Scott Weiland's THE WILDABOUTS bandmate Tommy Black (pictured) spoke to Yahoo! Music about losing his friend more than a year ago when the singer was found dead on his tour bus in Bloomington, Minnesota at age 48. "It feels like five years to me," Black said in his first 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." Black himself made headlines in the days following Weiland's passing when it was reported that he had been arrested for fifth-degree possession of a controlled substance in connection with the incident. A small amount of cocaine had been found on the tour bus that Weiland and Black shared, but no charges were actually filed against the bassist, because it would have been too difficult to prove that the cocaine belonged to Black. "I just got drunk when I heard the news [about Scott being found dead]. I went next door and had a few shots, unfortunately," Black told Yahoo! Music. "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." Black added that he will remember Weiland fondly and not the way the singer is portrayed in the media — as the notorious drugged-out '90s alt-rock figure that got fired from STONE TEMPLE PILOTS due to his erratic behavior. "Scott was a positive, loving, cool, badass person," Black said. "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." Read the entire interview at Yahoo! Music. Weiland, whom STP parted ways with in 2002 and again in 2013, was found dead in December 2015 at the age of 48 from a toxic mix of drugs and alcohol. He was touring with THE WILDABOUTS in support of their 2015 album "Blaster". He left behind two teenage children with his previous wife, Mary Forsberg Weiland.
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