Article from Rollingstone.com today. Maybe this marriage to his new lady is doing some good after all.
http://www.rollingstone.com/news/sto...on=6.0.12.1212
The day Scott Stapp decided to kill himself, his band, Creed, was the most popular rock act in the country. It was 2003. The group's third album, Weathered, had just been certified six-times platinum, making it the best-selling rock album of the past year. Stapp himself, though, had become the most hated man in rock. Long-ridiculed in the press for his Christian-tinged lyrics and Messianic stage persona, Stapp had also alienated his bandmates with increasingly erratic behavior. The Weathered tour had ended with a disastrous concert in Chicago, during which Stapp had been visibly intoxicated, at one point lying on his back in the middle of a song. Stapp admits now, "I don't even recall doing that show." After the tour, Stapp was dropped off at home in Orlando, Florida, where he lived in a plush gated community. "I was insane," Stapp says. "You saw Ray? I was shivering. All this stuff was coming out of my body."
While on tour, he'd been drinking heavily and had become addicted to Percocet. He'd also been taking Xanax and large doses of the anti-inflammatory steroid prednisone for throat problems. Once home, he quit all drugs, cold turkey. At which point, he says, "I wanted to end my life."
But he didn't stop drinking. One evening, after polishing off a bottle of Jack Daniel's, he removed two firearms from his collection. "An MP5 SD3 and an MP5 K," he says. "Machine guns. They're what SWAT teams use." Since the Chicago show, he hadn't spoken to anyone from Creed. He'd become convinced that everyone involved with the band wanted him to die, so that he would become a "Kurt Cobain martyr-type" and boost record sales. "I had crazy thoughts going through my head," he says.
Before he pulled the trigger, he looked up and saw a picture of his son, Jagger, the product of a troubled marriage. Jagger, then four, was staying with Stapp's mother at the time. "And in an instant," he says, "I just turned and shot the house up. And I just broke down. I was like, 'I was about to blow my head off. How low can I get?'"
Even this wake-up call turned out to be short-lived. In the ensuing months, Stapp would flee to Maui, where he became addicted to OxyContin. By the middle of 2004, Creed broke up. Stapp cleaned up long enough to get engaged and record his solo debut, The Great Divide. But last fall, when it came time to promote the album, he began to self-destruct all over again.
On Thanksgiving Day, after announcing his engagement to his fiancee's family, he got into a fistfight with members of the band 311 at a hotel bar in Baltimore. According to 311's frontman SA Martinez, Stapp was doing shots, being "loud and obnoxious" and made "a disrespectful comment to my wife that I'd rather not repeat." When drummer Chad Sexton asked Stapp to settle down, the members of 311 claim Stapp sucker-punched him and, in the follow-through, struck Martinez's wife. (Stapp denies starting the fight.)
A few days later, Stapp taped an episode of Casino Cinema, a celebrity poker show on the cable channel Spike TV. He was obviously intoxicated. During the episode, Stapp slurs his words, curses incessantly, claims Dave Grohl has "a little cock," demonstrates a bizarre series of kung-fu moves and demands a kiss from co-host Beth Ostrosky (Howard Stern's girlfriend), later telling her, "My son thinks babies come from my sac" and "I make more money than Howard."
After watching the show, Stapp entered rehab. Now, a few days after Christmas, Stapp, 32, is back in Baltimore, sitting in the finished basement of his fiancee's parents' suburban home. The basement, Stapp's future-brother-in-law's bedroom, is carpeted; a phalanx of ceramic Santas line the top of a big-screen TV. Stapp has dimmed all of the lights except for a silver lamp, and now he sits in the near-darkness, perched on the edge of a couch.
He's dressed casually, in faded jeans and a tight black jersey, with a white knit Chicago Bulls cap pulled low on his forehead, his long hair tufting out to his shoulders. His mother-in-law-to-be brings us sandwiches and homemade brownies on a tray. There's also a leatherbound Bible on the coffee table, with Stapp's name etched on the cover. He takes two heaping scoops of sugar in his coffee, his hand shaking as he works the spoon. His eyes, large and sad even when he's making a joke, begin to well up. He cocks his head and stares harder at me, ignoring the tears in a way that makes them more awkward. Eventually, his voice cracking, he says, "Before all of this happened, I think the last time I cried was 1991, when my grandfather died."
A few minutes later, he adds, "It's weird. You can sell millions of records, be showered with all this love and admiration and still feel despised and unwanted. That's what I felt. I've made a lot of mistakes I'm not proud of. These aren't tears of sadness. I'm happy to get this out."
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Since 1997, Creed have sold 25 million records in the U.S. alone. The group's sound -- post-Pearl Jam arena-grunge -- may have been generic, but Stapp, as a frontman, stood out, though not always to the band's benefit. Irony-deficient, Jesus-haired and often shirtless in a way that reminded people of the guy from Lord of the Dance, Stapp came off as arrogant in interviews and preening onstage, and his lyrics, while inspirational to legions of fans, sounded like embarrassingly sincere Christian rock to the unconverted.
The band formed in 1995. Stapp had been raised in a strict Pentecostal family in Florida and was forbidden to listen to rock music. After leaving home at seventeen, he began drinking and using drugs, and became obsessed with the Doors. In Tallahassee, he reconnected with a high school acquaintance named Mark Tremonti, who turned out to be a guitar player in search of a singer. They recorded their debut, 1997's My Own Prison, for less than $6,000; it became the first debut album in history to produce four Number One rock songs.
But by the time of the follow-up, 1999's Human Clay, Stapp's personal life had grown increasingly hectic. He'd married his first wife, Hillaree, six months after they met; they divorced fifteen months later, but not before having a son. Since the divorce, he has retained sole custody of Jagger. One of the last times they saw each other, in 2002, she was arrested for hitting Stapp in the face with a cell phone.
According to Stapp, the nasty breakup, the responsibility of single-fatherhood and the success of the band soon proved overwhelming. He began drinking heavily and taking prescription pills. Attempts to get clean -- including a celebrity detox program at a luxury hotel in Hollywood -- didn't last. "There are a few people who get so crazy when they party, they have a nickname for their alter ego," says Tremonti, 31. "With Scott, it was Rick. I don't know where the name came from. But it would be like, 'Uh-oh. Here comes Rick.'"
"Basically, Scott was a cool, normal guy," says former Creed sound engineer Kirk Kelsey. "But fame caused the biggest destruction of his personality. The more power he got, the more corrupted he became."
Stapp's ego raged out of control. After shows, he'd ensconce himself in the corner of crowded college-town bars, ordering his bodyguards to bring over girls and keep everyone else away. He constantly threatened to quit the band, saying things like, "I'm going into acting or politics. This is just a hobby." A jock in high school, he bragged about the number of fights he'd been in and drunkenly challenged people to trade punches. "Scott's a time bomb every time he walks out the door," says a source who worked for the band. One night, after Kelsey critiqued Stapp's vocal performance, Stapp playfully tapped the soundman on the cheek a couple of times, then suddenly gave him a real slap. He walked away before a stunned Kelsey could react, later bragging that he had "bitch-slapped" the much bigger man.