Not Dead & Not For Sale (10 page)

I
N 1995, STILL HEAVILY HOOKED,
I started recording the third STP record,
Tiny Music … Songs from the Vatican Gift Shop
. That happened in famed film actor Jimmy Stewart’s enormous mansion in Santa Barbara. We had everything we wanted—total privacy, private cook, absolute tranquility. Given the most sumptuous surroundings to make music, though, rockers can turn heaven into hell. At least I can. Artistically, Dean, Robert, Eric, and I were on the same page. We wanted to make a statement. We wanted to deconstruct, go low-tech, get to the dark heart of the matter. I was happy to write Bowie-esque stream-of-consciousness lyrics that didn’t need to make sense. Example: “Big Bang Baby”:

Does anybody know how the story really goes

Or should we all just hum along

Sell your soul and sign an autograph

Big bang baby, crash crash crash

I wanna die but I gotta laugh

Orange crush mama is a laugh laugh laugh

The laugh, though, was on me. I was at the height—or depth—of my addiction. Shooting coke. Shooting heroin. Running down the 101 every third day to L.A. to score and running back. Jannina called me all the time. Where was I? What was I doing? I was worrying her to death. “Don’t worry,” I said. “I’m fine.”

When STP decided to fly out to Atlanta to finish up the record, I brought along Jannina’s brother Tony, who, although high, was not insanely high like me—just insanely more of a drunk. I was getting increasingly paranoid. When Tony needed a break, I brought out my pal Ron Kaufman to see after me. But no one could really help. When I passed out in front of the hotel in the limo, no one could wake me up. I was passed out in the backseat for six straight hours.

In many respects,
Tiny Music
is a dark record.

“Lady Picture Show,” one of the central songs, is about the horrific gang rape of a dancer who winds up falling in love but can’t let go of the pain.

“Trippin’ on a Hole in a Paper Heart” reflects my hunger for redemption. “Break your neck with diamond noose,” I wrote. “It’s the last you’ll ever choose. I am I am, I said I’m not myself, but I’m not dead and not for sale. Hold me closer, closer, let me go, let me be, just let me be.”

“Adhesive” is me at my most depressive moment. “Adhesive” is the bottom: “Comatose commodity. The superhero’s dying. All the children crying. Sell more records if I’m dead. Purple flowers once again. Hope it’s sooner, hope it’s near. Corporate records, fiscal year … Stitch the womb and wet the bed. With a whisper I’ll be dead.”

WHEN
TINY MUSIC
CAME OUT
, some critics said it was influenced by the rock band Redd Kross. The critics weren’t entirely wrong. After
Purple,
we had toured with Redd Kross. When I was in my late teens and early twenties, I was certainly a Redd Kross fan.

Eddie Kurdziel, superb Redd Kross guitarist and friend of Dean’s and mine, became a casualty of the nineties. He died of an overdose in 1999. Did our fascination with heroin influence Eddie’s decision to try it? I can’t say for sure. I suspect, though, that it did. And if that’s the case, I am deeply sorry.

Redd Kross had a whimsical, sometimes frivolous attitude that I admired. They were Beatles-influenced, just as we were. I had been lovingly and carefully studying the Beatles for years. You could say the same thing about Cheap Trick, who opened for us during a segment of the
Tiny Music
tour. Our influences came from everywhere. If your hearts and ears are open—as ours were—you absorb the world around you.

Core
had happened

Purple
had happened.

Tiny Music
had happened.

Heroin had happened.

Jannina had happened.

Mary had happened.

Money had happened.

Fame had happened.

The more I got, the more I lost. The more I lost, the more I wanted. The more I wanted, the more I wasted. The more I wasted, the more I wandered. And wondered. I took to the streets, the alleyways, the dark passages that connected me to death and death’s closest friends.

S
TP—A MUSICAL PHENOMENON.
A cultural breakthrough.
Rolling Stone
cover. Thirteen rehab stints in three years. This is the 1996–1997 run behind
Tiny Music
.

The guys—Robert, Dean, Eric—knew I was hurting. “We’re your brothers,” they said. “Just tell us what’s happening. We don’t want to hear about it in the papers. We want you to come to us first.”

Brotherhood. Solidarity. Money on the line. We had a million dollars lined up for a gig in Anchorage and two in Hawaii. After we played Jay Leno’s
Tonight Show
, I gathered up my courage and talked to Dean, Robert, and Eric, man to man.

“Okay, guys,” I said. “I’ll level with you. I’ve been chipping. But I have enough meds to get me through these gigs. And I’ll bring a sober guy along with me, at my expense, to make sure I stay straight.”

Next thing I know, my own Stoned Brother Pilots call a press conference and cancel the gigs, telling the world, in essence, that because of their junkie lead singer, the tour can’t go on.

It was a vicious move, even more so when “our” lawyers demanded that I pay
them
—out of
my
own pocket—the million dollars caused by the cancellation.

I was through. I was out.

I was back in rehab.

I was out of rehab.

I was back on dope.

I was married to Jannina and, in one of these half-recovered states, went home to find her with another man. She cried, she apologized, she felt terrible, but I felt worse. I said, “Look, the way I’ve treated you, this is hardly your fault.”

The marriage was over. The divorce took forever and cost me a fortune.

From
12 Bar Blues

F
AR AS BANDS GO, I’VE ALWAYS BEEN HALF OUT AND HALF IN
. My nature is that of an individual artist. I can get excited about joining the team and going for the gold; I can even be a gung ho team player, but not for long. No doubt, STP was born out of my soul—and the souls of Robert, Dean, and Eric. As I write, STP is completing a new record, and the reunion feels good, even organic, because the band’s initial impulse had genuine artistic merit. I expect that STP, as both a recording and touring band, will endure. Our relationship to our fans is based on a shared passion and a history that is nearly twenty years old. Creatively, we continue to inspire one another and my hope is that we all grow old together, but just not in tight leather pants. I prefer a more graceful approach—Bryan Ferry, David Bowie.

At the same time, my loner sensibility remains a part of who I am. The pattern is pretty clear: When I had the falling-out with STP after
Tiny Music
, I went off and did my first solo project,
12 Bar Blues
. When I later fell out with Velvet Revolver, the band I joined after STP, I went off and did my second solo project,
Happy in Galoshes
. Both projects brought me deep satisfaction. It was also a way to tell my bandmates, “Ciao, so long,
buenas noches
.” But beyond my temporary anger, I needed some artistic time away from STP.

On
12 Bar
, I was reflecting on being alone, reflecting on how I had hurt Jannina. In a song called “The Date”—which I wrote, played all the instruments, recorded, and mixed in about an hour—I sang about how “she waits for a date and yet she knows that he’s not coming.” I was in a Lennon-circa-his-primal-scream-period phase. It wasn’t about making beautiful music; it was just raw emotion. I was pleased, though, when Daniel Lanois called it the most beautiful of my songs.

Raw emotion drove a song like “Mockingbird Girl,” which I had written when, for a short period, I was with a group called the Magnificent Bastards, a side project that allowed me to take new sorts of musical risks. The band was an excuse for one great song and a lot of broken needles. “Mockingbird Girl” concerns a friend who fell for a girl whom he couldn’t quite grab hold of. It was used in a film called
Tank Girl
and, to my ears, has a George Martin Beatles sound.

While in the studio working on
12 Bar
, I happened to glance at the TV. The film
Barbarella
was on, and I found myself riveted. I wrote a song using that title. The lyrics are obscure, but reading them today, I see my desire for a strong, powerful woman to come along and cure me of everything. “You play the game,” I wrote. “I’ll masturbate and play a lullaby. You ran the race. I’ll pay the miles. You sing the pin love fuzz and dance the musty queer. I’ll stay at home ’cause I’m the mouse. So high that I can’t fly …”

I was really grateful—and honored—when Sheryl Crow came in and played on “Lady, Your Roof Brings Me Down.”

When I wrote “Where’s the Man,” I was living alone in a rented apartment—split from Jannina—and filled with regret. “Where’s your man, he’s lost and gone again. What’s your name? The name behind the shame.”

I was awash in shame. I was still hooked on heroin. I wanted out but didn’t know what that meant.

12 Bar Blues
wasn’t a hit by any means. It didn’t sell anywhere near the numbers of STP, but it was critically acclaimed. I wasn’t surprised because so much of it sounds like it’s from outer space—my home address at the time. Talk Show, the band the other Pilots had formed with Ten Inch Men singer, Dave Coutts, suffered the same lack of success.

I was bummed but decided to tour anyway. I formed an all-male band called Scott Weiland and the Action Girls. When we played New York, I went downtown to score dope in my old Lower East Side stomping ground, but by then, unbeknownst to me, the game had changed. There were no more hassle-free easy-access drug sales. Walking out of one of those nasty tenements with a fresh purchase in my pocket, I was nailed by a couple of cops. The Atlantic Records publicist bailed me out. I was so sick that someone suggested I try what’s called an overnight opiate detox. They put you under and you wake up feeling like you’ve been hit by a Mack truck. Problem was, the fuckers didn’t give me enough to keep me under. I awoke in full withdrawal, shitting, puking, cramping, and screaming, “Help! Help!” A nurse came in and said nothing could be done until they got hold of the doctor. It took thirty minutes of agony before he got there.

I went back to L.A., where still another rehab awaited me.