Stone Temple Pilots

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

clean flannels

deadly

Giving Tiny Music a spin for the first time in a while, it's actually surprisingly good, some of it better than Purple. My memory of it at the time was it was just sort of an out of place, out of time record. The world had tired of STP and there wasn't an easy category for their stylistic change.

Tiny Music is fantastic. The only STP album I ever really want to listen to.

I love "Tumble in the Rough"

He was a power pop guy. He loved Brian Wilson and the Beatles. That's what I'm suddenly realizing.

i remember listening to the radio when they debuted "big bang baby" and afterwards the dj said something like "i guess we have to stop calling them clone temple pilots." of course it was derivative in a different way but it was pretty offbeat for the time and is still kind of a great song.

i hated it at first cos I was like "wtf is this high pitched kiddie voice Scott is doing" but I grew to love the song on repeat listens really fast.

that song I really dug even at the time, but didn't give the whole record that much of a chance

some of it was weird, like Weiland's "redrum" backing vocals on "Art School Girl".

I liked "Lady Picture Show" a lot at the time.

"And So I KNow" was pretty much Girl from Ipanema....

Art School Girl is kind of a low point. He wasn't the greatest lyricist.

"Adhesive" was another one I really enjoyed from that album. had quite a glam-cum-Beatles chorus

when the dogs do find her, got time, time to wait for tomorrow to find it, to find it, to find it

find what

spent the day listening to deep cuts:
http://narrowcast.blogspot.com/2015/12/deep-album-cuts-vol-53-stone-temple.html

was disappointed by how little STP i heard on rock stations today when i was driving around, though, only "Sex Type Thing" and "Wicked Garden." they had a nice little run there, i can't think of many bands who i hated as much on their first album who improved so quickly on the next couple albums.

HER NAME IS WHAT IT MEANS

Chuck had a great o_O quote in the expanded Stairway from (iirc) Josh Clover/Jane Dark from around the time of Tiny Music, about how "[The band was] a great advertisement for drug addiction: No group benefited more from forgetting what they sounded like 5 minutes ago..."

it's a bit of a pun

One line in the second verse goes "Her name is what it means." This line is a bit of a pun, referring to the similarities between the words "heroin" (the drug) and "heroine" (a female hero). Scott Weiland was known for frequent drug use throughout his musical career. He is saying that heroin is his heroine, that drugs are his hero. (thanks, Aki - Sunrise, FL)

sebadoh, to use the most flagrant example, spent an inordinate amount of time in my interview with them to mock STP. many, many other bands I interviewed in the 90s did the same. this tells me that STP made an impact.

STP are to the nineties what Kings of Leon were to the 00s. Pop up out of nowhere, get famous quickly, make zero friends in their peer group, then divebomb.

I don't hate this dude or this band but I'm pretty shocked at the outpouring of love for STP and their records on Twitter/ILM last night and today. I had no idea so many knowledgeable and passionate music lovers held them in such high regard.

Seems like the fact that "All In The Suit That You Wear" (the bait track on their hits set) was intended for the first Spiderman movie, but pulled when that Nickleback/Saliva thing was picked instead as the lead single really feels in retrospect like a turning point in popular tastes.

Just guessing that STP are one of those bands that broke big when a particular group of "knowledgeable and passionate music lovers" were adolescents. You always love the stuff that turned you on at that age, even though your tastes have grown deeper and more "respectable" with age.

It's why I still listen to Cinderella or Def Leppard with zero irony.

I imagine they worked as a good gateway band into other stuff...dropping names like Bowie's and Bolan in early 90s interviews probably brought a lot of their fans in the US into vintage Glam for one thing.

I was not an an adolescent when STP hit. I was 24. at that time, I was well into all manner of shit that smug, Johnny come lately in 2015 record collectors consider compulsory.

to me, STP was as much part of the landscape as the Chronic. cuts from either records swagger the same way. Gerard Cosloy and other individuals like, say, Michael Azerrad (reading Our band could be your life for the first time now; my, what poor writer he is) were so offended by popular culture/approximations of the 80s underground that they could not comprehend that music of substance could result outside of their peer group.

I don't really have any feeling for STP beyond the first four chords of "Plush," which are all-time.

ah, 24

Gaz Coombes

interview shot two days before the news.

this is like staring death in the face and genuinely makes me feel gross

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

he seems alright there!

Michael Azerrad's an excellent writer when he just sticks to reportage, irritating when he offers up his fucking opinions. He's like a lot of rock biographers that way - ever read Jimmy McDonough's Shakey?

STP was kinda my gateway to rock music so it's hard to be objective about them - I was 11 when Purple came out and accessed the band via MTV and the video for "Vasoline," which clip deployed every far-out trick in the book during a brief moment when pop surrealism was in vogue. Spin hated them because they were obvious Rock Pros/Rock Bros/opportunists who had the good sense to seize on someone else's musical movement just as it went supernova, and they got there earlier and with a bigger commercial payoff than any of the other pretenders to Cobain & Vedder's throne. That they were vastly more skilled and more versatile than Candlebox/Collective Soul/Bush et. al. only became obvious to most when grunge was already history. I wore out my cassette tape of Purple 19 years ago - it hasn't improved with age - but I still happily spin albums 3, 4, and 5 on occasion today. Scott Weiland, poor guy, was barely functional even before he got 86ed from Velvet Revolver. Difficult person though he obviously was, he came off as a far more decent guy in his not-great autobio (which I read most of in about an hour of perusal at the local bookstore) than such famous junkies as former bandmate Slash and Anthony Kiedis in their respective tomes. Weiland seemed to think getting clean just meant kicking heroin - he was always consistent about the date he gave up junk, so I believed him; he could have been high on all kinds of other things after 2003, which people seem to forget whenever they watch one of the innumerable train-wreck live performances on YouTube etc. - and taking that kind of shortcut to rehabilitation probably killed him if anything. I wouldn't wish his last 10 years on anybody. R.I.P.

I don't hate this dude or this band but I'm pretty shocked at the outpouring of love for STP and their records on Twitter/ILM last night and today. I had no idea so many knowledgeable and passionate music lovers held them in such high regard.

I feel like it's less an outpouring of love than they did something really specific and the landscape would've seemed kinda incomplete without them

anyway incidentally 12 bar blues is a crazy good fake bowie record

Kind of sad that his last interview was pretty much like answering a fucking shallow facebook quizz. I've seen better questions on the tests in fashion magazines. What was that about?

Where you going where the mice are found?

I always imagined this to be a granary or corn crib, maybe? Alternately, the city of Anaheim?

It's "where you going with the mask I've found"

Where you going with the mascarpone?

feelin like a ham and mustard chain

damn

http://buffalo.com/2015/12/04/featured/an-open-letter-to-scott-weiland-so-this-is-where-it-ends/

oh boy, an open letter to someone who is dead

The chords for "and so it goes" run through my head frequently. Better than the majority of 90s lounge revival scum. Really sucks that weiland never did a loungey/bossanova album (or did he?)