Rejecting the Theory

We worship the dead and under-appreciate the living. This comes as rock star after rock star has come out to comment and mourn the death of Scott Weiland, former lead singer of Stone Temple Pilots. Words and phrases are being thrown around like the scene in "Big" in the Italian restaurant where the cook comes out with a birthday cake and then throws dough into the mouths of Tom Hanks. It's reckless and seems death-defying to do it, but it also has its reward of making all of us not dead being able to rationalize in our heads that a) Scott Weiland is dead and b) for me, maybe I didn't appreciate him while he was on the earth.

I can definitely relate to the idea of this as the anniversary of my mother's death approaches. After all the wishes of "you are in my thoughts and prayers" become fainter and fainter, the brutal truth is that I am left with the reality that Mom is dead. I'm not saying Scott Weiland's death has now made me appreciate Mom more than anything else in the year since her death. Instead, Weiland's death has triggered in me the realization that I didn't really appreciate Mom while she walked the earth in the same way that I didn't appreciate Weiland when he walked the earth. I'm going to focus solely on Weiland's death and how it makes me feel. That may seem like an odd choice, since I brought up Mom's death anniversary, but after rereading what I wrote here, I'm not sure what else is worth saying.

I always have liked the simplistic way the Shrek character summarized himself in the first movie. While walking with Donkey, he explains that "ogres are like onions," going on to explain that ogres have many layers. It's not just ogres that have many layers. Weiland's layers are particularly interesting as more and more details come out about his life. For example, I heard a DJ on Sirius XM talk about when Weiland and Slash visited the studio in 2007 when they were both members of Velvet Revolver. The DJ said that they both smoked and that smoking is not allowed in the studio but he wasn't going to tell them they couldn't smoke. He went on to describe Weiland as a wonderful person and used the phrase "one of the greatest ever" in his impromptu eulogy.

It's good that people can share memories like that because it would be very tempting for me to dismiss Weiland's creative contributions to the world. After all, the lyrics he wrote were, I'll say it, strange and too abstract for me. I'm not planning to scour all the websites that post lyrics and then assemble all of his lyrics into a single collection and then painstakingly analyze them. I will leave that task to a die-hard STP fan.

Editor's Note: this is the first time "Stone Temple Pilots" has been used as a tag.