Stone Temple Pilots |
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Mon. June 18.2001 6:39 PM EDT |
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Stone Temple Pilots: Long Way HomeWeiland talked about group therapy, the headaches of bunking with your bandmates, and why U2 make him cry. by By Teri vanHorn |
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Stone Temple Pilots (Atlantic Records) |
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SAN DIEGO — Scott Weiland is walking back from an Alcoholics Anonymous meeting held around the corner from his home. Clad in a denim shirt and jeans, the Stone Temple Pilots singer is incognito. His newly shorn hair is hidden under an L.L. Bean
A few days earlier, STP — which include guitarist Dean DeLeo, bassist Robert DeLeo, and drummer Eric Kretz — finished mixing their fifth album, Shangri-La Dee Da, in Atlanta. Now Weiland, 33, his wife Mary, and their 6-month-old son Noah have retreated to their home to nest for a while before the touring and promotional grind begins again. Though clearly in decompression mode, the singer is also visibly restless. He pops the album in the stereo and settles into his couch with a cup of tea. As the music plays, Weiland listens with complete focus, appearing lost in the music. Produced by the band's longtime studio collaborator Brendan O'Brien, Shangri-La merges rudimentary rock and roll and classic pop melodies with moments of glam, punk, space-pop, and even bossa nova. Like the band's last album, No. 4, which had to be wrapped in a hurry when Weiland suffered a drug relapse and then spent five months in jail for a probation violation, Shangri-La Dee Da's sessions had their own share of drama. But they also marked the most productive time in the band's nearly decade-long career. Weiland recently sat down to talk about group therapy, the headaches of bunking with your bandmates, and why U2 make him cry. *** VH1: You guys rented a Malibu mansion to record this album, moving in with your significant others, producer Brendan O'Brien, his staff, and a documentary film crew. That sounds a little cramped. Weiland: It got to be a little bit much. Everyone kind of came apart at the seams. There were beautiful times, there were a few angry times, a few sad times. They knew when my wife, Mary, and I were arguing, we all knew when Robert and Kristin were arguing - and Juliana and Dean and Eric and his girlfriend. It was an interesting experiment to get people who aren't in their 20s anymore to live communally and work on music. [The creative process] is the most personal thing in your life other than your family. Then you bring in a bunch of roadies, techs, assistant engineers, producers ... a film crew. It got a little squirrelly. I'm pretty amazed, with everything we went through, that there weren't any fistfights. A year from now you won't remember anything negative, you'll only remember the funny things. It's like when you spend Christmastime at a big family gathering. People do it year after year because they tend not to remember the negative things that happen. But out of that whole thing, we were all more focused than we've ever been. We had a lot to prove to ourselves. VH1: Like what? Weiland: We want to sell a lot of records - making money is a great thing. But equal to that is a desire to feel like you've done something that mattered, that your contemporaries and peers respect your work and that you've left some kind of indelible stamp. VH1: Do you feel like you've done that? Weiland: Listening to these songs, I definitely do. VH1: What about before Shangri-La? Weiland: Well, a lot of successes come by mistake. Put us onstage with anybody, with equal production, and I know what the outcome will be - there's no one who can touch us. Anybody who pretends that they don't go into a show with another band wanting to own the crowd and take the evening is full of sh*t. I don't remember when that hasn't happened for us. But making records is a whole different thing. It's personal. Who you are as a performer is one thing, but when you're making records, you're dealing with musicians' tastes, their goals, their wants, their needs, everyone's individual pride. You either just try to put something out and not risk any of those things, or you dig into that stuff: You expose yourself and you expose the other people. That's what it's like being in a band for a long period of time, and why many bands, even the really good ones, don't last. It's a lot easier to be a successful solo artist and make records the way you want and pick a producer and hire guys to play. If you don't like their attitude one day or the coffee they made is too weak, you [just] fire them. But when you're in a band, in order to get to that point where you've done what you set out to do, you have to dig down deeper and continue to push the others when they're falling behind. It's a lot easier to get on each other when you're 23 and you're making your first record. But when guys have money and comfortable lives and don't need to do certain things, it's a lot harder to manipulate [them]. You just have to hope everyone's on the same page. We felt it was time to make that record. I think this is the one, artistically, anyway, that shines a new light onto everything we've done in the past. VH1: When I talked to Robert shortly after you began recording, he said the band was breaking into territory that you'd never been able to reach before. He said a big factor in achieving that was the fact that you weren't in the throes of drug addiction. On the one hand, it sounds like there was a whole new level of freedom for you. But on the other, there were all these new pressures - you'd just become a father and a husband, and here you all are in a house making a record. Weiland: With addiction, you free yourself of one thing and the snake finds a way to bite you in the ass with teeth you've never felt before. It's an ever-evolving, ever-changing deal. This wasn't the same story as the last three records, but it wasn't really any easier. Mary and I have been married less than a year and we have a son — balancing that [during the recording process] was really difficult for me. That's the main reason why Mary, Noah, and I are down here for a while. Making this record I threw myself back into a little bit of hell. That doesn't necessarily mean the same kind of stories that we dealt with in the past. But it takes a price on my personal life — my relationship with Mary and the security of having a new family. That's what's the most important thing — Mary's health, my health, Noah's health, and our health as a family. I tend to get my hands into all these other things and all these distractions, and after a while I start feeling depleted. I'm sure that everybody in the band is kind of doing the same thing right now — the decompression chamber. VH1: Are you guys getting along? Weiland: Yeah, but there's still a lot of issues that we have with each other that we always skirt around. Like any relationship, you develop baggage. There are things that we should have resolved a long time ago that we don't resolve because we're fearful of reactions. [Our management company] had this idea that we were going to talk to this guy and do group therapy. There are four personalities, and there is one personality. I think everyone's excited about that suggestion. It's really pretty easy for us to go out on the road and rock the world and come away feeling pretty good about ourselves, with big egos and all. But making a record's a whole different thing, so it brings up old things that you thought were kind of gone. VH1: Do you think Dean, Robert, and Eric trust you? Weiland: Yeah, I think they trust me to know my limitations. They probably trust me as much as Dean and Robert trust each other. We all kinda trust Eric. [Smiles] VH1: Do they trust your sobriety? Weiland: Yeah, I mean, why not? I played a couple hundred shows since I got out of jail, had a family, recorded 18 songs — I've got a lot to show for it. VH1: What kind of situation are you describing in the song "Days of the Week" — that whole one foot on the sidewalk, the other one in the grave mind-set? Weiland: It's an assessment of my feelings coming straight out of jail and being hit with sensory overload and a lot of new insecurities. But not every sentiment on this record is autobiographical — some are observations. I'm getting better at that. It used to be that every song lyrically was about my life, my experiences, my feelings. That's an important thing for an artist to be able to do, but it's also a little self-indulgent. It's a bit more of a task to observe somebody else and to paint their story and tell their story. Dylan is great at doing that; he's a great storyteller. VH1: What about "Bipolar Bear"? Weiland: That's a day-in-the-life song. I suffer from manic-depressive disorder, and I've chosen not to take medication for it. Because of that, every once in a while I go through manic episodes and really depressed episodes. It's kind of like a snapshot of one of those moments. VH1: What's the story behind "Wonderful"? Weiland explains the evolution of "Wonderful."  Weiland: Robert and I wrote it while we were on tour. We were in the dressing room, and it started off with just my voice and Robert playing acoustic guitar. Over the next couple months, we did different recordings of it onto DAT in arena dressing rooms and bathrooms, because they're really big and have lots of reverb. My initial thought was to take it in kind of a Nick Drake direction. But as we started doing demos, it kind of felt like, "Well, it's such a great song that it could make a real imprint on pop music and we might be doing it a disservice to just have it completely stripped down." We decided to play with a few different arrangements. There were some battles back and forth with O'Brien, because this is one of those songs that we knew was real important. We've always walked a fine line between experimenting with different instrumentation and acoustic music ... to punk rock and everything in between. Of all the ballads that we've ever put out, this is probably my favorite. More so than "Creep," "Big Empty," or "Lady Picture Show." It's probably the most well-written song that we've ever done. It's also a love song for my wife. VH1: It's not a very happy love song — pretty fatalistic. Weiland: Sometimes when I'm lying in bed with Mary in the morning and she's still sleeping, I wonder, "What would she do if I died? What would I do if she died?" That thought just kind of turned into lyrics. VH1: You looked completely absorbed listening to it. Weiland talks about how U2's music makes him feel. Weiland: There are a few songs that have the ability to have that affect on me — you know, that bring water to your eyes and give you chills. U2 has the ability to do that to me. "Kite" off the new record just does something to me — pulls on my heartstrings. In the same breath that it's being experimental, it's honest and it's real, and it just moves me. Just like "Stay (Faraway, So Close!)" off Zooropa. [He sings] "Green light, 7-11/ You stop in for a pack of cigarettes." I can be brought to tears listening to songs like that, but it doesn't happen very often with songs that we write ourselves. Because you get real cynical, but every once in a while it does happen and you feel like you're onto something. |
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