Nouvelles photos de Scott + article (Inked Mag - printemps 2006)
http://img283.imageshack.us/my.php?image=image79sf.jpg
http://img283.imageshack.us/my.php?image=image88xl.jpg
http://img283.imageshack.us/my.php?image=image94jp.jpg
http://img319.imageshack.us/my.php?image=image18qq.jpg
http://img418.imageshack.us/my.php?image=image23ab.jpg
http://img418.imageshack.us/my.php?image=image32rk.jpg
http://img218.imageshack.us/my.php?image=image44so.jpg
http://img283.imageshack.us/my.php?image=image54cw.jpg
http://img283.imageshack.us/my.php?image=image63lu.jpg
If you want to know a man’s life, just study his face. Take one look at Scott Weiland and you can tell he has lived a life most of us would be afraid to experience. His face doesn’t tell stories, it holds them. Intense, soft, scary, fearful, intimidating, and vulnerable, it’s all there-his rise to mega fame with Stone Temple Pilots, his fall with drug addiction, arrests and divorce. Last year was one of redemption. He cleaned up his act and Velvet Revolver won a Grammy. With his Family as inspiration, Weiland fights on, for something larger than himself.
Chelan, Washington is about as far away from Los Angeles as you can get. Nestled in the high desert Mountains a little over a half day’s drive from Seattle, this is the kind of place where,
if life has gotten a little too loud to bear, you can wake up in the morning-or afternoon, if you’re Weiland-and enjoy the silence. It’s the real kind of silence, where the more you open your ears to hear, the further away you try to listen, the more awesomely quiet it becomes, a kind of throbbing, uninterrupted sound of air and earth and the world turning.
It is here, in the mountains, where Weiland is staking his claim to a little piece of mind in the form of 20 acres of high desert beauty. He and his assistant, an affable steel drum player named Panhead, are readying the property and it’s brand new, Feng Shui log cabin so Weiland can bring his wife Mary, and the kids, Noah and Lucy, up to Chelan for their first Christmas in the mountains next week. “One of my martial arts instructors has a place up here” he says “And I just fell in love with it”.
When Weiland falls in love with something, he falls hard and all the way. When it’s music, he winds up writing his own chapter in the 90's alt-rock music canon as the front man for
Stone Temple Pilots. When it’s heroin, he winds up so soul-kissed by the dope it’ll take 30 detoxes and 20 some odd trips to rehab and the threat of losing his family to finally sober his ass up. When it is martial arts, as it is these days, he trains three times a week with Benny “the Jet” Urquidez, the creator of Ukidokan (a combination of several martial arts).
“Anytime I’ve set my mind to something I’m passionate for, I go full on. When I first discovered narcotics I went for it full on” he says. “It gave me peace of mind. I attacked it with a vengeance. I looked at it like a whole new cultural experience; it was a lifestyle. But I had discipline-I wasn’t a sloppy junkie. Just like now, for the last 2 and a half years, embracing being a responsible husband and father. That’s something I dove in completely”.
These days, discipline means borrowing a page from the Eddie Van Halen playbook of being home at dinnertime, no matter what, to spend time with the kids. Building the cabin in Chelan is a big step for Weiland, who has been clean and sober now just over two years. “A lot was done long distance”, he says of the construction. After all, life as the singer for a multi-platinum-super-group Velvet Revolver, a band he founded with former Guns n’ Roses members Slash, Duff McKagan and Matt Sorum, doesn’t always allow for time to chop wood and build walls. But get him talking about the cabin, and he’ll launch into a list of the design specs and architectural nuances so thorough and exact-down to the type of tile he’s using in the bathrooms that even a home depot manager might think he’s a bit obsessive.
Weiland likes to think of it as discipline. It’s an intensity that is palatable, if at times overwhelming, even to him. Discipline has always been a double edge sword in his life, stemming from in no small part from growing up with the clean cut stepfather, whose sole advice to him was to be responsible. His parents had divorced when he was three, devastating him. His step-dad moved the family from California to Ohio in 1972, where Weiland discovered he had a voice-and a taste for a good buzz. He embarrassedly sang in the school choir and stole off into the woods near his family’s house with a tumbler full of whatever booze he could tap from his Dad’s liquor cabinet. The combination of respect and resentment towards his stiff stepfather manifested into Weiland’s intensity-again he calls it discipline-when he discovered Rock n roll.
In 1982, the family moved from Ohio to Orange County just in time for Weiland’s teenage years. By his sophomore year his band was gigging in OC regularly-his maniac on stage persona fueled by his recent discovery of cocaine. He was responsible all right-for his bands success, but also for being so wired, he would see paintings come to life. A decade of this “great dichotomy” as he calls it, of drive and self destruction, led to STP and sometimes as memorable tales of drug busts and epic speedball binges. After his first major bust in 1995 outside a crack house in Pasadena, his then wife Janina Castenada bailed him out, only to have him bail out of the car on the way home to go on a bender.
These days Weiland isn’t recalling his war stories. He now prefers to talk in wide, patient, circuitous arcs on the big topics that mean something to him. Recovering addicts share their experiences, strength and hope, and today Weiland is heavy on the strength. Continuing his riff on the role of discipline in his life, he finally lands on the topic of what he does for a living.
“Music, choosing that is a life choice. I didn’t say “I love music, I’m in a band”. I charted a course. I managed my band, I saw it go through. I guess I forced it in a sense. You have talent luck and goal, and then luck. Circumstance and god collide and you get these serendipitous moments” he says “That takes discipline” That is the summation of his musical career.
Drug addicts are creatures of habit. They craves the stability and the consistency of ritual, if only because it is consistent, especially when set against the chaotic life of being a god damn drug addict. Heroin is an especially ritualistic drug, with it’s fixing process, and near-religious array of private paraphernalia. Weiland loved the ritual, the discipline of his drug habit, for so long it crashed and burned STP and almost cost him his family. Then it happened.
He calls it the “turn around”, and he tells the story very matter-of-factly as he does profoundly. After spending his whole life not feeling truly part of anything, beginning with his own family after the split with his parents, he finally got with the program. There were no huge epiphanies. No paintings came to life, and there were no visions of god in the detox cell. He just knows after a lifetime of wanting to get higher than a witch doctor, one day the obsession left him. His life hasn’t been the same since.
After a DUI bust in 2003, on his Birthday of all days, Weiland was ordered to an inpatient rehab program. He remembers those days clearly. “I was really depressed, Mary and I had separated, and it looked like I wasn’t getting my family back. All I wanted to do was sleep and lie in bed all day. My roommate was this big music producer (Weiland won’t reveal his name)and this guy was older, he [had] been through a lot. He said “look motherfucker, you’re depressed. I get it, I understand. How are you going to fell any better about yourself lying in bed all day? I’d like to do that too, but I get my ass up, because the counselors tell me it’ll make me feel better, so I do it. I take action” “So I followed the guy to the group therapy session. And I just want to get loaded, but I did it. And I did it again. I’d get up in morning, and I’d go to group. And by the end of the week something started to change. By that Friday people were telling me, ‘you sound totally different. I didn’t know what was going on with you’ Just a week had gone by
and I hadn’t even though about getting high. I could help others who were coming in and were depressed. I started to laugh again”
The DA wasn’t convinced, and ordered him back to rehab. He wound up at Malibu Ranch, a luxury rehab center. “I met a guy who was in a sense my guru, Jerry Schoenkopf (the director). His overall philosophy was “create your own program” and that really resonated with me, because up until the I had always tried to do what other people did and wound up comparing myself to them. But once I got out of there, I didn’t have the craving. I’d hear people at Narcotics Anonymous meetings say they didn’t have that obsessiveness, and I thought that was impossible.
Weiland now calls his epiphany a “miracle”. “There’s nothing-not even the death of a loved one-that could get me to stick a needle in my arm. It’s not an option. It doesn’t speak to me in the form of a lie anymore.” he says. With that, Weiland is back to his cabin and more work, more discipline. And he’ll be higher in a way he’s never known before-high above Chelan with his Family.
http://www.inkedmag.com/content/view/26/68/
