Scott Weiland is Countersuing Stone Temple Pilots

If you’ve never been fortunate enough to be a privy to an entertainment business lawsuit, allow me to illuminate for you the manner in which it occurs:

• Party A says “You’re a stupid poo-poo face and you owe me money.”
• Party B says “Now YOU’RE a stupid poo-poo face YOU owe ME money.”
• They settle out of court.
• The lawyers, who charge you one of your offspring for every billable hour, walk away making more money than anyone else involved in the suit.
• The end.

So. The remaining members of the Stone Temple Pilots — Dean DeLeo, Robert DeLeo, and Eric Kretz — brought a lawsuit against former vocalist Scott Weiland last week, basically alleging that he’s a huge bag of dicks and owes them unspecified damages (although, after reading the complaint, it seems like the smallest amount he’d pay would be somewhere in the range of $3 million); now Noisecreep reports that Weiland is playing his part in this little dance and countersuing, “seeking compensatory damages of more than $5 million, along with statutory damages of up to $2 million for each ‘willful use’ of the Stone Temple Pilots name ‘per mark, per type of goods or services sold, offered for sale or distributed.’” Weiland’s countersuit argues —

“How do you expel a man from a band that he started, named, sang lead on every song, wrote the lyrics and was the face of for 20 years and then try to grab the name and goodwill for yourselves? You don’t, but three of the instrumentalists in Stone Temple Pilots tried.”

On a practical level this is a patently ridiculous claim, because bands fire their longtime lead singers (and longtime everything else for that matter) all the time. Also I may be imagining this, but it seems like patting himself on the back for singing and writing lyrics and then calling the other members of the band “instrumentalists” somehow implies that the vocalist is the most important part of any band, which is exactly how a vocalist would think. But the DeLeos and Kretz could just as easily point out that Weiland never wrote a note of music in the band’s career and they’d be just as right; it’s kind of a chicken-and-the-egg argument that can only be settled in the future, when we see which of the two sides manages to have a more successful career (financially speaking) than the other.

But like I said, dollars to doughnuts there will be some sort of out-of-court settlement. Of course, if we’re really lucky, we’ll end up with two separate versions of Stone Temple Pilots. If there’s one thing that’s always good for a laugh, it’s when two bands use the same name.