When word of my arrest in Pasadena became public, I was still living at the Marmont and partying hard. The press was asking me for a statement concerning my drug bust. I didn’t want to go on TV, so I wrote something and gave it to Courtney to read on my behalf. She was delighted to be my spokesperson. In essence, I said that I would never advocate drugs for anyone, that I was not in great shape but hoping to get better.
It was not a particularly strong statement, but at that point I was not a particularly strong man. I was groping, grieving, and getting more fucked up on heroin, a drug that simultaneously made me feel bad, feel good, and feel bad for feeling good. Confusion reigned. The din inside my brain was louder than the din of a dozen metal bands. Only heroin could turn up the quiet. Only heroin took me to the place where shame, guilt, and remorse were magically washed away.
IN 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.
STP—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
FAR 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.
THAT WAS THE QUESTION DEAN ASKED ME over the phone.
“Not sure,” I said. “What do you have in mind?”
“A raw rock record. Nothing fancy. Just balls-out rock and roll. Back to basics.”
I liked the idea. I did not, however, like the absence of an apology from either Dean, Robert, or Eric for trashing me in public. I still harbored big-time resentments. But I was practical—as were they. If my solo project had gone through the roof, or if their Talk Show record had sold millions instead of thousands, we probably wouldn’t be talking. But Dean did call with this idea that seemed pretty sound.
“Besides,” he said, “we’re building a legacy. It’s important we stay together and not let shit tear us apart.”
So we got together and started jamming. My plan to continue working alone was trumped by a chance to put out a strong STP record and make good money.
The truth about working alone is this: Even during those periods when I was estranged from my bands, I often fell in with another collaborator. In that regard, no one has been closer to me than Doug Grean, soul brother to the bone. When I met him, I was in the process of putting together my recording studio and Doug had some equipment I could use. He presented himself as an engineer, and in that capacity we started working together.
Didn’t take long before I saw that, more than an engineer, he was a superb guitarist, trained in the rich soil of New Orleans funk, capable of playing in any genre. Beyond playing, though, Doug proved to be an ace composer. In short order, we hit it off and became a team. Doug took on different instruments—various keyboards and the tricky lap-steel guitar—enlarging our musical palette. I also started toying with keyboards, although my contributions were mostly sounds and sprinkles in a Brian Eno–esque mode.
Doug was an important contributor to the new STP album, which we would title No. 4.
All the songs were written together live. Brendan O’Brien, our brilliant longtime producer, urged us simply to put our hearts and souls on the line. What came out was, at least in my mind, a good record of generic rock. What kick-started things, though, was one single—“Sour Girl”—that turned into the biggest hit of STP’s career. The fact that we created a far-out video to accompany the song didn’t hurt. Since its release, everyone is convinced that it’s about my romance with Mary. But everyone is wrong.
“Sour Girl” was written after the collapse of my relationship with Jannina. It’s about her. “She was a sour girl the day she met me,” I wrote. “She was a happy girl the day she left me … I was a superman, but looks are deceiving. The roller-coaster ride’s a lonely one. I pay a ransom note to stop it from steaming.”
The ransom note, of course, was the fortune our divorce was costing me. And the happy state, which I presumed to be Jannina’s mood, was due to the fact that she had finally rid her life of a man who had never been faithful.
“I Got You” is another song that has me musing on Jannina and how, time and again, she tried to save me from myself. I wrote, “I got you, but it’s the craving for the good life that sees me through troubled times, when the mind begins to wander to the spoon. And I got you because you’re there to bend and nurture me through these troubled times.”
“And I don’t believe it,” says a song called “Church on Tuesday,” “is she really gone again?” It’s Jannina who is gone, Jannina whom I have pushed away, Jannina’s family who I visualize in church, praying for a man to honor their daughter in a way I never did.
When No. 4 was finished, the logical move was to tour behind it and let our fans know STP was back and stronger than ever. The only problem, though, was that I was weaker than ever. I was still fucking with dope. I was in the midst of a firestorm romance with Mary. And, finally, I wasn’t available to support the album because, when it came time to kick off the tour, I found myself heading for jail.
Better times
MY PLAN WAS ALWAYS TO AVOID JAIL. Rehab was my only hope. The court said so, and I knew so.
When I got to rehab, though, the emotional chemistry changed when a nurse slipped me a note that said, “Mary Forsberg is looking for you.”
My heart started hammering, my pulse racing. Apparently Mary had been having drug problems of her own and wanted to join me at this recovery home. Part of me wanted her to check in. But a smarter part of me knew it was a terrible idea.
I told the people running the rehab not to admit her. Mary found another place to recover but left after a few days. A week later, on my birthday, she sent me a card. All it said was “Happy Birthday, Baby!” That’s all it needed to say. It sent chills down my spine.
I wanted to see her, and after moving to a sober living house I sought her out. At the time she was living at Charlize Theron’s place, which was under reconstruction. A few days later, I did what I had longed to do—move in with Mary. We were hopelessly in love.
Hopelessly.
A LITTLE WHILE LATER, we were living together in an apartment off the mid-city Miracle Mile in L.A. We were also doing coke together. This was before we were married and had kids. I was slipping on and off heroin when Mary and I went to a party where an old friend offered me a fix. I said yes. Mary was distressed; she begged me not to, but I cou
ldn’t be dissuaded.
“Well,” Mary said, “if I can’t stop you, I want to do it too. I want to know what it feels like. I want to know what you feel like when you do it.”
“You once snorted it.”
“But that didn’t do anything. I want to shoot it.”
“One time only,” I said. “One time and that’s it.”
She agreed.
I prepared it. She tied off. After shooting her up, I watched her fall into an easy ecstasy.
Later she said, “I felt more peace than I’ve ever felt in my life.”
She immediately knew why I did what I did.
My song “Bi-Polar Bear,” released in 2002, centers on something I discovered about Mary and myself years earlier: bipolarity. Friends and colleagues had been saying that maybe my drug condition and her erratic behavior and uncontrollable moods were more than simple mood volatility. So we went to a psychiatrist who specialized in such evaluations. We both passed the test with flying colors. We were both bipolar bears. The lyrics say,
So I’m halfway letting go again
I’m halfway full on
Left my meds on the sink today
My head will be racing by lunchtime
The romance with Mary always felt like a footrace—her catching up with me, me catching up with her. We’d break up to make up and start all over again. She’d swear me off. I’d swear her off. But my need for her was as great as my need for beautifully destructive drugs. For months, we were happy together, protecting each other from the cruelty of a world that couldn’t understand us. Only we understood each other. Then for months we would stay apart, realizing the futility of trying to forge two spirits moving in different directions.
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