Stone Temple Pilots singer Scott Weiland will turn 32 this week -- in a Los Angeles jail.

That's where he'll be Tuesday when No. 4 is released, the long-awaited reunion album of his multi-million-selling Southern California band.

Weiland is perhaps this decade's most chronically troubled rock star. Last month, he was sentenced to a year behind bars for violating his probation in a string of previous drug busts that date back to 1995.

In that time, he has had more than one brush with death.

"It hurts when the guy's flat-out on a bed with his mouth open, and you're wondering if he's dead," says Robert DeLeo, the band's bassist.

Weiland has been in mandatory rehab six times since that first charge for heroin and cocaine possession. This year, the singer finally exhausted the patience of L.A. County's judges. He was arrested in Los Angeles on Aug. 13 following a July heroin overdose.

Jail-time might finally get Weiland clean, but it evidently hasn't damaged his famously erratic way of expressing himself.

"It is one of the travesties of mankind to lose one's freedom," Weiland said a month ago in an official statement released from the L.A. County Jail's Biscailuv Recovery Centre. "But if the wheels of a man's mind are free to turn and the wings of his spirit cannot be clipped, then is a man truly in chains? And is any man truly free?"

Weiland has never been exactly reluctant to express an opinion.

Known, perhaps by his own design, as a petulant, arrogant interviewee and a dedicated upholder of rock 'n' roll decadence, he once told Details magazine that "there was a time when I'd suck d--- for crack, but I never had to. I'm rich."

Just bought drugs

Questioned by police outside a New York City housing project last year, he promptly admitted he had just bought drugs.

But the singer has been sincere about the pain of his addiction.

"(Heroin) becomes something you need just to stay well," he has said. "If you don't have it, you're sick, and you long for the life you had before ... and you stop caring."

The three non-jailed members of Stone Temple Pilots shed a different light on their troubled frontman during a recent promotional visit to Toronto to discuss No. 4.

For STP, the Weiland roller coaster ride is troubling, but it's nothing new. They're not the most unlikely band to show up for an interview without their singer, and they laugh upon being reminded of this.

It's also an indicator of just how candid guitarist Dean DeLeo, brother Robert and drummer Eric Kretz are in discussing their longtime friend, whose battle with heroin addiction has dogged the band's career for five years.

"We were just talking about how we were in the same predicament with Tiny Music," says drummer Kretz, 33, referring to STP's last album, Tiny Music... Songs From The Vatican Giftshop, which came out in 1996.

"Right when we released the record, and were getting ready to tour, Scott was MIA. So we were just kind of laughing about it. This is almost identical to the last time.

"Except, this time, we know right where he is."

There's a twinge of tough-love in the comment, as if to say Weiland is almost safer under lock and key than wandering off on his own -- which is pretty much what happened when STP ended their Tiny Music tour at Toronto's Guvernment club in May 1997.

Back then a breakup was rumoured -- and denied -- as Kretz and the DeLeo brothers formed the side-band Talk Show, and Weiland went solo. Weiland's debut album, 12 Bar Blues, fared well enough. Talk Show's self-titled effort didn't. After an 18-month hiatus, STP regrouped earlier this year to make No. 4.

"This record reeks of determination," 38-year-old Dean DeLeo says. "I was asked just this morning: 'Why don't you replace Scott?' He's irreplaceable, man.

"Talk Show was just medicine for us, y'know, because we like making music."

Adds bassist Robert, 33: "If we didn't feel we had anything to contribute with Stone Temple Pilots, I would have packed it up by now."

The others say they realize Weiland is integral to their band, but they don't want to risk his health for the band's sake.

Upon Weiland's release from prison, which is expected in early spring, the band will shut down once again if he relapses.

"We've got to walk away from it," Dean says. "Because if we don't, we start wearing that hat with the big 'E' on it: 'Enabler.' "

Then again, prior to his July overdose, Weiland told Details magazine, "I seem to get in more trouble when I'm at home bored, doing nothing."

Robert disagrees.

"When it comes time for him to jump into this band, it almost makes us feel like we're enabling him to go into that area where it's acceptable to be like that," he says.

Whether STP have lived up to their full potential is debatable.

After five years of slogging in San Diego's clubs, the band burst onto the charts in 1992 with Core, an album that deftly capitalized on the grunge trend of the day and stretched the sounds pioneered by Pearl Jam and Alice In Chains to their full commercial potential.

STP's first hit, Plush, belatedly nabbed the group a Grammy in 1994. That same year, they released another multi-platinum album, Purple, before Weiland's drug abuse started to come to light. By 1996's difficult Tiny Music, the group's sales were slipping.

"With Tiny Music, Scott wasn't really there to comprehend it and contribute his part, and the record got a little lost on the way," Dean says.

"There have been times when you want to say to the world: 'You should see what we can really do,' " Robert adds.

Fighting for sobriety

The DeLeo brothers say that their new disc, No. 4, captures Weiland fighting for his sobriety with a renewed spirit.

Weiland addressed his personal problems directly on 12 Bar Blues, but a new tune such as I Got You, on which Weiland describes his mind "wandering to the spoon," is downright confessional.

"He proved to me on this record that he's not in as much denial as he used to be," Robert says. "He was coming from a far more literal standpoint, and I think it was his way of saying, 'I have a problem here.'

"As singers, we get away with a lot, behaviour-wise, as if it's okay to be a junkie. It's not okay. It's not okay for him."