Stone Temple Pilots

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.

wear*

No. 4 was the album for me; get past the red-herring nu-metal singles and it's p much just a cohesive blending of glammy garage rock and shoegaze, with a couple 60s LA pastiches thrown in for good measure. One of the best alt-rock albums from the late nineties.

i legitimately thought weiland was eddie vedder in a wig until about viewing 10 of the 'plush' video. (years later this phenomenon would repeat itself: i saw an interview with a still-pretty-christian-pop jessica simpson on mtv and was half convinced it was britney spears in a wig, sending up her own persona. probably worth noting that i've worn incredibly strong glasses since i was, like, nine years old.)

so i get why those who view music more, uh, superficially might hang on to those comparisons. 'plush' is still one of their biggest songs.

it's their highest-ranking track on the boston classic rock station's firecracker 500. (#65, right between boston and bob seger. 'alive' is no. 3.)

http://wzlx.cbslocal.com/2015/07/05/2015-firecracker-500-100-1/

Plush is probably near my least favorite STP song, and yeah it definitely sounds like a second-rate PJ copy. also lol maura

imo "wicked garden" is a really horrible song

yeah that's a pretty bad one

it sounds like grunge first album 101

OTOH Trippin' On A Hole In A Paper Heart is a great little jam with some nice Zeppelin nods that I remember writing off the first time around.

"wicked garden" is hilarious, i am thankful for it

otoh i will never be thankful for the lyric "when the dogs begin to smell her."

Lyrics were very much Weiland's weakest point imo

OTOH Trippin' On A Hole In A Paper Heart is a great little jam with some nice Zeppelin nods that I remember writing off the first time around.

― on entre O.K. on sort K.O. (man alive),

yeah they sound like they absorbed the Zepisms after "Dancing Days."

Relistening to all this stuff. Forgot that they jacked Lush for Big Bang Baby. Going to go listen to Lush now instead.

I think it matters a lot that I happened to be learning guitar right when they got big. I picked up some neat tricks learning those tunes.

I do not know anyone irl who ever liked this band

― Οὖτις, Friday, December 4, 2015 4:01 PM (3 days ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

in case that clarifies things

― Οὖτις, Friday, December 4, 2015 4:01 PM (3 days ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

have you left your house after 1983

― Hammer Smashed Bagels, Friday, December 4, 2015 4:10 PM (3 days ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

it's remarkably simple really - all of my friends/social circle are from the same generation as me who saw them as johnny-come-latelys to the grunge scene (which only a minority of us were into in the first place) and never bothered to follow them. All the younger people I know (coworkers, relatives etc.) were small children when STP apparently peaked, so most of them have no idea who they are. I don't have a lot of people between, say, the ages of 30-35 in my irl social circle.

For what it's worth, Οὖτις, I do not know anyone irl who ever liked this band either. I know a shitload of people who were aware of them and heard their music, but I do not know anyone who actually liked them.

Weird. I wonder what kept them going so long with no one buying their albums or going to their shows.

the glory of love

the age range of friends on my FB wall that mourned Weiland and were STP fans to a degree ranged from like 20 to 55.

I wonder what kept them going so long

cocaine iirc

and there it is

I forgot that I liked the song "Lounge Fly" a lot. didn't one of the riffs get used as incidental music on MTV or something?

Weird. I wonder what kept them going so long with no one buying their albums or going to their shows.

― on entre O.K. on sort K.O. (man alive),

their hits haven't left album rock radio, and I'm sure their catalog sales were decent, insofar as anything is in 2015.

I saw them play this set in 1997, with Cheap Trick opening: http://www.setlist.fm/setlist/stone-temple-pilots/1997/mullins-center-amherst-ma-33d824d1.html

I was in high school at the time and definitely regarded them as rock gods, Led Zeppelin-style. Way more into them than Pearl Jam, likely because their songs had actual hooks, better riffs, catchy choruses, etc. I may have heard their cover of Dancing Days on the radio before I heard Houses of the Holy. Now I mostly remember the number of guitars Rick Nielsen used.

Pretty stark to realize now how many of their songs were explicitly about being smacked out. Had no idea at the time.

that's a LONG-ASSED set for a band of their ilk. I remember the alternative shows I saw in the 90s could barely get to like 13-15 songs, or be like Candlebox where they have 20+ songs available but pad their set with terrible covers of songs that just came out in the past year.

I also think some might be misreading faint appreciation/memories as 'adulation' ITT. don't know that any of us actually rate STP in the upper echelon of music.

I can still enjoy things from the Core - Tiny Music era, plus I loved "Sour Girl", but I largely grew out of them after the 90s. but as a middle school kid growing up right as they exploded, they were ubiquitous everywhere I went. I largely got into them because my best friend wouldn't shut up about them (his uncle got him an autograph from Eric Kretz on a napkin) and I tended to copy what he did back then - still really like songs like ...whatever the one on Purple is that goes "Sell me down the river".

as mentioned upthread the DeLeos were fantastic musicians and came up with some great ideas - when they branched out into their more offbeat 70s material, it might not have been wholly original, but it was fun. I think taht's why Tiny Music in retrospect grew larger in my esteem - as an adult I appreciate it more than my initial "wtf" reaction as a kid