ALSO by DAVID RITZ
BIOGRAPHIES:
Divided Soul: The Life of Marvin Gaye
Faith in Time: The Life of Jimmy Scott
AUTOBIOGRAPHIES:
Ray Charles: Brother Ray
Smokey Robinson: Inside My Life
B.B. King: Blues All Around Me
Etta James: Rage to Survive
The Neville Brothers: The Brothers
Jerry Wexler: Rhythm & the Blues
Aretha Franklin: From These Roots
Walter Yetnikoff: Howling at the Moon
Robert Guillaume: Guillaume: A Life
Laila Ali: Reach
Gary Sheffield: Inside Power
Felicia “Snoop” Pearson:
Grace After Midnight
Lang Lang: Journey of a Thousand Miles
Don Rickles: Rickles’ Book
Don Rickles: Rickles’ Letters
Leiber and Stoller: Hound Dog
Paul Shaffer: We’ll Be Here for the Rest of Our Lives
Grandmaster Flash: The Adventures of Grandmaster Flash: My Life, My Beats
Tavis Smiley: What I Know for Sure
Cornel West: Brother West
Archbishop Carl Bean: I Was Born This Way
Natalie Cole: Love Brought Me Back
Janet Jackson: True You
NOVELS:
Search for Happiness
The Man Who Brought the Dodgers
Back to Brooklyn
Blue Notes Under a Green Felt Hat
Barbells and Saxophones
Family Blood
Take It Off! Take It All Off!
Passion Flowers
Sanctified Blues (cowritten with Mable John)
Stay Out of the Kitchen! (cowritten with Mable John)
Love Tornado (cowritten with Mable John)
INSPIRATIONAL:
Messengers: Portraits of African American
Ministers, Evangelists, Gospel Singers,
and Other Messengers of “the Word”
SCRIBNER
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Copyright © 2011 by Scott Weiland
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First Scribner hardcover edition May 2011
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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Weiland, Scott.
Not dead & not for sale / Scott Weiland with David Ritz. —1st Scribner hardcover ed.
p. cm.
1. Weiland, Scott, 1967– 2. Rock musicians—United States—Biography. 3. Stone Temple Pilots (Musical group). I. Ritz, David. II. Title. III.
Title: Not dead and not for sale.
ML420.W357A3 2010
782.42166092—dc22 2010025147
[B]
ISBN 978-0-7432-9716-5
ISBN 978-1-4391-9997-8 (ebook)
All photographs are courtesy of the author unless noted otherwise.
“Fall To Pieces” © 2004; “For A Brother”; “The Last Fight”; “Mary Mary” © 2007 Chrysalis Music/Ready Set Go Publishing/Dracsorum Music/Pimp Music/DTK Music. By Scott Weiland/Matt Sorum/Duff McKagan/David Kushner/Saul Hudson. All Rights Administered by Chrysalis Music (ASCAP). All Rights Reserved. Used By Permission. International Copyright Secured. All other lyrics by Scott Weiland used by permission, courtesy of the author; Foxy Dead Girl Music; Triple Kauf Noplate; and Bug Music, Inc.
Content
A Tale of Two Fathers
A Tale of Two States
“Trippin as I’m Thinkin’” —from “Crackerman”
Former Movie Star Ronald Reagan is President of The United States
What the Fuck Does “Soi-Disant” Mean? (We really never knew. Fuck art, let’s fart.)
The Tale of the Pork Chop
New Kid in Town
Art School Girl
High as the Sun
Summer of Mary
Summer of Music
“I See the These are Lies to Come” —from “Plush”
Winter of our Discontent
Summer Kiss
Purple Wounds They Ease The Pain
“What’s Real What’s for Sale?” —from “Vasoline”
Breathing is The Hardest Thing—from “Interstate Love Song”
“Confusion Is My Illusion” —from “Unglued”
“I’m a Selfish Piece of Shit —from “Barbarella”
“Wanna Make a Rock Record?”
“The Painted Clown” —from “Lady, Your Roof Brings Me Down”
“Falling Further with a Flaming Hand” —from “Pruno”
Positive Soul Regeneration
Noah
The Devil’s in the Sun
Lucy
I Was Back There
Wind and Rock
“Journal of Memories, Feeling Lonely Can’t; Breathe” —from “Fall to Pieces”
Tenacity
“I Wanna Know Why You Have to Go”
The Day We Lost Our Lives
The Smoking Gun
Parisian Nightmare
Shoes of a Dark Clown
Cleaning Jimmy Choos with Holy Water
Acknowledgments
I dedicate this book to my beautiful children, Noah and Lucy
NOT DEAD & NOT FOR SALE
The Earthling Papers
As a baby, I was a dead-ringer for my son, Noah. Here I am, already interested in music and, as you can see, a believer that one should own one’s own albums.
PRELUDE to the PRELUDE
This memoir took me unknowingly to new highs and new and uncharted lows. It’s been a pleasure to work with David Ritz, an artist and tireless worker. I’ve relived pains as well as the highest of heights. I’ve felt deflated and elated to dig through the maze that is the mind and soul. Mining through the cobwebs to explore the why’s and why not’s. The human heart filled with sorrows and gold inspired me to dig further through this marathon or labyrinth in order to get the answers, find truth, and forgive injustices endured in order to move forward happy mostly, sad lovingly, and purged of the nightmares of the past. It’s been a grand endeavor.
But worth it.
Peace to All,
Scott R. Weiland
IT’S 2010 AND IMPROBABLY —hell, impossibly—Stone Temple Pilots is back together and blazing hot, especially after our second single debuted at number one.
Our new single debuted at number one.
Our new album is selling like crazy.
Old fans are back. New fans are lining up. Even the critics, who once delighted in deflating us, are praising us to the sky.
We were written off as the band of disastrous dysfunction with too many personal problems to survive. Or rather, I was written off as the guy whose hopeless addictions had—and would always—ruin everything for everyone.
Well, here we are, like Led Zep, playing sold-out arenas all over the world.
I couldn’t be happier.
And I couldn’t be more pissed because one roc
k-and-roll rag, our nemesis from back in the day, has, like the monster from the black lagoon, reemerged. They did a profile of me that was so off I didn’t even recognize myself. Quotes were taken out of context and old clichés about me were rewritten to look new.
Well, maybe the timing of this wrong-headed article isn’t so bad after all. Maybe it serves to remind me how glad I am to be offering up my own story in my own words. As you’ll see, I’m not afraid of documenting details about the life I’ve led. I have nothing to hide. I’ve done what I’ve done. I’ve done loads of things right and loads of things wrong that could be considered uncouth. It’s all here, all documented in my dreams, my musical schemes, my drama-poem-lyrics.
You’ll see that much of this has to do with love. I’m in love with love—or is it the idea of being in love with love? I believe that love only happens truly twice, but why, I wonder, does love always equal a broken heart?
With all this in mind, I’ve decided to tell my story. I’ve sold nearly 40 million records and at the time I didn’t appreciate it much. I felt it would be different later with Magnificent Bastards, both solo records (Twelve Bar Blues and Happy in Galoshes), Velvet Revolver, and finally the rebirth of STP. This book is an attempt to appreciate the complexity of so much success in the midst of so much chaos.
I wrote these “Earthling Papers” so you can hear directly from me. I’m not arrogant enough to call it the truth. But I do call it my truth. My life had been twisted, demoralized, redemptive, remarkable.
Let me start by jumping back to the point, only two years ago, when my mind was a mess.
Be ready for the rabbit hole.
PRELUDE
EVERY TIME I TRY TO CATCH UP TO MY LIFE, something stops me. Different people making claims on my life. Old friends telling me new friends aren’t true friends. All friends trying to convince me that I can’t survive without them.
Then there are the pay-for-hire get-off-drugs professionals with their own methods and madness. They help, they hurt, they welcome me into their institutions … and, well, their madness.
Welcome to my life.
Two years ago, my life was self-restricted to a sober living house, meaning that I walked through the doors of my own free will. Within hours, I watched the game of communal free will get stepped on, laughed at, and batted around like a Ping-Pong ball.
One of my fellow patients was a rocker chick just turned twenty-one. She had a problem with depression. We met in the lounge and talked the night away, smoking cigarettes, exchanging words of comfort.
“Am I pretty?” she asked me.
“You are beautiful,” I told her.
“Everyone says I smell because I haven’t showered.”
“Everyone can get fucked,” I told her. “When you’re depressed, you’re not exactly in the mood for a shower.”
She told me a story of grief and confusion. I listened. When she was through, we hugged good night. She kissed me sweetly. She wanted more.
“We can’t do this,” I said. “It’s not right. Not now, not here.”
A day later, I was approached by one of the counselors whom I considered a first-class shit talker.
“Rumor has it that the two of you were intimate.”
“What’s intimate?” I asked.
“Sex.”
“No!”
“She obviously has a crush on you.”
“Okay. What of it?”
“I heard you two had sex in the Jacuzzi.”
“No Jacuzzi,” I said. “No sex. Besides, who has sex in a Jacuzzi?”
“I want to know what happened,” she insisted.
“We were flirtatious. That was inappropriate. So we stopped.”
This young woman was confronted at our next group session. Sixteen hours later, she sliced her leg down past the fatty tissue. She was a cutter. They took her out of the villa and put her in a psych ward.
What can I do about it?
I write a poem, “The Little Villa and Painted Egg.”
Minds squall, alcohol, heroin
The man, the boy, the girl
The little villa where you live
You need to fill that pain inside
Xanex, Valium, barbiturates—they ease the easy side
Of all you fucked-up managerial types
You love to rule by what you say
Not by what you find
Beautiful garden, Easter eggs, those that you never really had
You stole our experiences and stole our baskets
That’s how you found twenty-one out of fifty-seven
THAT WAS LAST MONTH. This week I’m home dealing with those who “manage” my business life, those who, for their own purposes, direct my moves. They are my partners, assistants, and drug coaches (whom we call “minders”). There is no peace, not for an hour, not for thirty seconds. Someone is always showing up with calculated suggestions and implied instructions. I don’t know, but I think I’ve done pretty well for myself, even during my long-lasting, narcotic misadventures—all without the protective bubble of paranoid employees, partners, and helpers—er, minders.
Meanwhile, the facts are these:
It has been eight and a half years since I shot dope and nearly three years since I did coke.
I still drink. A regular garden-variety boozer, I am like any other barfly or drink-alone kind of guy. My relationship to liquor is not romantic the way I once envisioned my love affair with dope. I struggle to stop drinking, but I don’t see it as suicidal. In any event, I’m not drinking today. Today I’m inviting you into the middle of my life and the middle of my head. My heart feels a bit closed off because I’m realizing that there are few people, if any, that I fully trust. That’s an amazing statement to make and brings me to what may be the purpose of this book.
How did I get to this point? One word could probably suffice—loss.
I’m searching for explanations.
Someone recently gave me a T-shirt that said, I’M IN LIKE SEVEN BANDS.
There is a Stone Temple Pilots story to tell. There is a Velvet Revolver story to tell. There is a love story to tell. And a drug story to tell.
AMONG MY GREAT LOVES is that category of substances called heroin. Narcotic alkaloids. Derivatives of opium. I describe this stuff lovingly. I do so at the risk of high irresponsibility. It is not my intention to mislead anyone looking to live a righteous life. God knows that the shit will kill you, inside and out, soul to the bone. At the same time, I am committed to an honest assessment of the wreckage of my past. I loved opiates; I hated opiates; I am attracted to opiates perhaps the way John Keats was attracted to death. One hundred ninety years ago, the romantic poet wrote “Ode to a Nightingale”:
I have been half in love with easeful Death,
Call’d him soft names in many a mused rhyme,
To take into the air my quiet breath;
Now more than ever seems it rich to die,
To cease upon the midnight with no pain,
With thou art pouring forth thy soul abroad
In such an ecstasy!
IS DEATH THE MUSE? Is rock and roll the nightingale? Are opiates the key to unlocking the magical kingdom where colorful flowers fade to black? Why should anyone—especially a kid or a man who suspects that he or she may have talent—be drawn to such a kingdom?
I don’t know. Except that the pull is visceral. It may also be an act of self-loating or anger against home or society or even the human condition in which the promise of death shadows us from those first fresh moments of birth.
I think of the young woman overwhelmed by a compulsion to cut herself. The compulsion is heartbreaking and bizarre, but maybe not bizarre at all—maybe it’s simply the most honest compulsion of all because it gets to the heart of the matter. My long opiate-dazed days and sleepless nights were all about cutting myself emotionally. When I got high, the last thing in the world I wanted to do was party or interact with other human beings. I retreated to the dark corners of my room and my life. I
stayed alone and disappeared down black holes where no one could find me. I couldn’t find myself. I didn’t want to find myself. I became invisible. Or, as I put it in the song “Dead and Bloated,” “I am smellin’ like the rose that someone gave me on my birthday deathbed.”
Dad Kent and me at age five
Dad Dave and me at age three
WHY IS THE WORLD SO DIFFERENT NOW? I used to take my fishing rod and go down to the lake by myself. Now the world is one organized playdate after another.
In my childhood, I relied on my imagination—I could walk in the woods and be in Camelot, or Narnia, or wherever my mind envisioned. I had a vivid imagination, and still do. Today, though, how can you compete with a computer that, with the touch of a button, gives you every answer to every question?
In a technologically more innocent era, I was born Scott Kline in Santa Cruz, California, on October 27, 1967, to Sharon and Kent Kline, who divorced when I was two. Then Mom married Dave Weiland and I became Scott Weiland. I lost my name. I lost my father. I gained another father. Later I resented the hell out of my blood father, Kent, for not insisting that I keep his name. I felt abandoned. Gave his name away, gave his son away. Meanwhile, I saw Kent as a cool dude who drove a Pepsi truck for a living but smoked dope at night and listened to the Doors and Merle Haggard. When I think about my dad and Martha, the artist he married after Mom, I hear Fleetwood Mac’s Rumours. Kent’s the father I wanted to be with. At age forty-two, I’m still looking to connect with him.
My new dad was a good guy whose middle name was discipline. An aeronautics engineer with TRW Space and Electronics, he was always working on advanced degrees. Shortly after he married Mom, he moved us to Chagrin Hills, a woodsy suburb outside Cleveland, Ohio.
I’m stuck on that name—Chagrin Hills. Chagrin means distress, pain, anxiety, sorrow, affliction, mental suffering. Usually, idyllic suburbs have names like Pleasant Valley or Paradise Falls. Chagrin Falls makes no sense. In some ways, my childhood made good sense; in other ways, it didn’t.
My childhood was green pastures and bee stings, learning to play baseball and football, living in a nice house, waiting—always waiting—for the start of summer so I could go to California and see my dad Kent.
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