With multi-platinum sales, Grammy nominations and sold-out concerts, Weiland, Slash, Duff McKagan and the rest are in perhaps the best spots of their careers - though it's been far from easy.
Weiland recently took some time during a tour break to speak to the Rocky Mountain News from his home in Hollywood, Calif. He has a special fondness for Colorado, not just because of his love of snowboarding or his Red Rocks shows with Stone Temple Pilots but also because his parents hail from Evergreen.
Question: In early press material regarding Contraband, you said something like "We're all looking for a rebirth." Do you feel like you made it?
Answer: You know, I do. You're right, though. Lightning hardly ever strikes twice, and it has in this situation. When I formed this band with these guys, they kept coming to me with this new material. Finally I just decided the pros really just outweighed the cons. I looked at it like 'Here's a real opportunity to create in my mind a true, real sexually violent rock 'n' roll band.' I felt we could make a massive contribution to the face of rock 'n' roll.
The question was: Would we have a real chemistry and could we keep it together with all the big personalities involved? As writers, right off the bat, I noticed it worked. Then we did a gig, and it worked. And it got better and better and better. And as all this success happened, a No. 1 record, all the No. 1 singles, critical reviews, Grammys, the whole thing - it is really pretty amazing.
But I think really it's a testament to us. It takes a lot of hard work to keep a band like this together. It's almost like everyone in their own way has gone through post-traumatic stress disorder from previous bands.
Q: Slash reminds me of Led Zeppelin's Jimmy Page. He loves his music and just wants to play it.
A: His guitar, in a sense, is a fifth appendage. He really is the kind of person who loves to rehearse. He'd rehearse every day if we allowed him to, even during break.
One thing the band has learned how to do from all the dramas of our past bands is keep a band together. I think keeping a band together . . . is almost like defying gravity. It takes really loving what you're doing. . . .
Q: Given that it's your second time around, do you protect it more?
A: Definitely. When the tension starts to rise and we notice things are getting a little out of control, we call a powwow and we just exorcise whatever demons are going on. We find out that underneath the surface there's a lot of miscommunication going on.
Q: Was it a leap of faith to write songs with guys you barely knew?
A: At first I had no idea whether it was going to work. It was kinda like jumping into the fire with a squirt gun. But I found it to be very rewarding and very exciting. We kinda had our back up against the wall. We had two soundtracks we had to deliver for. We didn't have a lot of time for a lot of pleasantries. We kinda jumped into it as five creative people. That actually allowed us to get to know each other intimately really fast.
Q: Was that the purpose?
A: It just happened to be that way. Those opportunities sorta came out of nowhere. But what we ended up doing after that - once we decided this works, let's do this thing - was let's keep on writing, let's do this band. Then we decided, all right, let's make a record. We decided we'd raise the bar higher than we'd ever raised it before. We would not put any filler on the record. If there was one song that one band member didn't feel completely in love with, that song wouldn't go on the record.
Q: How many rejects did that make?
A: Initially, there was a chalkboard. On the chalkboard there were 60 song ideas they'd been working on for about a year. Out of those, I whittled it down to about 25. Then we wrote 12 more on top of that. From that, there were about 40. We whittled that down to 13 songs.
Q: People ask about your musical influences, but I'm interested in your stage presence. Who influenced that?
A: God, I would say everything from Iggy Pop to James Brown. David Bowie to Mick Jagger. There are so many. I could go on and on and on. (Jim) Morrison.
Q: When did you feel like you could command a stage?
A: There are two parts to what I do. There's the performance/art side, then there's the songwriter side, the recording-artist side. To me those are two totally different things. One of my favorite bands in the entire world, possibly my favorite band, is The Beatles. But I wouldn't consider The Beatles one of the greatest live bands. As songwriters and recording artists, they were probably the greatest of all times.
When I'm in the studio, that's where I feel completely alive. Being on the road, it's rough. It drains. But there's that hour-and-a-half period of time that it's like being high. It's everything. It's similar to songwriting and recording because it's extremely creative. I have no idea what I'm doing next. But the rest of the time you're on the road can be fairly miserable.
Q: How tired are you of the media's using you? Even the PBS Frontline story on the music industry seemed exploitative.
A: I get very disgusted with the media, especially the celebrity-oriented media. To tell you the truth, I think the only reason that most of it exists is just to make a buck. . . . The media has gotten most of the world so addicted and obsessed with wanting to know every last detail of what's going on with celebrities, especially with wanting to know their innermost secrets and if their relationship is falling apart. . . . I've been doing this for 12 years, and it didn't used to be that way.
I guess that celebrity-based press makes a lot of money. I see a lot of my wife's friends wait at the newsstand for those magazines to come out, hot off the press. You gotta get 'em like doughnuts at 6 in the morning. It disgusts me.
