SCOTT Weiland is the quintessential rock star.
He’s as good-looking as his idols – Jim Morrison and David Bowie – and between drugs and jail, he’s a bad boy’s bad boy. On top of this, he still managed to sell 35 million albums as frontman for Stone Temple Pilots and Velvet Revolver (his latest ex-band) and as a solo artist.
Now clean and sober, Weiland releases his second solo album today, the two-disc “Happy in Galoshes,” and his tour touches down Dec. 5 at the Fillmore at Irving Plaza. While the 41-year-old musician should be on top of the world, speaking to The Post from his LA home, it seems as if he carries its weight on his back instead.
“It’s been a really s – – – year and a half,” Weiland says. “My brother died. My mother got cancer. My grandfather is dying of emphysema and my wife is divorcing me.”
Good thing, then, that Weiland says, “I need adversity to write.”
The title of the new disc reflects that sentiment. “Happy in
Galoshes,” Weiland explains, means “I’m happy when it rains.”
He adds that this is a concept album, and the concept is how he absorbs personal pain. “The majority of the record,” he reveals, “was written during setbacks and the breakup of my marriage” to model Mary Forsberg, with whom he has two children.
“The rest of it is about my
brother’s death,” he says.
Weiland’s younger brother Michael, who died of a drug overdose, was vital in the recording of Scott’s solo record, 1998’s “12 Bar Blues,” playing all of the percussion.
Those were rocky days for Weiland, especially since the period marked the first time he realized how much heroin was hurting him.
“It was a miracle that [the album] even came out,” he said. “We were all getting pretty strung out. That’s when I hit a point where I said, ‘We gotta stop using, I want to get clean.’ I wanted both of us to stop using, but I was the only one who eventually did.”
Before he hit bottom and kicked smack in 2002, Weiland was busted in New York for buying heroin while dressed as a pimp. Later, he did a stint in a California correctional/treatment facility for possession.
Weiland says it wasn’t jail that rehabilitated him, but something from within.
“I wanted to quit,” he says. And from 2002 through 2007 – just after his brother passed – he stayed clean. “I had a setback after Michael, I had a coke binge, but then I put myself back in rehab,” he says.
“That was the greatest thing I ever did for myself. It was there that I realized my biggest problem wasn’t my addiction to drugs, but my need to medicate my feelings and deaden my ability to have relationships.”
While his self-realization has made him stronger, losing the man who he still calls “‘the best friend I ever had” has taken its toll.
“Writing these songs doesn’t lessen the hurt” Weiland says.
“I woke up this morning at 7 and I turned on the television, and there was a movie on about the World Trade Center, and suddenly I was thinking [about] how I lost my brother. I still dream about his death. I had to identify his body after the OD. How am I ever going to forget that?
“We both lived hard lives. I
happened to get off of heroin and he didn’t. I feel guilty that I alienated him over that.
“Rock guys can’t look sensitive, you have to look tough, but it’s really a myth, a mask. Maybe that’s why all the real emotion ends up in my songs.”
Happy in galoshes, indeed.