Weiland Picks Up His Career--and a Sideline

Just a year ago, Stone Temple Pilots singer Scott Weiland’s ability to regain control over his life and career was in doubt.

In jail on drug charges, he’d sabotaged STP’s success, and any revival seemed unlikely.

Today, though, not only is STP set to move into a Malibu estate to start recording a new album in the wake of a triumphant concert tour, but Weiland is also overseeing career moves by other artists as well as himself.

Weiland is launching his own label, Lavish Records, and has signed two acts, Los Angeles rock trio the Campfire Girls and rap group the Underdogs.

“My main thing is I’m a music fan,” he says. “There’s a certain excitement that I get out of working with a new artist or people who are still really hungry--as opposed to working with a group who sold millions of records. I don’t have to mention any names, and I don’t mean my own group.”

That’s a not-well-veiled reference to Limp Bizkit--Weiland served as an uncredited co-producer on several tracks on each of the band’s last two albums. But it’s also a general observation that the music business has lost sight of the grass-roots rock world in which success can be measured in thousands rather than millions.

To that end, in their quest for financing and partnerships to get the music into stores and online, and to promote it, he and his associates are looking for new business models. They’ve had positive response in early talks with venture capitalists, pitching an approach that would treat album deals as joint ventures with the artists to give them a bigger ownership stake in the recordings than the standard record deal.

This is also a chance for Weiland to help artists who didn’t get the same breaks he and STP did on their way to rock stardom. The Campfire Girls fit that bill perfectly. The trio signed with Interscope Records in 1994 after a label bidding war, but the band fell victim to drug problems and split up before a full album could be released.

Last year, Campfire Girls singer-guitarist Christian Stone found himself working as a bartender alongside Weiland’s brother, Michael, who’s doing A&R; duties for Lavish. Both of the Weilands had been fans of Stone’s old band, and Scott offered his Pasadena studio to Stone to record new solo material. Those sessions soon evolved into a full Campfire reunion, with Weiland’s input.

“We were just going to record a few songs, and Scott heard the stuff and was so into it he wanted to make us his first project,” says Stone. “And he had creative ideas for the songs, really great ideas. Scott, as far as producing for us, brings a side to our music that was never there before, this kind of pop sensibility.”

But Weiland makes it clear that Lavish is not a charity home for wayward rockers.

“I think I have an opportunity to be part of something that’s on the horizon,” he says. “There’s a huge vacuum now and I believe there is a want and need for something. I just don’t know what it is yet.”

SPEEDING TICKETS: The future of concert ticket buying may have arrived. More than 80% of available tickets for Weezer’s upcoming tour have been sold, without a single fan waiting in line or on hold. The more than 70,000 tickets sold thus far have been purchased via the Internet.

“The Ticketmaster people told us that we would all celebrate with martinis if we sold 10% of these tickets online, and here we are approaching 90%,” says Tiffany Hein, entertainment brand manager for Yahoo!, which is sponsoring the tour and providing the Internet hookups for fans in conjunction with Ticketmaster.

The 20-date trek, which starts Feb. 21 in Austin, Texas, and includes a sold-out March 16 date at the Hollywood Palladium, is the third under the Yahoo! Outloud banner. Hein, who created the concept, says it took the coalescence of several key elements to reach this level of Internet sales so quickly.

“Weezer has a rabid fan base that’s very Net savvy,” she says. “The band has been gone for four years but kept in touch with the fans [through the Internet].”

And, she says, with Yahoo!’s underwriting and the strong relationships tour producer Dave Frey (co-founder of the H.O.R.D.E. festival) has with promoters, it’s been possible to keep ticket prices, including Ticketmaster fees, to a low $20.

What Yahoo! gets in return is exposure as more than just a search engine and e-mail site, in this case providing Webcasts of Weezer shows and online chats with the band.

KENNEDY LEGACY: The Dead Kennedys’ classic political punk screed “Holiday in Cambodia” in a commercial for a Southeast Asia cruise? Don’t look for it. But the ‘80s Bay Area punk band’s singer, Jello Biafra, is suggesting such things will now be possible, thanks to a recent court ruling that he had improperly withheld control of the quartet’s catalog and revenues from the other former members.

In a message on the Web site of his label, Alternative Tentacles, Biafra charges that the other three members “most likely will pimp our music to corporate labels, TV commercials, etc.; regardless of how people who believe in Dead Kennedys’ message feel about it.”

Absurd, says bassist East Bay Ray.

“That’s a red herring to distract people from what this was really about,” says the musician. “The issue is Biafra defrauded his bandmates. He had control of the catalog and decided he wanted to get more money out of it rather than tell us he owed us money.”

The plan now, Ray says, is to arrange for a new release of the full DK catalog, plus a series of previously unreleased live albums and videos.

“It’s not going to be [done through] a corporate label,” he says. “We’re looking at joint ventures and decent-size independents to get the music out.”

An Alternative Tentacles spokeswoman says that Biafra is not doing interviews about the subject, though on the Web site he is soliciting contributions to a legal fund for an appeal of the ruling.