Tag: glenn-burke

This is the latest post for an ongoing media project — SoCal Sports History 101: The Prime Numbers from 00 to 99 that Uniformly, Uniquely and Unapologetically Reveal The Narrative of Our Region’s Athletic Heritage.  Pick a number and highlight an athlete — person, place or thing — most obviously connected to it by fame and fortune, someone who isn’t so obvious, and then take a deeper dive into the most interesting story tied to it. It’s a combination of star power, achievement, longevity, notoriety, and, above all, what makes that athlete so Southern California. Quirkiness and notoriety factor in. And it should open itself to more discussion and debate — which is what sports is best at doing.

The most obvious choices for No. 3:

= Carson Palmer: USC football
= Keyshawn Johnson: USC football
= Willie Davis: Los Angeles Dodgers
= Anthony Davis: Los Angeles Lakers
= Candace Parker: Los Angeles Sparks
= Chris Paul: Los Angeles Clippers

The not-so-obvious choices for No. 3:

= Josh Rosen: UCLA football
= Glenn Burke: Los Angeles Dodgers
= Steve Sax: Los Angeles Dodgers

The most interesting story for No. 3:
Scott Weiland: Edison High of Huntington Beach football quarterback (1982 to 1985)
Southern California map pinpoints:
Huntington Beach, Costa Mesa, Long Beach, Hollywood

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The photo documents perhaps the only tangle circulated evidence that Scott Weiland played football — an aspiring quarterback trying to make his mark at Edison High School in Huntington Beach.

He kind of looked like a young Sean Salisbury — ready, willing and able to commandeer a team to success and fame. The hairstyle of the moment was helmet friendly.

Yet, the eventual lead voice and flamboyantly driving force in and out of Stone Temple Pilots, Velvet Revolver and Art of Anarchy, fired or otherwise bored with each venture, wouldn’t be on track to become the famous college football player as he once thought he’d like to be.

High school non-confidential: The teen years focused on self discovery, watching, listening, hatching experiments, hormones raging, expectations and lack of sleep leads to falling into groups of new fast friends and/or swallowed up by cliche cliques.

At a peak of his music fame in 2007, Weiland was asked in fan Q&A about his high school activities.

“What kind of self-respecting outcast were you?” he was asked.

He explained:

“One with a lot of cojones. I was never a jock, but I was an athlete, and I was good. (Edison High) had just won multiple state football titles; it was a hardcore football school. I had aspirations of going to Notre Dame, so I played quarterback. But also I was into music: I sang in the school choir; and the two worlds didn’t really hold hands skipping down the hallways. I got a lot of flak from the coach and the guys on the team. Then I formed a rock & roll band with my best friend, and at the start of the senior year, I decided that I was into music more.”

While there is the one football photo, there thousands more snapshots, videos and websites that celebrate Weiland’s legendary music work — nominated for six Grammys, winning two for Best Hard Rock Performance, selling 50 millions records and called a “voice of our generation” by Smashing Pumpkins’ Billy Corrigan.

Some critics might have thought his bands were “a shameless clone of such grunge leaders as Pearl Jam, Nirvana and Soundgarden.” But taken individually, Weiland was called “one of the towering figures in the history of rock” by Rolling Stone magazine.

Audiences and fans were captivated by a chaotic stage presence. He was a champion chameleon, amplified by a megaphone. All in all, he navigated the diversity of glam, and alt rock, and pop, and hair-metal ballads far better than he did toxic mix of drugs, alcohol and all else the came to consume him.

So when he died in 2015 of a drug overdose at the age 48, the question had to be asked: How will he be remembered?

We are left with shards of facts and quotes and guesses. And photos. Many provided by him.

Continue reading “No. 3: Scott Weiland” →