Scott Weiland
From Dickipedia - A Wiki of Dicks
Originally, the band called itself Shirley Temple’s Pussy. When the record label made its preference for a new name explicitly clear, the band decided it liked the initials so they just found some other words that started with the same letters. Sure, the new name didn’t have the fervent, evocative poetry of a 1930s child star’s genitalia, but it would suffice.
In 2003, Weiland and three other junkie rock stars formed Velvet Revolver, one of the worst names in the history of rock bands. Some other sucky band names are Soi Disant, Awkward Positions, Swing, Mighty Joe Young, Magnificent Bastards, Camp Freddy, The Wonder Girls, Shirley Temple’s Pussy, and Stone Temple Pilots. What these bands all have in common is that Scott Weiland was in them.
Weiland is best known for his work with intravenous equipment. His career as a drug fiend began, as so many similar careers do, with the gateway drug marijuana, which he first tried when he was 13. At 16, having dropped out of high school in his freshman year, he first tried cocaine. Not long after that, he first tried rehab. All of this, though, was mere prelude to his discovery of his true calling, hardcore heroin addiction.
Weiland is the poster boy for recidivism. His death could be reported at any moment.
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Heroin
In 1993, Weiland was introduced to heroin by Butthole Surfers front man Gibby Haynes. From all available evidence, he liked it very much.
On May 15, 1995, Weiland was arrested in an alley behind a motel in Pasadena for possession of drug paraphernalia (a crack pipe), being under the influence of drugs, driving under the influence of drugs and, most significantly, possession of drugs (heroin and cocaine). This turned out to be just the wake-up call he needed, and he quickly entered rehab and turned his life around.
Just kidding. What he did was hole up for a month in a Los Angeles hotel room with skank and fellow heroin enthusiast / dick Courtney Love. “We shot drugs the whole time,” Weiland recalled ten years later. “Most of the time she just walked around in panties.”
There, now that image is burned into your brain as well.
Weiland was sentenced to a year’s probation, with the stipulation that the charges would be dropped if he stuck to the rules during that time. Tragically, one of those rules was, “Don’t shoot heroin.”
More heroin
On March 5, 1996, Stone Temple Pilots released their third album, Tiny Music … Songs From the Vatican Gift Shop, whatever that meant. A tour was planned but eventually scrapped because, as the band announced, Weiland “has become unable to rehearse or appear for these shows due to his dependency on drugs.”
On April 29, 1996, Weiland was sentenced to three months in a rehab in Pasadena. In June 1996, he went AWOL, prompting his first arrest warrant to be issued. He returned to the facility a day later, citing “personal reasons” for his excursion. These reasons had to do with making sure he wasn’t being thrown out of the band for costing them huge sums of money a) because they weren’t touring and b) because the album wasn’t selling because they weren’t touring.
Weiland managed to complete the rehab program, and the 1995 possession charges were dropped. With this triumph behind him, Weiland and his band belatedly embarked on their concert tour in November 1996, ending with a New Year’s Eve announcement that the last four dates of the Stone Temple Pilots tour had been cancelled due to “personal problems within the band.” Weiland re-re-entered rehab days later.
After a month in rehab, Weiland was all better again, for two months. Following a short tour, rumors were flying that Weiland had been kicked out of the band. Manager Steve Stewart said, “The band is not breaking up,” though apparently, the rest of the band felt they needed to “see other singers” and recorded an album under another name with another frontman.
On September 8, 1997, Weiland was arrested for possession of heroin and a hypodermic needle. He re-re-re-entered rehab, or as the process had become known, re4hab.
Still more heroin
Weiland’s solo album, 12 Bar Blues, was released on March 31, 1998. Around this time, Weiland – who had ditched the grunge and was now styling himself as a Mohawk-sporting, eye-liner-overdoing Bowie-Bolan-Ferryesque glam rocker – declared that he was going to “save rock ‘n’ roll.” First, however, Weiland would save ten bags of heroin, with which he would be arrested on June 1, mere hours before he was supposed to play a sold-out show at New York’s Irving Plaza.
Weiland re5entered rehab, and quickly re5exited. A month later, he was arrested in Los Angeles for failing to show up in court for a hearing in connection with the February drug charges. After being released on $10,000 bail, he demanded that his wife, Jannina, drive him to his dealer. When she refused, as he later told the story, “I jumped out of the car at 45 mph, rolled across the street, found a pay phone, called a cab, [and] went to my dealer’s house,” where he shot some heroin. Not long after, Jannina became Weiland’s ex-wife. On August 12, 1998, Weiland pleaded guilty to heroin possession in Los Angeles and was sentenced to three months of rehab.
Inexplicably, Weiland’s bandmates consented to the regrouping of Stone Temple Pilots. Their fourth album, the cryptically titled No. 4, was released on October 26, 1999. The band finally went on the road, and after financial and critical success, moved into a Malibu estate to record its fifth horribly titled album, Shangri-La Dee Da. It was released on June 19, 2001. Finally, the band would be able to tour properly.
The album totally bombed, selling a dismal 350,000 copies. This was approximately 4.3 million fewer copies than their first album sold. The band blamed Weiland, and following a fistfight between Weiland and guitarist Dean DeLeo during the final concert, it was understood that Weiland was out of the band. For good this time. Or not.
Meanwhile, Weiland had married model Mary Forsberg on May 21, 2000, and on November 19 he became a father. Weiland celebrated his son Noah’s first birthday by fighting with his wife in a Las Vegas casino and getting arrested on a domestic battery charge. He pleaded guilty and was ordered to undergo counseling. Another child, Lucy was born in August 2002. Periodically over the past several years one member of the couple or the other has filed for divorce, but so far no divorce has been consummated.
In May 2003, Weiland joined up with three former Guns N’ Roses junkie dicks, Slash, Duff McKagan, and Matt Sorum to form the self-styled supergroup, Reloaded. The name would have been the first clever one for a Weiland-related band, so of course it was changed to the awful Velvet Revolver.
Heroin yet again
Early on the morning of May 18, 2003, Weiland was pulled over by Pasadena police for driving without his lights on. Unsurprisingly, there was heroin and cocaine in his car, and Weiland was sentenced to three years probation on two felony drug possession charges. At this point nobody really thought Weiland would ever stop using heroin, but they still held out some slender hope that they could make him stop getting arrested for it. With his addiction now spanning millennia, Weiland pleaded no contest and once again entered rehab.
Weiland celebrated his 36th birthday on October 27, 2003 by getting arrested for driving under the influence after crashing into a parked car and leaving the scene. He pleaded no contest and was ordered into yet another drug program.
On June 8, 2004, Velvet Revolver released its first album, Contraband. Washington Post reporter Sean Daly saw the band perform and observed, “With his creepy stare, skeletal frame and herky-jerky dance moves that make him look like he's fighting his way out of a straitjacket, Weiland is an unsettling frontman.”
No heroin?
In an interview in the April 2005 issue of Esquire, Weiland announced that he was off drugs for good. (See also: George W. Bush’s “Mission Accomplished” speech of May 1, 2003.) “The prospect of losing my wife and my children changed everything,” he said. “Right now, for the first time in my life, I’m finally happy. I don’t think anymore about getting high.”
No, heroin
On March 24, 2007, Weiland and his wife got into an altercation in front of their children that left two hotel rooms with holes gouged in their walls, dishes smashed, and phones ripped out of their sockets. Afterward, Mrs. Weiland went home and torched $10,000 worth of her husband’s clothing in their front yard. She was arrested for felony arson vandalism, thus proving to her husband that he wasn’t the only one in the family who could attract unwanted legal attention.
By Halloween, Weiland had been arrest-free for more than four years, a milestone he celebrated by getting arrested on November 21 for driving under the influence of a drug after crashing his car in Los Angeles.
On January 20, 2008, Weiland failed to show up for a Velvet Revolver gig at the Sundance Film Festival. On February 7, Velvet Revolver was scheduled to perform at the House of Blues in San Diego. Instead, the band issued a statement apologizing to fans for having to cancel the concert because Weiland had that day entered, of all places, rehab. Or, in this case, re-re-re-re-re-re-re-re-re-re-re-re-re-re-re-re-re-re-re-re-re-re-re-re-re-re-rehab.
On April 2, 2008, Velvet Revolver kicked Weiland out of the band. Fortunately for him, the three leftover Stone Temple Pilots had just formed the Facebook group “Masochistic Gluttons for Punishment Who Like Nothing Better Than Constantly Worrying About Whether That Phone Is Ringing Because Our Singer Is Dead,” which inspired the notion of reuniting with Weiland. Their first gig together after almost seven years is scheduled for the Rock On The Range festival in Columbus, Ohio, on May 8. It is to be followed by a 65-city North American tour that kicks off May 17 and is expected to end abruptly on any night thereafter, or before.
