Stone Temple Pilots

their first record has 5 songs that I know purely from radio osmosis, that's quite the successful debut in a genre that had a ton of records that were only 1 or 2 songs deep

i kind of think that's what made them interesting to me, that interloper quality. they also really convincingly embedded a beatles-ish mode of songwriting in their work from tiny music on, which really attracted me to them at the time

Yeah, I think "Creep" was the first song of theirs that I heard (in a music store) and I was sure it was a new Nirvana album.

I always had the feeling they were interlopers who wandered in from the wrong scene (and I still kind of believe that), but they for damned sure could make a super solid greatest hits album.

― Ⓓⓡ. (Johnny Fever), Friday, December 4, 2015 9:14 AM (26 minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

i hate this post, but i do agree with it. however, the songs were really, pretty good, and he used to wear dresses on stage, and he did seem genuinely sincere in his efforts to be just plain subversive -- yeah, it isn't like he was cobain or anything, but he still gave things a good go, in the 90s.

Hyperlink I had that exact same experience playing that album cruising around in 2002 I think? Maybe summer of 2001.

Perhaps how I'll remember him best...."And where's my only cigarette?"

Guessing that I gave them their only Pazz & Jop #1 vote ever for "Sour Girl" (not sure, though). Liked about four or five other singles, and also voted for Velvet Revolver's "Fall to Pieces." He had a knack for melody within whatever genre he was working in.

Just looked at the "Sour Girl" video for the first time ever. Not exactly the pictures I had been carrying around in my head.

sad how unsurprising this is...growing up when i did, learning to play guitar when i did, it would be hard for me not to have a soft spot for stp.

I interviewed him around Happy in Galoshes (a really catchy little album) and he was thoughtful and nice and I liked him a lot. Then I saw him live on that tour and it was a disaster. Same thing on the STP reunion tour. Hard to watch. Sad to think about everything he could have accomplished without his abuse issues.

recent live footage. not looking so hot.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9AHXwlmOmUM

I can't think of a single tune besides "half the man i used to be" but I was still shocked by the news last night. Checked my phone right before I went to bed and there was an AP alert. surprised that it kind of rocked me at all. Sad. I think it's interesting how a lot of the commentary today goes like "Even if you didn't like them," "They may not have been your favorite," "I never really listened to them" etc. I was endeared to him through interviews on Howard Stern. Addiction sucks.

Reports that he'd been using crack again

http://www.tmz.com/2015/12/04/scott-weiland-dead-crack-cocaine/

listened to some 'purple' songs last night, a record that came out mid-high-school for me. sad how oblivious i was, apparently, to what so many of the songs were about at that age. the sufferings of suffering artists are wasted on teenagers.

Core came out in my final year of high school & my friends & I would nick off during lunch driving around listening to the cassette over and over.

And I was really into Purple in college, it was definitely an album that drew my new college friends & I together. I remember dancing to Vasoline on free beer night more than a few times.

I was just listening to Purple this morning, gave me full-on time machine feels - forgot how well i knew the album, lots of songs I'd completely forgotten.

I fell off with them pretty quickly after that though - might go back & check out Tiny Music. i dont remember that album hardly at all except that i hated big bang baby at the time.

last interview, sounds half dead

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BUZVi8la_6c

really surreal this happened in Bloomington and he was gonna play the Medina Entertainment Center. It's usually a lot of older country type stuff and classic rock bands, like a bit sub-regional native american casino circuit, looks like Firehouse & Winger are playing there in Feb

i saw Dio there at the very lowest (lock up the wolves/angry machines-ish) late 90s ebb of his career, great show but yeah it's pretty far down from where he'd been

hope he found some peace or at least some rest

No innovator but for a while more restless than I gave him credit for. Weiland was, I think, beloved because he was the average kid with a killer record collection and the drive to duplicate them.

I often felt that they were the most underappreciated of the grunge bands. All the charges of them not feeling quite like the real deal next to Vedder's "socially conscious college poet" earnestness and Cobain's damaged artist rawness ring true, but they had great hooks and great grooves and I enjoyed the shit out of their albums.

Totally.

"Interstate Love Song" is an immortal modern rock classic.
"Big Bang Baby" (song and video) was the coolest shit to me when it came out, totally got me into alternative rock. Still love it.

always felt like there was something kinda generic about weiland as "rock star". he had the moves and looks and voice but not a whole lotta charisma otherwise. felt like that about the whole band. and they seemed kinda jerky too. wasn't he kinda renowned for being jerky? can only imagine what a velvet revolver backstage room was like. probably nowhere you would want to be. also wasn't the stp guitarist just as big a drug guy? can't help but think of weiland just following in the footsteps of more compelling sadsacks like kurt and the alice in chains dude.

playing half-filled mid-west beer halls with faceless dudes behind him cranking out vaseline every night would probably send me over the edge too.

there was that performance just earlier this year -- April -- where he was visibly high and it went semi-viral and his camp tried to spin it as "he couldn't hear the monitors." I had a friend who was really bummed about how people were laughing at the footage whose clear import was "this guy is so far gone and no-one around him is able to stop him or brave enough to say 'I won't be party to this'"

yeah I've seen this and I guiltily did laugh at it b/c it sounded like a Legion of Rock Stars thing. but there was something visibly creepy about it, like I'd almost believe he was literally sleepwalking

i don't think dean deleo was a drug guy!

the deleos were/are both fantastic musicians, most of stp's better moments involved them coming up with stuff that sounded sort of like the prevailing grunge/hard rock style of the time that turned out to be pretty weird and cool upon closer inspection

he talks about it here. how the guitarist was heavy into heroin and crack. but that he was the one who was the bad guy or whatever.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yWWRqjzX7YE

although i don't know where he talks about in that interview...i just remember him talking about it on that.

If I'm to be honest, this hasn't come as much of a shock or surprise to me at all - Weiland really, really struggled to stay clean to the point where it was only a matter of time before something like this happened. Still, 48 years old is no age to go... RIP.

So is STP considered a grunge act? When they first came out they seemed to avoid getting lumped in with the other grunge Bands; which I found odd since they sounded similar to nirvana and Alice in chains.

i don't remember them not being lumped in with other grunge bands. i thought they got lumped in there pretty good. though they also got metal coverage. but so did soundgarden and other grungers.

radio obviously loved them. they were very radio-friendly. which is why a lot of indie people scoffed at them. lots of haters fell in love with big bang baby though. lots of hepcats on my facebook posting that song today.

I always felt they were thought of as a weak ass Pearl Jam knock off (as of the first record); they moved beyond that after a few records though

They got chastised for sounding too much like Pearl Jam* and also for being from California.

*TBF, when the early STP singles where first on the radio, ten-year old me actually thought they were Pearl Jam. Even after learning the truth I thought they were from Seattle, because that's where all those bands came from.

STP were considered to be charlatans to the seattle milieu 92/93. Which they probly were, but sometimes wannabes improve on suckass bands like Pearl Jam (have I mentioned that Pearl Jam sucks donkey balls yet?) very quickly the deleo-kretz rhythm section rendered such distinctions irrelevant. that kretz mufugger swings.

I gotta say that the "Big Bang Baby" went a long way to redeeming them in the eyes of skeptical me, thanks to Weiland's pants, eyeliner, and dancing. For my college newspaper at the time I was decrying the death of sex in American male college music.

in mid 90s NYC, there was no more effective way to kiss up to the Malkmus/Cosloy crowd (matador and STP were both Atlantic-affiliated at the time) than to sneer at that band.

http://www.deathandtaxesmag.com/272692/pavement-apologizes-for-mocking-scott-weiland-in-range-life/?utm_source=sc-fb&utm_medium=ref&utm_campaign=ref

That's awesome

I had no idea anybody cared about this band

yes you diid

I do not know anyone irl who ever liked this band

in case that clarifies things

have you left your house after 1983

i liked them. I admired their dedication to artifice i.e. they were always a glam rock band

yeah when 'plush' came out everything from their name to weiland's pure eddie vedder rip just seemed really calculated, and being from san diego and debuting on a major -- with no early sub pop singles -- didn't help with the rockist youth

several of the later songs are great, but they ultimately seemed only a notch above bush?

obviously weiland had a lot of problems, but i don't remember hearing anything to suggest that underneath it all he was a really good dude, and it's not like the lyrics spoke to ppl like elliott smith or something. kinda surprised at the number of heartfelt pourings out, but i wasn't in school when they came out and maybe i'm just a jerk anyway

"Plush" may have sounded like PJ but it was written back when Mother Love Bone were still active

I do not know anyone irl who ever liked this band

― Οὖτις, Friday, December 4, 2015 7:01 PM (44 minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

how . . . how is this possible

doesn't know anyone irl

man some of the comments in this thread are breaking my heart

Weiland was, I think, beloved because he was the average kid with a killer record collection and the drive to duplicate them.

always felt like there was something kinda generic about weiland as "rock star". he had the moves and looks and voice but not a whole lotta charisma otherwise. felt like that about the whole band.

several of the later songs are great, but they ultimately seemed only a notch above bush?

i mean goddamn you guys, everyone is welcome to have an opinion but one notch above bush? the guy died hours ago!

i get the feeling that most folks here are only familiar with core + whatever singles they may have heard in passing, and fair enough, i am not a huge fan of the first record myself, but tiny music and no. 4 and shangri-la-dee-da are all really, really great pop/rock records, the deleo brothers and eric kretz are tremendous musicians, and scott weiland was an incredible singer/writer/performer, and absolutely one of the greatest rock n roll frontmen ever, when he wasn't a sickly strung-out mess from the various drug addictions/mental illnesses. very sad that he couldn't be helped, and people did try. half of duff mckagen's autobio is about him trying and failing to clean up scott weiland.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=18g8McJFQbk

this is an unreleased b-side or something, i think if stp had ever been able to shake off that first "grunge" record they could have really blossomed into a great pop band, i think they certainly tried to anyway, very sad that it didn't work out that way

playing half-filled mid-west beer halls with faceless dudes behind him cranking out vaseline every night would probably send me over the edge too.

pretty much. RIP

one of the more striking memories I have from elementary school is hearing 'interstate love song' on the car radio when getting a ride with this kid's parent for a field trip. I don't remember what the field trip was - I know the kid's name was stevie and he was a real problem child and his dad was kinda an idiot, kinda wish I knew his last name so I could google him and see what happens later in life to that 3rd grade kid who showed everyone his penis.

anyway the song felt like such a perfect car-radio-highway song even at the time that it made a permanent impression on my brain. it's a really good song.

a few years later I won the album 'no 4' from a radio call in contest. 'I got you' is a great deep cut if anyone wants a good stp song they might not have heard.

My friends and I never liked them in high school. They were music for kids with clean flannels and haircuts. Spoiled for choice, narcissism of small differences, punk hipster bullshit. I wish they still made radio rock like this. R.I.P. Weiland.

OTM.

Might as well repost this:
---
For some reason I thought I had already posted about how at CTY one summer I learned Big Empty off the OST and played/sang it acoustic at the talent show. Later that day the girl I had a crush on came over to me and said "all the girls on my floor think you have a sexy voice," -- to which the only response I could muster was a squeaky "cool!" She made a grossed-out face and walked away.

― i don't believe in zimmerman (Hurting 2), Wednesday, May 2, 2012 2:23 PM (3 years ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink