When the World Loses a Voice

 

"The world was losing its voices—the ones that mattered anyway."

 When I heard that rock singer Scott Weiland had been found dead on his tour bus, I immediately thought of the above line from a short story I wrote on the day Norman Mailer died. Weiland’s cause of death was cardiac arrest. He was 48.

Like many music lovers, I was thrilled when pop music began to give way to alternative music, especially grunge, in the early Nineties, and the band Scott Weiland fronted was an important part of that movement. The first song by Stone Temple Pilots that I remember hearing was “Plush” (1993). It showcased Weiland’s throaty vocals and was one of a string of hits I would hear countless times on local alternative radio stations in the years to come.

 

Weiland’s voice was one that established a place in my life. Soon after STP’s sophomore album Purple (1994) came out, a friend and I ducked out of a church sleepover--after a day of tearing down houses destroyed by flooding--to go see STP at the state fair. Those were the days when they would bring out a couch, rocking chair, side table and lamp for a cozy acoustic set midway through the show. Laid-back. Stripped down. Just chilling. This was part of the zeitgeist.

And it was exquisite.

Not long before, the world had lost another one of its voices when Kurt Cobain committed suicide by shooting himself in the head with a shotgun. I was sitting with friends in a college lounge when another friend (the guitarist in a band for which I tried to and occasionally succeeded at playing drums) came in and told us the news. We were all shocked, but Cobain had been a personal hero for him, so he took it the hardest.

It’s a moment I’ll never forget, just like I’ll never forget the first time I heard “Smells Like Teen Spirit.” In my corner of the world, Nirvana had yet to break when the song was released in 1991, but MTV had a late-night program which I remember showing videos for The Posies, Frank Black and others, many of whom would soon be eclipsed in the public eye by bands like Stone Temple Pilots, Pearl Jam, Soundgarden, Smashing Pumpkins and Nirvana.

It was on this program that I first heard and saw the video for “Smells Like Teen Spirit,” and it resonated with a rebellious streak in me. My high school’s dances were quaint affairs in the gym, with oldies like “Unchained Melody” by The Righteous Brothers getting the couples out on the floor. Good memories, but “Smells Like Teen Spirit,” with its fuzzy guitars, banging drums, mumbled lyrics, smoky atmosphere, creepy janitor and anarchy cheerleaders delivered a subversive thrill.

Cobain may have mumbled many of his lyrics as if he didn’t give a fuck, but as his life and death showed, he gave too much of one, something which I suspect was also true of another tragic hero from those days. Alice in Chains is probably my favorite of the bands I’m mentioning in this post, so it was lead singer Lane Staley’s death by drug overdose in 2002 that most deeply affected me. By then, I was a working adult and felt like an important piece of my youth had chipped and fallen away.

Staley’s voice had been with me since I had picked up Facelift (1990) on cassette from the local music hole-in-the-wall one day while out trekking around town with a friend. Soon after, AIC played second to last on the main stage at Lollapalooza (previous post). The band was just beginning to perform songs from its second studio album Dirt (1992). On the heavier songs, sweaty masses seethed on the hill behind where I sat with a couple friends, and a constant barrage of tossed bottles and other refuse arced back and forth overhead.

The point of these recollections is that Cobain, Stayley and Weiland were a part of my life, and depending on your music tastes, may have been an important part of yours, too. That’s why their deaths affect us so much and we offer tributes to them on social media, even though we know their lifestyles were often less than model.

 

Weiland’s troubles with alcohol and drugs, and his shaky relationships with bandmates, are well documented. His family life was also troubled. Immediately after his death, his ex-wife Mary Forsberg Weiland wrote a piece for Rolling Stone cautioning against glorifying his death:

"In reality, what you [the fans] didn't want to acknowledge was a paranoid man who couldn't remember his own lyrics and who was only photographed with his children a handful of times in 15 years of fatherhood."

Nonetheless, glorify we will. We will celebrate troubled artists in all fields--Jack Kerouac and David Foster Wallace, Jackson Pollock and Mark Rothko, Marilyn Monroe and Heath Ledger, Amy Winehouse and Scott Weiland. But hopefully we will celebrate them not as saints but as flawed individuals who brought beauty into the world, a beauty that entered our lives.

So, when the world loses voices that you love, post R.I.P. messages on social media, buy a T-shirt, download an album, or find some other way to pay tribute--for you celebrate your own life as well as theirs.