He blows through the lounge of a Beverly Hills hotel like a chill wind that rasies the hairs of your neck. A two-fisted drinker, he downs a Coke at the bar, and brings his new favorite- cranberry, soda, and a twist of lime- to the table. He plucks an olive from a snack tray and, holding it between blood red fingernails, gently nibbles, like a vampire giveing a virgin her first kiss. Swathed in a floor-length black Armani cloak, Scott Weiland, wildmutation of a rock 'n' roll star, slithers into a chair. "Nice coat, " I observe. "I'd suck dick for fashion," he proclaims with a flickering smile. "And there was a time when I'd suck dick for a crack hit." The smile widens. "But I never had to. I'm rich."
There are many reasons to love Scott Weiland; His obviou sense of style, his bone-deep charisma, the astonishing things that come out of his mouth, the music that weeps from his wounds. There are also plenty reason to pity him: His fear. his pain. His addictions. His on-again, off-again relationships with Stone Temple Pilots, the band that made him rich and famous, and with Janina, the estranged wife he still loves.
But pity him not. He doesn't want sympathy for his devils. he wants something more: to prove to the world he is an artist. The irony of his career is that his heart has always been in the right place at the wrong time. As the '90s come to a close, with grunge so dead that its revival seems imminent, with modern rockers and saccharine teen-pop sensations clogging up the charts, it is a hard job being Scott Weiland. After being labeled a Seattle wannabe in the early '90s, he is now in the unenviable position of being notorious addict at a time when, as the Dandy Warhols recently put it, heroin is so passe. Other rockers like Courtney Love have cleaned up and added a top coat of polish. Weiland, though in recovery, remains a walking time bomb.
Now he is reliving- and relieving- all his wired emotions from the past couple years on his first solo record, 12 Bar Blues. Out this month, it is a sprawling, poetic collection of songs with an ambtious range of styles: lounge-fly crooning, industrial grind, and a happy, catchy collision between late- '60s Detroit rock (MC%, the Stooges) and early- '70s glam (Bowie, T.Rex). As auteur, Scott sang, played a variety of instruments, wrote the melodies and lyrics, and coproduced the record. 12 Bar Blues features fellow former users/rehabbers Porno for Pyros bassist Martyn LeNoble, guitarist Peter DiStefano, and ex-Redd Kross drummer Victor Indrizzo. Five of the songs have been remized by guitarist-producer Daniel Lanois, who has since become a close friend and charter member of Scott's touring band, the Action Girls. Weiland's not scare of the temptations of the road. "People do throw syringes onstage at times," he says wryly. "As if I'd actually shoot one- it's probably full of rat poison. Besides, I seem to get in more trouble when I'm at home bored and doing nothing."
He has already done two videos for the Kurt-Weill-meets-John-Lennon waltz "Lady, Your Roof Brings Me Down" (first featured on the Great Expectations sountrack). "Like Puff Daddy, I wanna own the airwaves. I wanna be in everybody's video. If I can't be in Beck's next video, I'm gonna blow up his studio."
He tells me, more seriuosly, that he has other plans as well: Forming a record label. Starting a screen career. "I'd like to get into acting, but I don't want to become Brad Pitt- bless his heart, he's absolutely gorgeous. I would rather not use my looks as a tool to become an actor." He turned down a cameo in Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas ("Why would I want to play a junkie?"), but he fell in love with a script he just read in which he'd play a psychotic bartender.
We adjourn to a hotel bungalow so Scott can play me the record. In the living room he's got plenty of divertissements to keep him happy, busy, and creatively stimulated: a boom box with megabass, a couple of cameras, and notebooks to capture anything of interest, a doting publicist and manager, and two manacurists send in from the hotel. One for him, one for me.
It is a difficult proposition for Marsha, his manucurist. Scott wants his Chanel Vamp but it's back in the bungalow he's actually staying in. He settles on a metallic silver for his toes, but he keeps jumping up to raise the volume on his boom box or take telephone calls. When he does sit still, he lights one Marlboro Red after the another from the butt of the last. Ashes spill down his black t-shirt and roll onto his brand-new, thirty inch waist Levi's.
"You know what?" he says, pointing to Marsha's industrial toolbox. "There was a brief period of time when my drug kit was like this. Here you'd have your insulin syringes for veins. You got you muscular needles over here for things like liquid Valium, which hurts the vein. Here'd you'd have certain glass pipes for smoking rock and base. And here you'd have little bottles of Jack Daniel's and Stoli, as well as the bottles of pills- the Seconals, Tuinals, all that. It lasted for about a week, until our tour security manager found that box along with my .22-caliber pistol. I said, 'Keith Richards used to pay somebody $100,000 to carry around that same case, and you're gonna take it away from me? I'll pay you $3000 a week to carry it.' The guy didn't agree with me. But it was probably better, because I switched to Buprenexm which is an opiate derivative that takes away the pain but doesn't give you the rush. And I was able to get well and not have to smoke crack for the rest of that tour."
Perhaps he hasn't put enough distance between the present and the past and still romanticizes drug use, or perhaps he tells these stories to remind himself of the horrors. Either way, this is how it works with Scott: The best defense is a good offense. He doesn't spare the gory details but, in yielding them, mostly resists talking about the hows and whys of his troubles. He narrates as we listen to the CD, which is loaded with references to them. On "Barbarella," the first single, he sings "I'll stay at home 'cause I'm the mouse." He explains; "I didn't want to show my face anywhere. Like, heroin was my only friend."
He cranks "Where's the Man," a song he wrote about kicking heroin cold turkey. As is roars from plaintive Neil Young-style verse to anthemic chorus, Scott breaks it down: "'As I get behind the wheel again means I'm taking control. 'You know I lied but/ If it makes you glad/ I'll tell you what you wanna hear' is when I first realized what a liar and thief I was becoming."
The abrasive, highly sexed, "Cool Kiss" is about a stripper Scott hung out with after he and his wife seperated. It wasn't really an affair; they were both so loaded they couldn't have sex. "I think she's dead now," Scott informs me.
But it is the yearning "Son" which stands out. Scott heard collaborator Victor Indrizzo fooling around with a guitar melody. "I said, 'What is that? That's beautiful.' He said, 'Well, while I was in rehab I was thinking about how I've wasted the last three years of my life not watching my son grow up and how I would love to be a part of his life again.' It just made me cry, and I wrote the words thining 'What is it like to be a father?' I've gone through three different abortions with girlfriends, and it really took a lot out of me. So I sang this to the child I never had." It is a tender piano lullaby with an aching country-guitar lick that recalls the music young Scott used to hear on the radio in the summertime when he drove around with his father
