Scott Weiland’s First Live Album Arrives With Unseen “Vaseline” Footage

Scott Weiland: Live, the first live album released under the singer’s name, is out today on CD and digital formats, following a limited vinyl run earlier this year for Record Store Day.

The release comes with previously unseen footage of Weiland performing Stone Temple Pilots’ “Vaseline” at the House of Blues in Anaheim, California. The clip is notable for what it reveals about his voice rather than for the occasion itself. Weiland pushes the vocal into a lighter, more melodic register than the studio version allows, sidestepping the lower resonance of the original. The lead guitar, meanwhile, turns noisy and untethered in a way that owes more to Neil Young than to hard rock radio, which gives the performance its loose, no-rules feel.

The album was captured on the tour behind Happy in Galoshes, Weiland’s 2009 solo record. It lands four days before what would have been his 59th birthday, on October 27. Weiland died in 2015 at 48 from an accidental drug overdose.

That timing is difficult to separate from the record, but the footage does not ask to be read as tribute. It shows a working singer in a room, taking a song he had performed for years and moving it somewhere else.