Rating: 4 stars (Spotlight Review)

With a helping hand from well-known, collaborative writer David Ritz, Scott Weiland penned Not Dead & Not For Sale, a memoir revealing long-exposed foreshadowing of pain and loss; though still managing to provide a glimmer of hope for a happy ending.

One of the biggest rock stars and known drug users of the past few decades, Scott Weiland had been in and out of the news in the late 1990s and early 2000s rife with a litany of offenses, including arrests for drug possession and his well-documented exit from one of his many trips to rehab.

Intending on setting the record straight, Weiland’s recounting of more than a decade of debauchery seemingly agreed with what he considered to be blown out of proportion by the media, rather than refuting it.

Despite dreams of rock and roll, Weiland was very athletic in high school. An accomplished quarterback, he would have started the season had his step-father not moved the family to a new town. While still in high school, Weiland had his first taste of incarceration after his parents found a small amount of weed and cocaine in his bedroom and had Weiland committed to a mental institution for three months. Though a connection was never made, it's possible that this event may have been the catalyst for things to come.

Despite making a concerted effort in the Liberal Arts curriculum in college, the pull of music proved to be much stronger and Weiland eventually moved to Hollywood to follow his dream full time. Although known by other names, the band that would become Stone Temple Pilots aka STP, gained quite a following in San Diego and was eventually signed by Atlantic records.

STP’s first album, the hard-hitting Core, was branded as a critical bomb, but became a run-away success, catapulting Stone Temple Pilots into rock stardom.

As the band continued to rise solidly to the top, Weiland, proclaiming his interest in the heroine culture and curious about the connection between heroine and creativity, put in his first order for China White and never looked back.

STP’s second album, Purple is a window into the real-life, escalating drug habit that Weiland and his band mates had cultivated and by which Scott was quickly being consumed. The cover of the album depicting a cherub riding a dragon past women in the clouds was borrowed from the actual logo on the package of the China White heroine.

Weiland’s drug addiction landed him his first stint in rehab in 1994. During that same time, his friend, Kurt Cobain was in a neighboring facility. But, unlike Weiland who would see rehab 12 more times in the next three years, this stay proved to be Cobain’s last. Waiting for the stark reality of the death of his friend to scare him straight, the message never came and Weiland continued to spiral out of control.

Although Weiland tells a fairly personal story, it often feels like he’s only scratching the surface—further evidenced by the abbreviated length of the book. The overall tone and voice felt muted and void of the raw emotion and visceral impact that made other rock memoirs, such as Anthony Keidis’s Scar Tissue, so riveting.

Overall, Scott Weiland does a good job of revealing his true self, or at least who he perceives himself to be. Not Dead & Not For Sale provides a peek behind the curtain at the man who fronted two of the hottest bands in music, a front row seat to the pain, loss and struggle that has formed Scott Weiland’s life..
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Hardcover: 288 pages
Publisher: Scribner (May 17, 2011)
ISBN-13: 978-0743297165