Stone Temple Pilots

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

ignore the redundancy of "ubiquitous everywhere I went"

Yes, I remember being befuddled at Tiny Music aside from the two or three punkier, rockier tunes. Now I listen to it and I hear a bunch of cool ideas, though not all of them quite get there. They were clearly trying to do something different. I remember being really disappointed by No. 4, which seemed like a return to the Core sound and a bit of a pander, Sour Girl aside. By the time Weiland joined Velvet Revolver, I was done with all of them.

I don't remember Cornell getting anywhere near as much shit as Weiland during the Audioslave era, which was kind of the same exact thing.

i was kinda surprised that so many people loved Audioslave - so fucking bland. and then once Chris finally finished blowing his voice out, you lost the one reason to even maybe listen to them.

I also forgot "Pretty Penny" from Purple, which was def their Zep worship song from that album. so good.

I remember being really disappointed by No. 4, which seemed like a return to the Core sound and a bit of a pander, Sour Girl aside

"atlanta" is also one of their best songs, but otherwise i think this is kinda how i still feel about this record

shangri la dee da split the difference between "hard" and "psychedelic" stp way better than no. 4 imo

*continues to rep for shangri la dee da throughout this thread*

xpost it kinda sounds like "My Favorite Things" at times but yeah it's a good one

I've never heard Shangri La Dee Dah, but tempted to check it out, though it may be too sad at this point.

I can't get past that title.

really think it's their most consistent besides tiny music, though it's also occasionally their corniest ("wonderful" and "a song for sleeping," though "wonderful" is super fucking harrowing now)

an Adam Ant cover?

lol

it's a song for his then-wife, the first line is "if i were to die this morning" :\

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.

Yeah, I mean to be clear they're in sort of an in-between zone for me, not quite a favorite but a band I listened to a good amount in my early teens and who were part of my musical fabric. OTOH their music has aged better for me than a lot of their counterparts, e.g. I used to play the hell out of my Jane's Addiction albums back then and I can barely stand them now.

Musically very good imo, lyrically bad, stylistically a little bit wannabe/also-ran/derivative, sure, but I'm too old to worry about poseurishness.

When I was in my 20s they were one of those bands I would say was "actually good" in that challops sort of way.

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.

― tremendous crime wave and killing wave (Joan Crawford Loves Chachi), Saturday, December 5, 2015 8:55 PM (2 days ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

feeling this post a lot. fwiw i never really liked STP at all, though i've enjoyed some moments in a few songs (even nirvana really, i dig in utero and esp unplugged i guess but most of their stuff doesn't do too much for me)

i never really knew any major fans of them, just a bunch of friends in the mid-90s who bought their albums because they were part of the group of bands that we all bought albums from in the mid-90s, eg nirvana smashing pumpkins sonic youth maybe a little RHCP, and none of those bands are anything i really care about at all except for a little sonic youth and maybe siamese dream

yep cosign all that (except the part about friends buying STP albums)

but the 80s thrash scene didn't get as ripped up by its excesses as grunge did

this did make me think though - was this just because thrash guys didn't get into smack? I can't imagine junkies playing thrash tbh

hey remind us did anybody you know listen to stp

at least STP were better than that garbage Collecting Soil