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Scott Weiland on Rape, Heroin, and Courtney Love

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In Scott Weiland’s new memoir Not Dead & Not For Sale, the 43-year-old Stone Temple Pilots singer reveals some vivid details about his personal life and musical career, including the breakup of Velvet Revolver, shooting heroin with Courtney Love, and admitting that he was raped when he was 12 years old. Here are five revelations from the book:

On Being Raped:
When Weiland was 12 years old and living in Ohio, he says 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.’ Adds Weiland, “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 Velvet Revolver’s ‘Commercial Calculation’:
Weiland admits to joining the band for financial gain. Guns N’ Roses members Slash, Duff McKagan, and Matt Sorum, plus guitarist Dave Kushner, “put some songs on a CD [for me] … it sounded like Bad Company and I never liked Bad Company. A week or so later another CD arrived with songs custom-designed for me… I wasn’t sure whether I wanted to hook up with these guys. Duff said, ‘There’s soundtrack stuff we’ve been asked to do, and the money’s great.’ The money attracted me. [But] I can’t call it the music of my soul. There was a certain commercial calculation behind it. Velvet Revolver was essentially a manufactured product… we came out of necessity, not artistic purpose.”

On Velvet Revolver’s Breakup:
“I was running wild during the second Velvet Revolver tour [in 2007],” writes Weiland. “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.”

On Courtney Love:
After a fight with his first wife, which resulted in Weiland leaping from a moving car to score heroin, he ended up at the Chateau Marmont hotel in Los Angeles. “That’s where I ran into another one of my dealer’s best customers, Courtney Love,” he writes. “She 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.”

On Early STP Tour & First Experience With Heroin:
“We were back in the States, still promoting Core,” Weiland writes, “this time on tour with Butthole Surfers, Flaming Lips, Firehose, and Basehead. This was the Barbecue Mitzvah Tour.” The gang rolled into New York City and “a few of the musicians had put in their orders for bags of China White,” and Weiland — who “couldn’t see himself passing up the delicacies that came with being a rock star” — put in his, too. That night STP dressed as Kiss at their show and Weiland snorted his first line before going onstage: “The opiate took me to where I’d always dreamed of going. I can’t name the place, but I can say that I was undisturbed and unafraid, a free-floating man in a space without demons and doubts.”