friends cheering me on. On my twenty-fourth birthday, we were in the middle of nowhere, so we camped out for the night. Robert made us tuna burgers, we got crazy drunk, and had a ball. The world was still young and fresh. We were still indestructible.
    Sometimes at our concerts we got concerned at the number of skinheads in the crowd. I hated that. They weren’t who we wanted to perform for. Whatever energy we were exerting was not meant to stimulate them. “If you don’t want this vibe,” I’d say, “go to a Pantera concert.”
    In New York, where we didn’t have much of a following, we played at a place called the Bank at Houston and Ludlow. A few years later I’d be scoring dope at that very corner. But for now, we were just trying to score with the music industry. Metal radio was playing us—“Sex