ARE YOU SURE SCOTT WEILAND IS SOBER NOW?

Past behavior is always the best indicator of future behavior. Which isn’t to say that people can’t change; they just usually don’t change, because, well, changing means taking a good, hard look in the mirror, admitting your faults to yourself, and then working on those faults. And most people just don’t wanna do that, ’cause, y’know. Even if the end result is good, the process kinda sucks.

Which is why I will never, ever again pay to see Stone Temple Pilots or any band featuring Scott Weiland, and why, even if I was offered a free ticket, I’d have to think long and hard about whether or not it was worth the schlep. Because watching that strung-out, off-key motherfucker try to take his coat off for five minutes is all the “performance art” I’ll never need this lifetime, thank you very much.

But Vince is a much bigger STP fan than I ever was, and I believe him that the band put on a killer show at SXSW a couple of weeks ago, and that Weiland “appeared sober.”

But I’m not convinced that Weiland actually is sober.

See, Blabbermouth had two interesting stories about Mr. Weiland over the weekend. In the first, he fell off the stage in Sioux City, Iowa:

Now, it’s possible Scotty just lost his balance, especially if he was wearing his favorite pair of Manolos or whatever the fuck that guy dresses in. He’s also still needle-thin, so it’s not out of the realm of possibility that he was knocked over by a strong gust of wind or something. But I think it’s hard for most people to see this video and not think, “Huh, I wonder if Scott is still a junkie?”

Meanwhile, less than twelve hours later, Bmouth had a second story about a concert not going so well for Mr. Weiland:

According to several eyewitness accounts from fans who attended STONE TEMPLE PILOTS‘ Milwaukee, Wisconsin concert last night (Friday, March 26) at the Eagles Ballroom, vocalist Scott Weiland forgot the words to at least a couple of the songs and seemed to be completely lost during “Dead and Bloated”, forcing his bandmates to leave the stage in apparent embarrassment and disgust.

There was some video of these events on YouTube, but they’ve been removed “due to a copyright claim,” which is bullshit, because there’s hundreds, if not thousands, of other STP cellphone vids out there (like the one above) that the band/label haven’t had pulled. (You may recall that Attack Attack! used a similar tactic to delete a video of one of their members getting hit with a bottle thrown by someone in the crowd.)

So, while, yes, this is all conjecture and it’s possible that Scotty is telling the truth when he says he “used to” take drugs, it’s also possible that Kerry King is going to be the next person to re-join Megadeth, that Glenn Beck and Noam Chomsky are about to co-author a book, and that MetalSucks is going to announce a merger with The Economist later this afternoon.

Now if you’ll excuse me, I’m gonna go shoot some heroin.

-AR