Stone Temple Pilots

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?)

I mean it's a really sweet piece and yet

xxpost it's a pretentious conceit and written with the skill of a 9th grade English student but the 'letter' itself isn't a hatchet job or anything.

right

I just hate the framing*

*he said about everything published on the internet in 2015

going back u.t., I never really got the STP = Pearl Jam complaints, at least where Core is concerned. yes, the vocal style similarities are there (especially in how Weiland overly featured his low voice and fitted it with a Vedderesque twang, which he wisely distanced himself from later). granted Ten was more commercial and polished than what followed but the music was still more hippy-dippy and jammy in places.

I wouldn't say Core was original though either. it was more guilty of being faceless 'heavy' leaden grunge. they threw a lot of meathead riffs in there ("Piece of Pie", "Dead and Bloated"), just didn't have the hooks of their peers. I still like a lot of the songs on it tho. "Wicked Garden", and "Naked Sunday" has always been an interesting one to me. "Crackerman" is embarrassing though.

i still love the "wet my bed" segue into "crackerman."

the "stp = pearl jam" people have always been worth ignoring. they're probably among those who also hear a lineage from nevermind to puddle of mudd and nickelback.

I never got this band at all fwiw, one of those things where I was always surprised to learn that people really had a strong feeling for them -- but I felt that way about p. much all of alternative nation from the time -- like I can rank all the bands of the grunge/Seattle explosion in what I think is everybody's more-or-less-accepted-order but none of it really reached me then or works for me now. But still I feel an intense grief for how this entire generation of bands, from this scene/style, whether they got rich or had to keep pounding the boards year in and year out, is racked by death and loss -- like, they practically entered the scene that way, when Andrew Wood died before the Mother Love Bone debut even got released. Drug use and death is pervasive everywhere, music or otherwise, obv., but like -- I listen to metal; plenty of metal bros get very deeply into dope; but the 80s thrash scene didn't get as ripped up by its excesses as grunge did. Maybe because there was less money to burn, idk. But it's sad in an especially harsh way for me, that these bands found this style that reached the popular imagination so strongly and then practically all of them crashed and burned somehow, if not immediately then years later.

yeah...it's really striking how many big frontpersons/solo stars of the '90s, both rock and rap, died either during the '90s or really young. you can say that of the '60s too obviously, but not as much of the '70s, barely at all of the '80s, and I don't think it's very true of the 2000s or 2010s either (biggest star that died at their peak of fame in recent memory was I guess Winehouse but a 2nd doesn't even spring to mind). any overview of popular music in the '90s is just pockmarked with tragic figures in a way that other recent decades aren't.

are there others since layne staley? i guess peter steele counts - i suppose type o negative and grunge bands shared some fans - but i can't think of many others.

Just sad and depressing that Cobain, Staley and Weiland were all born in the same year and not one of them made 50.

You could probably also add Mindy McCready to the 90s list, though she was only super famous for a minute.

yeah, Staley is the big one, although ODB, Mark Linkous, Vic Chesnutt, J Dilla, there are a fair number of cult/semi-mainstream '90s artists who died in the 2000s.

feels weird that whitney houston and weiland were both 48.

cant believe i forgot odb. a bunch just came to mind, and yes mark linkous, elliott smith, dimebag darrell, MCA, at least 3 members of gwar, mikey welsh, and might as well include left eye and aaliyah.

"Really sucks that weiland never did a loungey/bossanova album (or did he?)"

no, but...

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=it-K9uXXWlo

oof Aaliyah and Left Eye and Elliott Smith, how could i forget

Cris Kirkwood infamously got heavy into heroin when the Meat Puppets toured with STP, i dunno if through Weiland or if there were just plentiful drugs on that tour, and it really is a miracle that he came back from a decade-long downward spiral and went back to playing music.

"that these bands found this style that reached the popular imagination so strongly and then practically all of them crashed and burned somehow, if not immediately then years later."

with STP you are talking about a band that at the height of their success had to form a whole other band(!!!) because their singer was too sick to tour. that doesn't happen every day.

Two things about his passing that surprised me:

1) A lot more people in my Facebook feed apparently liked STP.
2) Some of them say that Tiny Music is a glam rock masterpiece.

I haven't listened to that album in a while but I will probably revisit.

"I had no idea", fuck off, go fuck your indie asshole

Tiny Music really is a cool album. it made me smile to see that Weiland called it his favorite in one of his final interviews.

i think what really struck me about STP at the time was how quickly they got better, more interesting and more unpredictable. Core and everything about their image/videos was so gloomy, and then suddenly Purple had awesome artwork and a hilarious hidden track and really great-looking videos, and Tiny Music took that aesthetic even further.

Weiland may not have gotten really overt with his Bowie-isms until after Kurt and Trent had started to make Bowie cool again but he was definitely really sincere in revealing his glam side and getting comfortable with it

i love the Purple artwork so much

That samba nova track is ace. Sounds more influenced by Space Oddity than Brazilian music, though.

weiland way more effectively embodied bowie than trent or kurt tbh

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sKHCp8YN5sM

also this is a great song, featuring the rare accordion stylings of sheryl crow, i feel like this would have been a far more comfortable vibe for the guy to have settled into in his later years

i was drunk and feeling sentimental, the other morning.

stp weren't very good. sorry.

it's a shame about scott, however. in any case, it was still pretty darn cool that he'd we're dresses on stage. . .

even though those albums were useless.

he seemed like a really decent fellow, nonetheless.

he was only 48. damn.

RIP.

if things are black and white, if things are cut and dry, scott was still probably on OUR side. he seemed like a nice enough fellow.