Scott Weiland live at Crocks in Thunder Bay, 12 July 2014

Scott Weiland played Thunder Bay on the night after Winnipeg. The band was at the Pyramid Cabaret on Friday 11 July 2014, and on Saturday 12 July it was at Crocks. The next date found on the tour is Théâtre Corona in Montreal on 17 July, so the Crocks show sits inside a run that crossed most of the country in a single week.

The date was announced on 9 April 2014, three months ahead, and the show was billed under Weiland’s name. Concert databases list the tour dates of that period as Scott Weiland and the Wildabouts. Ticket prices and support acts for the Thunder Bay night are not known, so what follows is the background to the man, the band and the year.

The singer

Weiland was born in San Jose, California, in 1967 and became known as the singer of Stone Temple Pilots, whose first album, Core, came out in 1992. The second, Purple, followed in 1994, and four more studio albums came before the band’s last with him, in 2010.

“Plush” and “Interstate Love Song” are the songs most people associate with the band. He sang with them from 1989 until 2003, and again from 2008 until 2013.

Between the two stints he fronted Velvet Revolver, a group built with Slash, Duff McKagan and Matt Sorum of Guns N’ Roses, from 2003 to 2008. Its albums were Contraband in 2004 and Libertad in 2007. He also made solo records: 12 Bar Blues in 1998, “Happy” in Galoshes in 2008 and a Christmas album, The Most Wonderful Time of the Year, in 2011.

Out of the band, into a new one

On 27 February 2013 Stone Temple Pilots announced that Weiland had been dismissed. It was a public break after more than two decades of shared history, and it left him apart from the group behind his best-known songs. From then on he toured and recorded under his own name, with the Wildabouts as his working band.

Setlist.fm files his 2014 dates under a tour called Purple at the Core, a plain reference to the first two Stone Temple Pilots albums. The name suggests the old catalogue was part of the draw, though that is an inference from the title alone.

The route that summer

Setlist.fm counts 36 concerts by the band in 2014, a number that can only be a minimum, since fans log what they attended.

The schedule touched a long list of places. The Venue in Fargo, North Dakota, hosted the band on 7 May, and the Belly Up Tavern in Solana Beach, California, on 7 June. Late June found it in British Columbia, at the Port Theatre in Nanaimo on the twenty-seventh and the McPherson Playhouse in Victoria the next night.

Then came the eastward leg. Winnipeg on 11 July and Thunder Bay on 12 July are a day apart and roughly 700 kilometres by road. Montreal came five days later.

The room that year

The same stage saw a mixed year. On 8 April a burlesque revue played Crocks, and Weiland’s date was announced the next day. In October Amon Amarth came through with two support bands. A July date with a former Stone Temple Pilots singer falls between the two, in the same room.

What came after

The Wildabouts recorded Blaster in 2014, and Softdrive Records released it on 31 March 2015 under the band name Scott Weiland and the Wildabouts. The guitarist Jeremy Brown died the day before the release. Weiland kept touring in support of the record.

He died on 3 December 2015 in Bloomington, Minnesota, at the age of 48. Reports later put his career sales above fifty million records across all his projects.

That gives the July 2014 date its place. The new album had been recorded but was still eight months from release, and the band that made it was on the road. The rest of the room’s nights from that year are on the shows page, where a Saturday in July looks like any other, apart from the name.