Remembering when the late Scott Weiland sang “Have Yourself a Merry Little Christmas” on TV might be what rock fans need to get them in the holiday mood.
Because watching the now 15-year-old video of the influential Stone Temple Pilots and Velvet Revolver vocalist covering the classic Yuletide tune on a 2006 episode of The Tonight Show With Jay Leno is practically a winter tradition at this point.
See the video down toward the bottom of this post.
Weiland was a big fan of Christmas music, as he shared in an interview with Billboard where he mentioned he first started singing holiday songs publicly in grade school. “I was picked to sing two solos,” the singer explained of a pageant in his youth. “One was a Christian Christmas carol and the other was a Hanukkah [song]. I still remember the majority of the words.”
In 2011, Weiland released an entire holiday-themed solo album, The Most Wonderful Time of the Year.
He said he “wanted to do it like a traditional Christmas album, like in the ’30s and ’40s. Most of the young people wanted to hear a Justin Timberlake version of ‘The Christmas Song’ or something R&B-modern, or the country kind of thing, like a Faith Hill sort of thing. But for me, I really connected with the crooners and the jazz stuff. They really touched my heart — the Frank and Tommy Dorsey bands and all that Nelson Riddle stuff, Mel Torme, Judy Garland, Ella Fitzgerald, Sinatra.”
Weiland died of a drug overdose in 2015 while on tour with his late-era solo band, The Wildabouts. Stone Temple Pilots still perform to this day with their new lead singer since 2017, musician Jeff Gutt.
Scott Weiland Performs “Have Yourself a Merry Little Christmas” on The Tonight Show – Dec. 18, 2006
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