|
Love Hurts
09/04/2001 8:00 PM, Yahoo! Music
David John Farinella
If you wander into a New Orleans bar and service is a bit slow, give the guys a break. After all, they might be short one bartender because he had to hit the road with his band. That's Wes Scantlin's story, anyway. Turns out the singer had hung up his guitar and was heading towards New Orleans to go to work at his cousin's bar when he got an interesting phone call. "I was in Mobile, Alabama when I got signed," Scantlin says. "One of my really great friends called me up and said, 'Fred Durst just called and I don't know what happened, but he wants you to fly to Los Angeles.' I was like, 'OK, no problem.'"
A couple of weeks earlier, Scantlin had conjured up some moxie while heading off to a Family Values stop in his hometown of Kansas City. He used a fake backstage pass to get a demo tape by his band, Puddle Of Mudd, to Durst--well, to Durst's bodyguard, anyway--and then waited. "The next thing I know, I get a call from Fred Durst and we're on tour with Godsmack and the Deftones," Scantlin says. "It was very weird, especially when you're leaving where you grew up and you want to see some of the rest of the world and you're at the end of your musical journey. I would never stop playing music altogether, but just as far as trying to support myself and anyone around me with music."
What happened there? Did the stars align? Did Scantlin call that Jamaican woman that's on the tube every other commercial break? "I think it has a little bit to do with magic and a little bit to do with skill and craftsmanship. I don't know, man, it just happened, and there's nothing I could do to stop it. When it happened, I wasn't about to stop it. Nobody's going to say no to that," he says. No kidding.
While Scantlin's struck a vein of gold in his musical career, he hasn't been so lucky in love. "Dude, never," he answers with a laugh. "I'm still searching for someone. I've always had a bad relationship with girls. I can't say I've been the best at it either, but people change and turn out differently and it really messes with your head. But I guess you can say it's good for songwriting. Every girl I date now, if they freak me out, I just look at it like another song."
"Control," one of the summer's biggest radio hits, details some of Scantlin's past experiences. So do the tunes "She Hates Me" and "Never Change." "'She Hates Me' is definitely a very comical song," Scantlin explains, "but it really came from a dark dramatic moment in my life. Yeah, that song, man, is about another girl that didn't want to do anything with me and kind of changed. I ended up saying, 'Man, this girl hates my guts.' That's how it came out."
Seeing as much of "Come Clean" is rife with Scantlin's "love hurts" mentality, does he warn women he starts to date nowadays? "Lately I have," he admits with a laugh. "Lately I've said, 'That's going to end up on the frickin' radio.' But, hey, music is drama, drama is music."
|
