When Jeff Gutt gave his first performance as the new lead singer for Stone Temple Pilots, at a secret L.A. industry showcase in November 2016, he wasn’t that nervous. As a onetime X Factor USA contestant, he’d had plenty of experience covering other artists’ songs, and as the former frontman for several estblished rock bands, he knew how to work a crowd. But he still felt pressure — not only because he had to late fill iconic STP frontman Scott Weiland’s shoes but because the singer who replaced Weiland from 2013 to 2015, Chester Bennington, was in the audience that day.

“I knew Chester. I’ve known Chester since 2001,” Gutt reveals to Yahoo Entertainment. “I was in a band called Dry Cell, and we were signed by the same guy that signed Linkin Park, so that’s how I knew him. He would come to some of our writing sessions and rehearsals; I’d see him in the studios that we were at. When we were recording, they’d be recording there. We just had a good friendship.”

Gutt and Bennington were such good friends, in fact, that Bennington invited himself to the L.A. showcase. “It my first private audition with STP, and he called and asked if he could come. He wanted to be there for that first show. So, I put him on my guest list. It was very cool that he could be there for that.” Bennington even ended up jumping onstage to sing a couple of songs with Stone Temple Pilots, in what must have felt like a torch-passing moment at the time.

Photo: Rhino/Warner Bros.

After the show, Bennington told Gutt he’d done an “awesome” job, and Bennington’s company at the event kept Gutt calm. “I was pretty much hanging out with him, because I’ve known him for so long,” Gutt chuckles.

Little did Gutt know that just eight months after he received Bennington’s encouragement and blessing, Bennington would be dead. Both Weiland and Bennington — incredibly charismatic and talented, if troubled, performers — were only in their forties when they died. “I’m actually the same age as Chester. I needed a couple of days, I’m not going to lie,” Gutt says about his reaction to the tragic news of Bennington’s suicide. “It was a shocker. I mean, I feel for his family and kids and his wife. It’s horrible.”

However, Gutt found comfort during studio sessions with his also-grieving new bandmates, STP guitarist Dean DeLeo, bassist Robert DeLeo, and drummer Eric Kretz. “We were recording at the time. We just really talked to each other and shared each other’s feelings about it,” he says. “It was very good to be around people, because I was going to be like, ‘Hey, I need a couple of days off,’ and they were like, ‘You should come to the studio. Come over and let’s hang out.’ I remember I just wanted to hide, but we went in the studio and some beautiful, beautiful songs were made. And they’re real. That’s the best part.”

Recalling Bennington’s positive attitude, Gutt says, “Everyone just wants to see STP do well, and he was one of those people, for sure.” And it makes sense that fans and friends would want to root for Stone Temple Pilots, after all they went through with Weiland — who battled drug addiction for most of his tenure with the band and even derailed STP’s career when he went to jail for five months in 1999. They’ve always alt-rock underdogs. And so has Gutt, a 41-year-old single dad, in his own way. After being eliminated before the live shows of The X Factor Season 1, he returned in Season 3 and made it all the way to the finale, but he still had to settle for second place. At the time, The X Factor seemed like his last chance, but he figured going on a national television could help him make “the biggest splash.”

“I had walked away from the music industry because I had a certain integrity and all that. Then when I needed to come back, it was years later, because I didn’t want to give up on my dream,” Gutt says. “That was why I chose television. I had always looked down upon those [reality/talent] shows, just because those people stand in line for a day and get their shot. And I’d spent 20 years in bars and nightclubs, dealing with promoters and getting ripped off and just everything that comes with all that stuff — paying your dues, I guess. I did that over and over and over again, so I figured, you know what? If someone’s going to go on one of these shows and win it, it could be someone authentic and real and doing it for all the right reasons.”

Gutt didn’t win, but becoming the new singer of Stone Temple Pilots, a band he grew up with, is a bigger prize than any Syco Records deal. The revamped STP’s self-titled album (not to be confused with 2010’s Stone Temple Pilots, the group’s last LP with Weiland), comes out March 16, and Gutt says, “I’m just really excited for the record itself, because it’s the first time I’ve actually had a record released on a major label. I’ve been trying my whole life to get to this point, and it’s finally here. It’s an amazing record, and it happens to be with Stone Temple Pilots. I mean, what could be better than that?”

Gutt promises the album will be “everything a superfan of STP would want” with a classic sound that honors Weiland and Bennington’s legacies — even as he finds his own voice within the lineup. “I love Scott, so that’s definitely part of what I put into this. I’m very respectful. I listen to everything [the STP band members] have to say, and I just try to be me at the end of the day, because that’s the only thing I can do,” he says. “I have my own story, and my story is meeting with their story. It’s a very awesome thing that we come together and help each other out.”

Listen to the exclusive premiere of the new Stone Temple Pilots track  “­­­­Never Enough” above, and watch the DeLeos and Kretz discuss Weiland and Bennington in the video below.

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This article originally ran on Yahoo Music.

“There’s something that doesn’t feel quite right to sit here and talk about Scott. It saddens me that he’s not able to be here and do it himself.”

So remarks Stone Temple Pilots guitarist Dean DeLeo, sitting at Yahoo with his bassist brother Robert DeLeo and STP drummer Eric Kretz. They’re discussing the 25th anniversary deluxe reissue of their massive debut album, Core, but without late frontman Scott Weiland sharing his own memories of the band’s glory days, “It’s heartbreaking that he’s not here to celebrate this,” laments Dean.

Stone Temple Pilots have experienced great highs — they’ve sold 20 million albums in the U.S. alone, including 8 million copies of Core — and as they sit with Yahoo for their career-spanning Backspin interview, they recall their happy times, like excitedly playing the Core mixes through giant speakers they called “flamethrowers,” Weiland trying to play two-chord guitar on “Tumble in the Rough,” shooting the low-budget “Big Bang Baby” music video, and geeking out when meeting idolized Yes producer Eddy Offord. But STP’s lives have often been plagued by tragedy.

Not only did Weiland die of an overdose in December 2015 — two and a half years after he was ousted from the group and replaced by Linkin Park’s Chester Bennington — but then Bennington took his own life less than two years later. Stone Temple Pilots are rumored to be among the special guests performing at this Friday’s Bennington tribute concert at Los Angeles’s Hollywood Bowl, which will raise money for Music for Relief’s One More Light Fund in memory of the late singer. The event, eerily, also takes place on what would have been Weiland’s 50th birthday.

Bennington and Weiland, both incredibly charismatic and talented performers, were only in their forties when they died. “For the rest of our days, we’re going to miss those two guys immensely,” Dean says softly. “You record music with somebody, you write music with somebody — that’s very intimate. You’re really putting all of yourself out there, and you’re very vulnerable. … These are two men that we had the luxury and honor of doing that with for many years, so we’re really, really going miss those guys. A lot.”

While the STP survivors admit that Weiland’s death did not come as a shock, they say Bennington’s suicide was “a huge, huge surprise. Everyone you meet has a battle inside that you know nothing about,” says Robert, loosely quoting Scottish author and theologian Ian Maclaren. “We still get together weeks later, and we’re scratching our heads, wondering what made sense to [Chester] at that moment, you know?”

As for Weiland, however, Robert remembers seeing that frontman’s dark side early on. “There was something inside of him that he was always searching for. He was always searching for something that wasn’t really him. I don’t think he was generally happy with himself,” says Robert. “I think when we went in to do Core, he really was getting in touch with that internal strife, which is a Catch-22, because it ultimately leads a singer to a key that unlocks a door to many different things. That makes people go, ‘Wow, that’s deep,’ but ultimately it leads to someone’s demise. It goes back to people like Jim Morrison, you know? I’ve talked with [the Doors’s] Robby [Krieger] and John [Densmore] about things like that, and it’s sad to see that someone ultimately goes to that place, somewhat not in control of the door they opened.”

Robert recalls Weiland’s much-publicized drug problems started during a 1993 tour with the Butthole Surfers, and says now, “I think resentment was growing since Purple,” the group’s Core followup. By the time they were recording their third album, Tiny Music… Songs From the Vatican Gift Shop, in a mansion in California’s Santa Ynez Valley, “Things were getting bad,” according to Eric.

“Yeah, I think there were times when we did go upstairs, and you had to walk past Scott’s bedroom first when you went up, and we just were checking in on him to see if he was alive. Literally,” says Robert.

However, hope sprang anew for the troubled band’s future with 1999’s No. 4. The marketing and promotion of that record hit a major stumbling block when Weiland went to jail for five months for drug possession, but STP played some of its greatest concerts during that era, and the album unexpectedly spawned one of the STP’s biggest hit singles, “Sour Girl.”

“So we had released the first single, ‘Down,’ and then we went out to Vegas and we did a show,” Dean recalls. “I don’t know how Scott pulled off a show the way he did that night, knowing what he knew … because we were at the L.A. County courthouse the very next morning, bright and early, where we watched Scott be cuffed and taken away for a sentence on, like, his second or third bust. So it went from having this record out to doing this great show to literally watching Scott being taken away. … Atlantic [Records], at that point, said, ‘This record’s done. Let’s just go work on something else.’ And Scott really went, ‘We need to release “Sour Girl.”’ And they did, and that song really helped that record out a little bit — probably put it on the map, you know? So that was an interesting time. Here we have this record, and our quarterback’s on the bench.”

“There was a window during the making of the No. 4 that Scott genuinely had the clarity of the Core days,” recalls Robert wistfully. “He was genuinely sober, genuinely focused, looking great [after getting out of jail], and all there. And that hadn’t happened since Core. There was a great energy there of taking this band to a further place. That was our moment, right there, to take this band to the next place.”

Unfortunately, while Robert says the band’s subsequent album — 2001’s Shangri-La Dee Da — is his personal favorite, the “moment” did not last. A long hiatus followed, and when STP reunited for 2010’s self-titled final effort, it was sadly obvious that they could not get back to that good place with Weiland.

“I think before it came to working with Chester, it was evident — this is so sad to say — where Scott was going,” Dean says, choking up. “He had a new ‘posse’ of people around him. They just kept feeding him all that he was, and they left out one vital part of that — and that was his health and his well-being. Because everybody just wanted money. I think Robert and Eric and I exhausted ourselves just trying to help him and just to be a friend. He wanted no part of that.”

“Well, I think when the truth comes around to someone that heavily in addiction, they want to run away from that,” adds Robert. “It’s really sad to see.”

“To be affiliated with somebody of that musical magnitude and to be so fulfilled by it, and to watch this person just go into this deep hole of demise was just f***ing awful. It was just awful, man,” sighs Dean.

However, when Bennington joined STP in 2013, he brought an “energy that we so desperately needed at the time,” says Robert. “And you know what? He didn’t need to do that. He was in a huge band; he had plenty going on. But he wanted to do this and he was excited about doing this, and now that he’s gone, I hear from people that he was so excited about it. … He gave everything he had, and that was such a great thing for the three of us. I look back at the touring that we did and the time we spent together, and it was just laughing and having a good time, such a positive thing, going out there feeling really energetic and great about this. … He made us look back at our legacy and go, ‘Yeah, this is what it could be.’”

While Kretz and the DeLeos are still in mourning for Bennington, Weiland is never far from their minds. “Not a day doesn’t go by that we all think about Scott. Every day,” says Dean, confessing that getting in the car and hearing Weiland’s voice on the radio, or even seeing a dashboard compass pointing to “SW,” will trigger bittersweet memories.

“I mean, we were brothers for half our lives and shared a lot of intimate, creative things with each other. It’s a part of our being. It’s part of my makeup as a person, to be able to share a dream with someone and actually follow through,” says Robert. “Actually, the people in this world catching onto what we did — that’s pretty amazing, if you look back.”

While Weiland isn’t around to commemorate Core’s 25th anniversary, he would no doubt be pleased to see Stone Temple Pilots’s legacy celebrated after the band took such a vicious and unjustified lashing from the music press in the early ’90s. “I don’t think we ever made records for critics,” Robert shrugs, adding with a chuckle: “Talking to some of those critics these days, they’re like, ‘Sorry!’”

“I had not listened to those [Core rarities and outtakes] in 24 years, 25 years. To listen to those again, man, it was a smack in the face emotionally, because it brought me right back,” says Eric, smiling. “I just remember being in the room, the smells of the rehearsal room, how bad they were — and just how excited we were, how great Scott’s voice was. It was really refreshing to hear that again.”

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This article originally ran on Yahoo Music.

Bassist Tommy Black (left) and singer Scott Weiland of Scott Weiland and the Wildabouts perform during day 1 of the Carolina Rebellion at Charlotte Motor Speedway on May 2, 2015 in Charlotte, North Carolina. (Photo by Jeff Hahne/Getty Images)

It’s hard to believe it’s been a year since Stone Temple Pilots frontman and ‘90s alt-rock legend Scott Weiland was found dead on his tour bus in Bloomington, Minn., at age 48. Tommy Black, Weiland’s close friend and bandmate for 10 years, in particular finds that fact difficult to grasp — but not because the time has passed quickly for him.

“It feels like five years to me,” Black tells Yahoo Music, in his first official solo interview since the tragedy. “It feels like a lot more than a year. It feels like it’s been a lot of years, for some reason. It was a horrible year… I still feel a little uncomfortable talking about it all, to be honest.”

A year ago, as speculation ran rampant regarding Weiland’s death, longtime sideman Black was suddenly thrust into the media spotlight, when it was reported that he had been arrested for fifth-degree possession of a controlled substance following the incident. (A small amount of cocaine had been found on the tour bus that Weiland and Black shared; it was later determined that Weiland, who had a long and much-publicized history of addiction issues, had died of an accidental overdose of cocaine, ethanol, and MDA, according to the Hennepin Medical Examiner.) Deputy Bloomington Police Chief Mike Hartley later told People that charges were actually never filed, because it would be too difficult to prove that the cocaine belonged to Black. But, the bassist says ruefully, “It kind of sucks that that’s the first thing that going to come up on a Google search for my name for the rest of my life.”

Black recalls the dark day when he found out that his friend had died — and then found himself in a jail cell for 17 hours, trying to process the terrible news. “We were at the Mall of America in Minnesota; we had a day off,” he begins. “I had knocked on Scott’s door to see if he wanted to go eat, but he didn’t answer, so I figured, let him sleep. So I was at the Mall of America, and Jamie [Wachtel], Scott’s wife, called me and said Scott hadn’t called her all day. I told her to call the tour manager, Aaron [Mohler], and find out what’s up. A bit later, one of the tour guys called me and said, ‘Come to the bus right now. Scott’s dead.’ Aaron and [drummer] Joey [Castillo] had found him and called 911. I went straight to the bus… The police were there, and they wouldn’t let anyone on the bus at that point. We went to hang out in the [hotel] lobby — and then I went to the bar next door by myself.

“And you know, I just got drunk when I heard the news. I went next door and had a few shots, unfortunately. And the detectives came to question us — they question everybody when somebody dies on a tour bus. They’re questioning me and they told me the next day, ‘We had to detain you, because you [were too inebriated] to really be able to answer questions, and we didn’t want you to leave the next morning.’ And then, you know, the media runs with that, so it had a bad spin on it. And that sucked, because that’s not the way it was. It hurt me at the time, but I understand. Everybody wants an answer. Everybody wants to blame somebody.”

Weiland’s death came only eight months after guitarist Jeremy Brown, Black’s 34-year-old bandmate in Weiland’s post-STP group the Wildabouts, died on the eve of the Wildabouts’ debut album release. Brown’s cause of death was also an accidental drug overdose. Black confesses he’s still not over either loss. “Two people like that in that timeframe — just processing it, there’s a post-traumatic stress disorder thing that comes with that,” he says. “It takes a very long time to digest something like that, and you never truly do. I just try to be positive and live a positive life and do positive things. That’s all I can do.”

pic.twitter.com/6aXTRBDOBP

— Tommy Black (@BlackTommy) December 4, 2016

These days, Black, who was the best man at Weiland’s 2013 wedding to third wife Wachtel, avoids reading press about Weiland (or himself), and tries to focus on positive memories — memories of a very different Weiland from the troubled addict depicted in the media, and very different from the tortured artist heard on Weiland’s most angst-ridden grunge hits. “Scott was a positive, loving, cool, badass person,” Black says fondly. “We would just have fun, like getting excited about music, talking about different bands and pulling up songs on our phones. And he loved paintball! He could be a big goofball sometimes. People only want to report the bad stuff, but Scott loved life. He had a very dry wit and he was very intelligent, and we were similar ages and came from similar backgrounds and even from similar areas, so we connected a lot on that level… We could talk without talking. We could look at each other and survey each other, where we were coming from. Like, we had similar obscure jokes that no one else understood. It was that kind of bond, which you don’t often come across.”

I miss you my friend…https://t.co/uATTBkgLpm pic.twitter.com/MG80x8N2Hs — Tommy Black (@BlackTommy) December 3, 2016

Black finds it hard to deal with Weiland’s death at this time of year not just because of the one-year anniversary, but because Weiland “took the holidays so seriously — and that shows how sweet he was. It’s really hard for me, because at least the last four or five Thanksgivings, New Year’s Eves, and Christmases would be spent with Scott and Jamie. I spent so many Christmases over there, and he would cook and he’d sing Christmas songs, and then his Christmas record [The Most Wonderful Time of the Year] would play and he’d start singing with it. At Thanksgiving, he would cook the turkey. He was a real good cook, and he took the cooking of the turkey really seriously… He just loved family and holidays. He was a very nostalgic guy about that sort of stuff.”

This past Thanksgiving, Black honored his late friend and kept that holiday tradition alive by cooking a feast in Weiland’s honor. “I texted Jamie: ‘What was that turkey he always cooked? What’s the recipe? Because that was a good turkey!’ I had never cooked a turkey before. Scott used to tease me about my cooking, because I have, like, a George Forman/OptiGrill thing,” he chuckles.

First time cooking a turkey thanks Jamie Weiland for Scott’s turkey recipe! Ate that turkey every Thanksgiving for the last 4 years… pic.twitter.com/gv7DxpPiZC

— Tommy Black (@BlackTommy) November 24, 2016

Black also has happy memories of his final shows with the Wildabouts — contradicting multiple sad reports that in the end Weiland was tired, depressed, and strung-out, sleepwalking through the band’s under-attended gigs. “No. He was so excited. He enjoyed playing and he was burning brightly as ever,” Black insists. “We were loving what we were doing. He said [the Wildabouts’ album, Blaster] was his favorite record since [Stone Temple Pilots’] Core. And that’s huge! He was in the best place that I had ever seen him. I think his body probably just gave out. He worked hard and he played hard. He sang hard… I mean, he had lived a long, hard life, and that was his reality. He didn’t have the normal life any of us had. Luckily, I got to share some of that with him. He was a very special person and it was such a tragic thing. But I don’t think he was upset at all.”

Listening to the music he made with Weiland has helped Black process his grief. “Somebody sends me a link to something and I check it out, and it just takes me right back there,” he says wistfully. “Music can make you smell things and taste things or hear things in your head… Your mind fills in the spaces in the music.” Black reveals that there is unreleased Wildabouts music in his possession, but he hasn’t “decided what to do with it yet. It’s cool, too. There’s some more ethereal-sounding stuff… it runs the whole gamut, actually. It’s just in my thoughts. I haven’t talked to anyone about it, to be honest.”

And in the end, Black hopes it’s Weiland’s music, not the tabloid scandals, that becomes his friend’s most lasting legacy. “Scott was the real deal,” Black states. “Sometimes I’d be playing with him and I’d look to my left and I’d be like, ‘Whoa, I can’t believe I’m up here with this guy!’ It was just such a compliment, an honor, to play with him, when you realize how talented he was.

“I don’t matter. Scott matters. Twenty years from now, in Rolling Stone or whatever, when there’s, like, pictures of Jim Morrison, Scott will be next to him too. You know what I mean? That’s all that matters.”

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This article originally ran on Yahoo Music.