<* SCOTT WEILAND *>
From iMusic
"I love rock stars," says Scott Weiland as he toasts up s'mores in his hotel's faux fireplace. "I'm intrigued by the glamor and the danger. Perhaps it will be my bane."
Already decreed by Alternative Press to be one of 1998's most eagerly anticipated releases, Weiland's debut solo affair finds the Stone Temple Pilots singer creating what he refers to as "a sonic adventure." Exciting, hallucinatory, and fraught with a Beatles-and-Bowie inspired sense of surprise, "12 BAR BLUES" is indeed magical. Loopy beats collide with delirious glammed-up popcraft on such extraordinary tracks as the phantasmagorical psychedelic first single, "Barbarella," or the moody melancholia of "Where's The Man." Elsewhere on this most expansive trip of an album, Scott gets his rock 'n' roll ya-ya's out on edgy tunes like "Jimmy Was A Stimulator" or the insidious "Cool Kiss." "12 BAR BLUES" is the rare record that seems to exist within its own space and time, without caring a tinker's damn about marketability or the ever-elusive hip quotient.
"Grunge is dead," Weiland declares, "and I shed no tears at the funeral. Dirty jeans, Pavement T-shirts, and dreadlocks are boring. Rock stars used to be alluring! We're like magicians, ya know? We get to project love and positive energy. We get to create magic! The thing is, I don't really give a shit what's cool and what's not cool, because I've never been regarded as cool. However, it is cool right now. Could you hand me my sweater?"
"Rock 'n' roll is dying because record companies are trying so hard to load up their rosters full of wannabe alternative bands," he continues. "You get bands that are just so mediocre that I can't even say that they suck, you know? It showed that you could brainwash middle Americans who watch too much Jeopardy by getting some college kids and dressing them up in golf wear and Izods and calling them alternative. At least in the early Nineties, when us and Nirvana and Pearl Jam and Soundgarden came out, record companies were making an attempt at developing careers."
After three multi-platinum albums with STP, Weiland recorded "12 BAR BLUES" throughout 1997 at a number of Los Angeles area studios, including a Burbank warehouse that the auteur converted into the vintage-yet-modern studio dubbed "Foxy Dead Girl Music." Scott and producer/engineer Blair Lamb (known for his work with Sheryl Crow and the one-half of Weezer combo known as the Space Twins) ran the sessions, with additional production assistance from esteemed knob-twister, Daniel Lanois (who came in near the end of the album's production, and who Scott says has declared "12 BAR BLUES" to be "the first album in ten years that he's been jealous of").
Weiland is personally responsible for much of the album's endlessly inventive music-a uncommon melange of rock, pop, dance, Bossa Nova, and all points in-between and beyond-playing, among other instruments, beat box, guitars, piano, vibraphone, and percussion. But this is no one-man-band, mind you. "12 BAR BLUES" also features such players as Scott's brother, Michael Weiland, who plays percussion on a handful of songs; bassist Martyn LeNoble and guitarist Peter DiStefano (Porno For Pyros); Grammy-nominated jazz pianist Brad Mehldau ("THE ART OF THE TRIO VOLUME ONE"); and ex-Samiam drummer Victor Indrizzo, who Weiland refers to as "my Mick Ronson" by virtue of his co-writing a number of tracks as well as his piano and guitar contributions. Together, Scott says, they're "the Action Girls."
"It's kinda like Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers," Weiland explains. "It's my thing, I wrote the songs, but the band is so good, they deserve their own identity. And so, it's the Action Girls."
In addition to the dozen new tunes on "12 BAR BLUES," the album also includes an all-new version of Weiland's only previous non-STP track, "Mockingbird Girl" (which was originally performed by Weiland and the Magnificent Bastards, and previously only available on the Tank Girl soundtrack), as well as the recent rock radio smash, "Lady, Your Roof Brings Me Down" (also available on Atlantic's "GREAT EXPECTATIONS: THE ALBUM" soundtrack).
"Victor was noodling around on piano with this waltz," Weiland says, explaining the genesis of the track, "and every time I heard it, it made me think of Cabaret, of Burlesque, of Tin Pan Alley, you know? Berlin in the 30s or, you know, England around the turn of the century. And it gave me that vibe, like it belonged with Charles Dickens."
While "12 BAR BLUES" represents Weiland's escape from the traditional two-guitars-bass-and-drums format, it also serves as a reflection of his much-publicized battles with addiction. Evocative and more melancholy songs like "Son" and "Cool Kiss" find the songwriter summoning a profound sense of regret that is matched only by his remarkable inner strength.
"Half the record was recorded while I was using...and using a lot," says Weiland. "But most of the songs were written when I was sober. They're mostly about my feelings about sobriety, about my new life, and also about the experiences that I had gone through. You know, the depths of heroin addiction. I've been to hell and back, man."
While most Rock Stars of Weiland's stature would tend to cover up the unpleasant details of his excessive past, Scott feels that honesty is not just the best, but the only policy.
"The more I talk about it," he says, "then that takes the power away from other people creating their own stories."
"12 BAR BLUES" amply displays Weiland's chameleonic gift for shedding skins like his hero, David Bowie. As he made his album, Scott viewed himself as a cracked actor in a similar vein as the original Thin White Duke.
"An album is like a movie," he muses, "and in each film you have different characters, right? So I'm a different character in each song. The songs are the different scenes, the different themes, and then within each song, you have changes, and these changes are taking you from one room to the next."
Perhaps Scott's main goal for "12 BAR BLUES" is to bring a little flash and a burst of glitter to the currently gray world of popular music. Scott Weiland wants to glam things up, and the lipstick kiss of "12 BAR BLUES" is just the thing to put the color back into the face of rock 'n' roll.
"Rock stars are born with another appendage," Scott Weiland, Rock Star par excellence, explains. "And that appendage is the ability to dress yourself up. It's like, birds fly, you know? The two things I know how to do like birds know how to fly, are write songs and dress well. I just want people to read this bio and realize that everybody has some sort of appendage, some special gift. Yeah, I've got a few nice suits, but ultimately it's about the grooves on the vinyl. It's about my music." 3/98
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