Rock of Love

By Rebecca Swanner
Photos by Alison Dyer

Inked Magazine
www.inkedmag.com

Weezer bassist Scott Shriner and his wife Lauren

We hang out at home with Scott Shriner — the only tattooed member of Weezer — to talk marriage, ink and the band’s shocking sixth album.

In a quiet neighborhood east of Hollywood, down winding tree-lined streets, sit homes belonging to Luke Wilson, Terry Gilliam, Barack Obama and Weezer bassist Scott Shriner, who is standing in his living room in a stark white bathrobe looking a bit shocked to see INKED. The scene isn’t a wild rock star party with a hot tub full of groupies (this is Weezer after all). Quite the opposite. Shriner is simply running late. While the bassist excuses himself and disappears upstairs to get dressed, his wife, Jillian Lauren, makes homemade green tea. The cozy Craftsman home is filled with antique furniture and two hyperactive Cairn terriers, and the expansive backyard is lined with fig, lemon, orange, peach and pomegranate trees. Soon, the household will be filled with another spirit, as the couple is in the process of adopting an infant from Ethiopia. This is home life, Weezer-style.

Shriner, the third bassist for Weezer, met Lauren Big Lebowski-style at a bowling get-together in Los Angeles. It wasn’t love at first sight. “This girl, who was one of the guys, brought [Lauren], who is definitely not one of the guys,” explains Shriner. “I instantly didn’t like her. She was really pretty and I suspected that she was trouble because she was so pretty. I was right.” Lauren, whose face is framed by long, raven-colored hair and Bettie Page-style bangs, had recently taken a break from dancing with the Velvet Hammer troupe (where her stage name was Sparkle Diamond) to finish her master’s degree and focus on writing her memoir (although she graces the cover of the Velvet Hammer’s recently released coffee table book wearing nothing but cherries and her tattoos).

When Shriner found out that Lauren was completing graduate school and had put her burlesque dancing on hold, he changed his tune. “She could have just danced, but she had chosen to go to school,” Shriner says. “I thought that was really cool and brave.”

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