In a brand new interview with Cleveland, Ohio's Scene magazine, singer Scott Weiland maintains that he is still a member of STONE TEMPLE PILOTS and can't legally be fired from the group, despite his bandmates' claim to the contrary. "I think it was a reaction to the fact that [my current solo] tour had sold out within a week," he says with regard to the rest of STONE TEMPLE PILOTS' statement that Weiland was "terminated" from the band. "It was probably not the smartest thing for them to do since I founded the band and there are certain legal terms within the contract which don't make sense as to that decision, or that threat."

Weiland and his solo band THE WILDABOUTS recently kicked off the 20-city trek, dubbed the "Purple At The Core Tour", where they are performing songs from the first two STONE TEMPLE PILOTS albums, 1992's "Core" and 1994's "Purple".

The singer, who is currently working on a new solo album, tells Scene that the last few tours with STP haven't been particularly inspiring.

"My philosophy is that I don't feel like going on the road and playing a greatest-hits set that we've been playing for five years," he says. "We've been doing that and in the midst of doing that, we made an album that took us a year and a half. That's not the way STP makes records. We make records in two weeks. If we're going to do something, we need to get back in the studio with [producer] Brendan O'Brien who has a track record with us and get re-inspired artistically again. We need to do it that way and get out there on the road and get out there with some excitement and not just turn our legacy into what JOURNEY or FOREIGNER is. That's not what we're about. That's not why we got into this. That's not at all what I'm about."

He continues: "More than anything, we've been a great live band. The reason why critics didn't like us because they thought we were one thing that we weren't. They thought we sounded like a Seattle band. We proved those critics wrong over our career and changed from album to album. We didn't sound like THE BEATLES, but we took that blueprint and the idea of being a band. Sure, there are some bands that have one sound and do it really well. But we looked at the idea of THE BEATLES and thought to really do it right, we had to evolve. We had to go into a cocoon every once in a while and come out as a butterfly and not an ugly moth."