David de Sola's Blog, page 7

Scott Weiland Remembered

Some sad news breaking late last night: ex-Stone Temple Pilots and Velvet Revolver lead singer Scott Weiland was found dead on his tour bus in Minnesota. He was 48 years old.

He had been touring with a backing band the Wildabouts for the past several months in support of his most recent solo album. In an interview recorded about two weeks ago, Scott floated the possibility of a Stone Temple Pilots or Velvet Revolver reunion, although it’s unclear how likely the prospects were for either, given Scott’s messy departure from STP in 2013 and the subsequent lawsuit.

Scott’s drug issues were well documented over the years.  Having covered similar territory in my Alice in Chains book, it’s sad to think of what he went through and what a struggle it must have been to get and stay clean. There is no official cause of death yet, so I won’t speculate on what (if any) role they might have played.

I was fortunate to have met Scott once several years ago. I was in Miami for a few days in October of 2001 (I remember the date very well because the DC Sniper shootings started while I was there) and staying at a hotel in South Beach.  The night before I was supposed to fly back to Washington DC, I saw a tour bus parked outside the hotel across the street from mine. I walked over to see what was going on, and saw Scott, sitting on a chair outside the main entrance smoking a cigarette with his shirt unbuttoned looking very casual.  I walked over to him and introduced myself.  He was very nice, and told me he and the band were in town to play a surprise show on the beach the next day which was going to be announced on local radio. Unfortunately I was not able to go to the show.  I think they were touring in support of the Shangri-La Dee Da album.  The band broke up or went on hiatus about a year later, after which Scott joined Velvet Revolver.

My condolences to his family, friends and band mates (current and former).

 

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Ben Carson and the Fog of Memory

The Huffington Post published this article I wrote over the weekend.  Worth keeping in mind as (I suspect) news organizations devote more resources to confirm or debunk stories he has told about his life over the years.

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Investigative Reporting Goes To The Movies

This afternoon, I went to a screening of Spotlight, the new Thomas McCarthy movie about the investigative team at the Boston Globe which broke the Catholic Church sex abuse scandal in 2002, reporting for which the paper ultimately won the Pulitzer Prize.

The subject matter is difficult to hear, but the cast and production team  of the film do an excellent job in showing the process by which the journalistic sausage is made.  It’s not easy, or glamorous.  It’s tedious, time-consuming work which can test the patience of anyone. There are lots of phone calls, meetings, and knocks on doors with potential sources which in many cases are met with outright hostility.  The role of the courts and the paper’s ability to get previously sealed but ultimately incriminating documents cannot be overstated. Though the film focuses on the Globe’s initial report about John Geoghan – the rogue priest whose misdeeds the paper is trying to expose – and the Catholic Church’s institutional failings in dealing with the Geoghan problem, the movie, as well as the Globe’s own reporting demonstrate that this was a wider systemic problem within the church.

Spotlight is the best movie about journalism since All the President’s Men, a film to which it can trace a direct and indirect line of descent.  Both stories and movies involve Ben Bradlee (the father in All the President’s Men, his namesake son in Spotlight) and deal with the editorial, legal and ethical dilemmas facing journalists. The sense of tension and paranoia is greater in All the President’s Men, but that was because the stakes and nature of the wrongdoing were so much higher. In Spotlight, the team’s biggest concern is keeping their journalistic enterprise a secret from the rest of the newspaper as well as the broader community at large, due to the sensitive and ultimately explosive nature of the subject material. The other thing the film captures well is the slow but gradually growing sense of horror and revulsion at the scope and scale of the scandal that the team is uncovering, and the little ways in which their findings begin to affect their personal lives.  I wouldn’t be surprised if seeing it on the big screen forces some of the people who lived the story in some capacity or other to revisit those feelings, whether they want to or not.

All in all, it’s an excellent film well worth watching.  I’ll be curious to see how it fares during awards season early next year.

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Dog Album 20

Alice in Chains (aka Tripod, aka The Dog Album) was released 20 years ago today. (h/t Mark Yarm)

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DC Book Signing

For those of you in the Washington DC area, I’ll be doing a talk and book signing at 6:30 p.m. at Busboys and Poets on Wednesday, September 23.  Hope to see you there!

Busboys and Poets

2021 14th Street NW

Washington DC 20009

 

 

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PMRC 30

Rolling Stone published an interview with Tipper Gore on the occasion of the thirtieth anniversary of the infamous PMRC hearing before the Senate Committee on Commerce, Science and Transportation on the subject of explicit subject matter in popular music.  I briefly touched on this subject in my book:

A few weeks after the hearing, Layne Staley and Johnny Bacolas – at the time members of a local heavy metal band called Sleze – were in the audience for a television talk show called Town Meeting on KOMO, for an episode about the controversy. According to a write-up of the episode in the Seattle Times, Layne – who had just turned eighteen several weeks earlier – said, “Our lyrics are all positive – we don’t use bad language or sing about drugs and sex – but I just want the freedom to write about what I want.”

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Facelift 25

Facelift was released 25 years ago this week.  There is some discrepancy as to the exact date, though.  Media reports say it was on August 21, but the RIAA database of gold and platinum records has the release date as August 24.  (I ran into this discrepancy while doing research for my book, and ultimately went with the RIAA’s date. If anybody can explain this discrepancy or knows the definitive answer, please contact me)

Although Alice in Chains wasn’t the first Seattle grunge band to form or sign a record deal (those distinctions go to Soundgarden and Mother Love Bone. I’m not counting Nirvana here because they were from Aberdeen), they were the first breakout band from that scene. Nirvana’s Nevermind is the event that is burned into the collective conscious, but history shows Alice in Chains were the first ones out of the gate. Facelift was released in August of 1990, after which the band went into a heavy touring schedule that would last almost through the end of 1991.  Jerry Cantrell estimated the album had sold some 40,000 copies before MTV gave the “Man in the Box” video its coveted Buzz Bin status and heavy rotation on the network in May of 1991. Facelift was certified gold – for sales in excess of 500,000 copies – in September of that year. Pearl Jam’s Ten was released in August, Nevermind was released in September, and Soundgarden’s Badmotorfinger was released in October.  Alice in Chains opened the door for the Seattle music scene, but Nirvana and Pearl Jam were the ones who blew it wide open.

Beyond the historical significance of the album, its age means that the band is now eligible for induction into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame.

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Happy Birthday, Layne Staley

He would have been 48 today.

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Does My Book Focus On Layne Staley Too Much?

Two weeks since its release, a recurring critique I’ve read online about my book is that it is too Layne-centric.  I think it’s a valid point, and thought it would be worth explaining my creative/editorial process for why I wrote it the way that I did.

By the time I started working on the book in August of 2011, I had been in the journalism profession for nine years and was also in the middle of my second masters degree.  The reason I bring this up is that during that time, I had written many stories on a range of topics, and had also read a variety of biographies and history books on different subjects. Why is this relevant? When I started working on this book, I had very strong and specific ideas about what I thought would work or would not, based on my own professional experiences as well as from what I’d read in other books.

There are lots of great (and not so great) rock biographies out there, but to the extent I had a basic model that I was aiming for, that would have been Chris Salewicz’s Redemption Song: The Ballad of Joe Strummer, which I highly recommend. The book had Joe in the title and as its main character, but really it was a biography of The Clash, before, during and after the band’s heyday. I outlined my book on the same basic pattern: Layne would be the central character, and the other members would be well represented to the best of my ability.  For a time, I considered calling it a biography of Layne Staley, but thought that would limit my scope too much and exclude stories about Jerry Cantrell’s solo career, Mike Starr’s post-Alice in Chains years, and the band’s comeback with William DuVall from 2006 to the present.  In the end, I opted for a broader, if imperfect, focus on the band as a whole.

Also worth noting: at the time I started working on the book in 2011, I was hoping the band members and Susan Silver would eventually agree to go on the record. I had hopes for that right up until I submitted the final draft to my publisher in 2014. I very much wanted to have more information about the other band members. Ultimately you publish the story you have, not the story you wish you had.

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The End of the Road

A lot happens in four years: a presidential term, an Olympic Games or World Cup, a high school or college education, and a leap year.

Almost four years after I started working on it, as of today Alice in Chains: The Untold Story is a reality, available in hard cover and e-book editions. It’s a surreal feeling to be typing this in my Seattle hotel room, knowing now that the book is finally out there for the world to see. It was even more surreal to finally be able to download my own book from the Kindle store.  I’m sure this won’t be the last time these feelings come up today and in the weeks ahead.

I wrote something similar in the book to the point I’m about to make now: although my name is on the jacket and the writing and reporting are mine, I would not have been able to get to this point on my own, and would like to take this opportunity to publicly thank those who made it possible.

Thanks to my agent, Anthony Mattero, as well as my editor Rob Kirkpatrick, executive editor Peter Joseph, and everyone at Thomas Dunne Books and St. Martin’s Press who shared my vision for what this book could be and were unwavering in their support for it.  Thanks to my tireless PR team – Suzanne Williams, Christy D’Agostini and Staci Burt.

Thanks to every source who agreed to be interviewed and helped make this book possible. (My on the record sources are listed at the end of the book, so I won’t name them here.) They are the ones who made it what it is.

Thanks to the many outstanding academic and professional mentors I’ve had over the years. (Also listed at the end of the book.) It is through their time, patience, generosity, insight and wisdom that I learned the skills and mindset that went into this book.

Thanks to my incredible and caring friends and family for all their moral support as I went through this process for the last four years. I love them all.

There were several books that influenced how I wrote this one (see the FAQ), but I especially want to thank Walter Isaacson. I read his brilliant biography of Steve Jobs in late 2011 and early 2012, and that set the bar very high. I wound up scrapping and rewriting some of the early drafts I had written up to that point, and for the next several years, constantly looked to it as a mark to try to reach.  I hope I’ve done that, but will leave it for others to decide, because I can’t and won’t grade my own work.

Thanks to everyone who pre-ordered the book, as well as those who will buy it in the future, for putting your trust and hard-earned money in an unknown author who wrote a book without the authorization or participation of its subject. I hope it lives up to your expectations.

Having said all that, why the title for this post? Because that is how I’m feeling at this point.  After four years of writing, editing, rewriting, and waiting, my first book is finally out in the world.  It feels almost like a high school or college graduation – the ending of one journey, which starts the beginning of the next.  I have two projects I’ve been developing, which I will announce further down the line when the time is right, but for now I want to savor and enjoy these moments. It’s difficult to pick just one word to describe it, but the closest that comes to mind is euphoria.

Thank you.

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