Scott has left us

This morning I sat in the micro scrolling the facebook feed and suddenly I read through a post by the Rolling Stone magazine that Stone Temple Pilots singer Scott Weiland has passed away.

Shocked, I immediately open my Twitter account to find out that it is true. The bloke is gone. Nostalgic feelings come back.

My imaginative timetravel device brings me back to 1993. In that summer I celebrate my 16th birthday, an age at which you do not spend Saturday evenings at home with mommy and daddy anymore watching a boring movie, but you go leave the small village to go elsewhere for a couple of beers and singing classic songs.

With 3 other guys we wait at the bus stop to go to the town of Groenlo, famous small city in the Netherlands where Grolsch beer was brewed first exactly 400 years ago.

We pay about fifteen guilders (at that time equivalent to seven bucks) for the bus trip and the entrance to the discotheque. After approximately half an hour we arrive in Groenlo, we hop off the bus and go straight to Café Kras, a crowded, smoky bar with ambiance and drink a half litre bottle of beer before entering the Lido.

Inside, we buy 25 guilders worth of coins (chips), for beer. So a glass of beer has a value of 1 dollar. We drink our first round while exploring the disco areas, checking which band will come to perform, looking around if there are already some chicks, and then we go to a small bar type area for our 2nd, 3rd and 4th beer. This is the rock zone. One of my buddies, M., at that time a huge grunge fan, asks the bartender to put the Plush single on. And keep it running for Sin as well please.
The dude smiles and we are satisfied.

(The crackling sound is so overwhelming that I had to borrow the CD Core soon after it was available in the library to record it on tape. But eventually I ended up buying the record a couple of years later).

When we´re finally very tipsy it´s time to get on the bus back to our village. When we come back around 2:30 AM, we´re a bit hungry. Eventually you could get all type of fast food at the Lido, but we quietly go home and have a ham-egg sandwich each.

For approximately one year, this was a Saturday night routine. Eventually I did not go out every weekend due to economic reasons. But my parents were willing to sponsor me when I behaved myself and helped them around the house in the weekends.

In April 1994 we we´re all stunned when we heard the news about Kurt Cobain. M. had a Nirvana bootleg CD from a concert in Rome which I had borrowed to record it on tape. Apparently the security was a bit rough cause Kurt kept asking them "piano, piano".

At the same time, when the topic "Nirvana" became less trending (there was no Internet), and life in the rock and grunge world goes on, Pearl Jam had this particular song from their Vs. album, Rearviewmirror, on of my favourites. Apart from STP, Nirvana & Alice in Chains, Eddie Vedder and his band were extremely popular in the Netherlands, especially the songs Alive, Black & Jeremy.

It wasn´t until the summer that Soundgarden became my preferred grunge band; I was singing Spoonman even on holidays in the Alpes des Hautes Provence, France. Soundgarden has similarities with the Stone Temple Pilots. But Scott, your voice was much darker than Chris´.

So Scott, this is a dedication for you. Thanks for the musical experience you brought me. You will be missed. You belong to a group of rockstars that left us way too early, apart from Kurt Cobain: Brian Jones in 1969, Jimi Hendrix in 1970, Jim Morrison in 1971, Bon Scott in 1980, Phil Lynott in 1986, Freddy Mercury in 1991, Michael Hutchence in 1997 and Layne Staley in 2002.

This is a weekend to put the Core disc on to listen it once more.