It was a one-man cell, furnished with a bunk, a toilet and a wash basin, all made of steel. There were no bars, just a metal door. There were no windows, either.

Technically, Scott Weiland was in protective custody. As a member of an 11 million-selling rock band, the Stone Temple Pilots singer was deemed by the Los Angeles Sheriff's Department to be at risk in the general population of Men's Central Jail in downtown L.A. But to Weiland - inmate 6158735 - his accommodations were solitary confinement in all but name.

"I've been in a p.c. block there, which has bars - it also has rats and cockroaches," he says brightly, as if comparing two pieces of real estate. "When the lights go out at night, the cockroaches come out. You wrap yourself in your blanket and hope they don't crawl all over you. But it's worse in that little room. No sound of anything. It's just your own head - the wheels inside, turning.

"It was," Weiland confides in a sudden hush, "a struggle not to commit suicide. There was a huge part of me that didn't want to go on."

On August 13th, 1999, he had walked into the Los Angeles County courtroom of Judge Larry Paul Fidler, where Fidler told Weiland that he had run out of last chances: After repeatedly violating his probation on a 1997 conviction for heroin possession, the STP frontman was going to prison for a year. Weiland left the room in handcuffs and was immediately transferred to his shoe box at Men's Central.

Soon after his arrival, Weiland received some "kites" - a kind of unofficial inmate telegram - from a neighbor. "He was a heavy in the Mexican Mafia," Weiland says. "He found out who I was - he could find out anything - and I signed some autographs for him and his family." In return, the gangster offered to procure drugs - heroin and speed - for Weiland. The singer politely declined.

"That was," Weiland claims, "the most pivotal moment of my life - turning down drugs when I knew that they would at least temporarily shut my mind off. My feeling was, 'If I'm gonna ask God to help me in this situation, I can't spit in his face.' "

It is seven months later. Weiland, thirty-two, is talking over dinner - not in a prison chow line but at a trendy Chinese restaurant in Hollywood. He says he grew a beard ("my Soft Parade look") and put on weight in jail despite the cuisine. But tonight, Weiland looks like a rock star again: cleanshaven and cleareyed, slim and rakish in black pants, a black turtleneck sweater and a long ice-blue scarf. There is also a slight but palpable punch in Weiland's voice. It is the sound of sobriety, the cautious pride of a recovering addict in the early stages of healing.

After five days at Men's Central, Weiland was transferred to Impact, an inmate drug-treatment program at another Sheriff's Department facility, Biscaluz Recovery Center. On December 30th, he was granted parole. Weiland is now a free man - of sorts. He is back on probation, required to maintain a strict regimen of counseling and drug tests.

Weiland is also sorting through the wreckage of his life, attempting to repair the battered love and trust of his family, friends and STP band mates: drummer Eric Kretz, bassist Robert DeLeo and Robert's older brother, guitarist Dean. Asked about what he learned in jail, Weiland keeps repeating the word humility.

"It's not me thinking less of myself," he says. "It's me thinking of myself less. A lot of my ways of thinking have backfired on me. My stubbornness. My pride. My arrogance. The difficult thing is that those defects of character become assets in my business, the rock & roll world.

"It's great being a rock star," he crows. "But you know what? Being a rock star doesn't give you the license to view yourself as more important than anybody else. And if I am to become a better man, a man who has some compassion and humility instead of just expecting people to understand me, that doesn't make me less of a rock star."

Weiland throws back his shoulders in mock godliness and beams like a man plainly in love with his job - and eager to get back to work.

This is where stone temple pilots belong: onstage, firing hit after hit - "Plush," "Sex Type Thing," "Vasoline" - at exultant fans. STP are at New York's Irving Plaza for a secret club show. It is the band's second concert since Weiland's release from prison, its first in New York since 1996. There are rough spots: a couple of false starts when Dean's guitar slips out of tune. But the power and raw glamour that made STP overnight stars with their 1992 debut, Core - concrete-block riffs, high-class choruses, Weiland's psycho-Bowie vocal theatrics - are still there. At one point between songs, a shirtless Weiland, his washboard chest glistening with sweat, turns to Robert and plants a sloppy kiss of gratitude on the bassist's cheek.

This is what life in STP was like just a year ago, during the recording of the band's current album, No. 4: "We were tracking 'Church on Tuesday,' " says Dean, "and Scott's main concern was to get out of there and get high rather than making his vocal performance as great as it could be. He snuck out of the room. I went into the other studio, knocked on the door and said, 'Why don't you share some? Why don't you fucking share, man?' "

Dean, 38, is sitting in the smokers lounge of his home on the Pacific Coast north of Los Angeles. It is a converted corner of the garage, outfitted with armchairs, a small wooden table and, in one corner, an old Cheap Trick concert poster. Dean, usually bursting with boisterous charm, is not smiling as he talks. He too struggled with addiction, years ago in his home state, New Jersey. "I've been there," Dean says frankly. "I've had the spike in my arm. But I never let my brothers down.

"At the time," he says of that recording session, "I would have liked to kill Scott. I didn't know if it was for selfish reasons or to put the fucking guy out of his misery. Yet when I listen to the record, I'm in love with Scott. I don't think there's anyone better." Dean finally smiles, wanly. "Talk about a dichotomy."

Weiland's most extreme screw-ups are all on public record: two arrests in California for narcotics possession, in 1995 and 1997; a third drug bust, in New York in 1998, while he was touring behind his solo album, 12 Bar Blues; five years of fruitless, court-ordered treatment for his addiction. And he has paid a sizable debt to society - a combined 140 days at Biscaluz and Men's Central, a little less than half of his full sentence.

Kretz and the DeLeos are still doing their version of hard time, their heads spinning in speculation and frustration. They speak of Weiland and his heroin saga with the affection and distress of blood brothers. "We are the guys who loved him the most, aside from his mother and father," says Kretz, 33, a Northern California native with a blond Musketeer-style mustache and beard. "We were always there to help him." Yet for all of STP's success under duress - four albums in nine years with combined U.S. sales of 11 million copies - Kretz and the DeLeos can't help wondering what should have been.

"I don't want to go through my life holding anything against anyone - it's not a healthy thing," says Robert DeLeo, a tall, courtly fellow of thirty-four and a veteran, like his brother, of Jersey Shore bar bands. In 1985, a year after relocating to Southern California, Robert met Weiland at a punk-rock show; they were soon collaborating in Robert's home studio, laying the foundation for what ultimately became STP.

"It's amazing," Robert goes on, "what we have accomplished as a band, with what we've been working on. But I would like to tell people, 'You should see what we can really do.' "

"Even before Scott went to jail," says Kretz, "it was like, 'STP, what's going on?' 'Well, the record's coming out.' 'Oh? Who's singing?' I told Scott that. He probably thought I was lying. But people were like, 'Is he still around?' "

Weiland first tasted heroin in 1993, after a memorable STP show at Roseland Ballroom in New York, where the band hit the stage in full Kiss makeup. "I tried heroin because I wanted to," he confesses, noting that at first the opiate gave him a rush of confidence. "I didn't feel like the guy in this band that was selling millions but who people weren't taking seriously," he adds, referring to STP's early pastings in the press as an imitation Pearl Jam. "I felt talented and valid.
"It wasn't like as soon as I tried [heroin] I became an asshole," Weiland adds. "It was a gradual process."

[From Issue 1047 — June 8, 2000]