Stone Temple Pilots

"The dissolution was celebrated by another Weiland arrest."

"Tiny Music" sounded quite good 7 or 8 years ago, anyway, and the earlier singles still sound OK to these ears.

I'm not too crazy about Core aside from "Plush," but Purple and Tiny Music are pretty good records. They've held up much better than a lot of their peers at the time, so I guess they get the last laugh.

I didn't like the No. 4 record aside from "Sour Girl," and the only song I know from their final lp is "Days Of The Week" and that's a nice pop tune.

Chuck is OTM about "Unglued" and "Tumble" - I'm surprised that they weren't included. I remember "Unglued" being on the radio all the time when I was a teenager.

Does anyone still actively follow them, though? I get the feeling this album will be like the Suede greatest hits album in the UK -- ie, it's not actually going to sell that much despite a good amount of the songs on it being huge at one point.

I don't think many people care about them right now, but they have a LOT of radio hits, and it's the kind of thing people will come back to later on when they get the 90s nostalgia. I'm sure in 20 years time we'll be hearing STP on classic rock radio, and that will be a boost for them too.

I think they may end up being the Grand Funk Railroad of their generation, though.

Heh. Nice comparison, that. (I think a similar situation will happen with Suede in the UK re: more nostalgia etc.)

Purple was one of those early 90s albums where modern rock stations played nearly half of the songs, even if they weren't official singles. (They did the same with Siamese Dream, Dookie and the first three Pearl Jam albums. Nevermind too, except I think I've heard every song off Nevermind on the radio at some point, except maybe Stay Away.)

STP are by far the most underrated band of the past 15 years, an injustice due entirely to bad timing. They always seem to be everyone's answer to why modern rock radio was ruined during the 90s. No one ever thinks to blame Candlebox or Collective Soul, only because they faded into obscurity a lot quicker.

This could be true. But why don't they blame Alice in Chains, or Nine Inch Nails, or Smashing Pumpkins (or maybe even Oasis)? None of whom ever did a song as good as Collective Soul's "Gel" or Candlebox's "Far Behind." (Okay, "1979" maybe was as good as the latter. But that's about it.) Hell, for that matter, why don't they just blame Pearl Jam, or even Nirvana? They *caused* it all, didn't they? (And Pearl Jam were at least as dull as any of the above.) (These are rhetorical questions, of course. I think I kinda know the answers.)

I think you're being unfair to NIN and the Pumpkins, Chuck. They were really different from the other bands and both had more of a unique sound. I don't there have been many bands who have aped the Pumpkins sound, and all of the NIN wannabes were more aggro and lacked that crucial Prince influence that makes a lot of Reznor's music bearable/interesting/pop.

Although NIN should be punished for that godawful Closer song (those horrible lyrics which made it so popular).

"Closer" is tremend.

Any group that could produce "Bad Time to Be In Love" has something going for it. On a similar note, I like STP's "Big Bang Baby," and...well, I guess that's it.

For those of you who hate NIN's "Closer," do you hate the song itself or the fratboy fan base it brought to "industrial" rock?

Grand Funk had a bunch of good tunes.

Collective Soul were really and truly the ass-end of empty 90s alt-rock.

As bad as Collective Soul were, I'd say the Gin Blossoms are more deserving of said title.

Re: The Gin Blossoms - I would say that they (along with Counting Crows and Sherly Crow) are more to blame for the popularity of things like Jon Mayer and Matchbox 20. They were one of the bands that the adult-oriented Modern Rock station format was built for, really.

I think Gin Blossoms recieved a similar fate to STP. They were simply a pop band (with some great singles) who were immediately slapped with the tag of "alternative" because they wore flannel shirts. They didn't really belong on rock stations, but they ended up there anyway, ruining a whole lot in the process. It's more their promoters fault than the band themselves.

The STP best-of seems really solid though, just based on how many of the MP3s I have from it (though it needs "Unglued"!!).

The Gin Blossoms' fate was similar to STP, at least in the era of Purple and Tiny music. By that point, they were far more pop oriented.

Wow, we just one of the few bits of genetic mutation that separates us!

My STP experiment was to put on "Greatest Hits" last weekend at the listening post at the Tower Records in Tokyo, listen to the first ten seconds of each song, and see what memories of my college years it would trigger. I listened to "Big Bang Baby" all the way through -- it's my favorite, by far. It's always good to work a gorilla suit into your video.

Yeah, that was it!

If NIN's "Closer" had been a quarter as catchy as, I dunno, "1999" by Prince or "Cars" by Gary Numan or a quarter as rocking as your average track by Big Black - hell, if Reznor came from Germany, which would have at least made his vocals amusing and weird, as everybody from Einsturzende Neubauten to Rammstein has proved -- I might have had a use for it. I was way past high school, so I really didn't care one way or another who their audience was. It was just a half-assed song by a half-assed band who didn't have the balls to be *really* pop. And thing is, I LIKE industrial rock. They just stunk at it. They weren't as good as all the bands they were ripping off, and they weren't as good as some bands (eg: Stabbing Westward) who ripped THEM off. (And oh yeah: "I wanna fuck you like an animal" is a dumb line.)

The "Closer" video contains my single favorite video moment--towards the end of the song, this seated older bald guy looks up at the camera with surprise and disdain. It's like half a second. I don't know why I love it so...

"Head Like A Hole", "Down In It", "Sin", "Terrible Lie", "Heresy", "Hurt", "Suck", "Gave Up", "Wish", "We're In This Together Now", "The Wretched", "The Fragile", and "Into The Void" to thread.

I like how in the "Big Bang Baby" video, when the song reaches the bridge, the visuals get all would-be psychedelic with swirling light patterns and such; like they're totally admitting "Yeah this is the part of the song where we inserted a little 'psychedelic' melody for the hell of it."

Yeurgh, can you suggest Linkin Park as a comparison instead? Stabbing Westward are freakin' nonentities. (Anyway, what Dan said, again.)

Actually, hold on, is this inverted snobbery? I see the whole point of the comment, it fits in with Chuck's pro-pop stance all these years, but this is a bit like willful ignoring of a situation -- obviously STP, say, had enough hits and people liking them for all the fact that I didn't and clearly were getting played on the radio. But so indeed were NIN, on MTV, getting people at multiband festivals all wound up and singing along, etc., just like STP. So is that Chuck is right or that they didn't have the balls to be pop like an individual listener likes, in which case we're just back to radical subjectivism (not a bad place to be of course).

I saw SW open for the Sex Pistols Filthy Lucre tour howevermany years ago. The crowd was booing through their whole performance and throwing things onstage.

The singer said, "C'mon! This is fucking punk rock show, people. Get into it!"

Some guy said, "Bring out the punk rock!"

http://www.villagevoice.com/issues/9941/seward.php

Having said that, one of the best, most underrated songs in that vein is "Skin Up Pin Up" by Mansun & 808 State.

Well yeah, but pop isn't just that or we wouldn't be here in the first place (unless all we talked about was Gary Numan and Prince, which is quite all right by me). I mean, when NIN first surfaced all the industrial hyperbores were annoyed precisely because they WERE pop, among other reasons because they were getting above average (if not regular rotation) MTV play as early as 1990. And they had good beats you could dance too and all that -- if stuff like "Head Like a Hole" WASN'T catchy you can bet you wouldn't have heard much beyond that first album anyway, but it was that popularity that led to further attention, the Lollapalooza slot, the break with TVT for Interscope etc. etc. *shrug* I mean, stuff gets big that lots of people like that you might not! We all know this!

But unlike Nine Inch Nails, they had no delusions of being "original" or
being "artists" or whatever. They were JUST a damn pop band. Which may well be why they're being sneered at here.

Uh, refer to Dan's point. Chuck, I'm surprised you of all people are arguing absolutes here. There's no dividing line except the one in your head, but there's no dividing line anyone has except that individual one in their head anyway.

haha that was BOOM

Heh, true. Mind you, this was mostly based on their boring live shows opening up for among others Front 242 (who I KNOW you hate, I admit ;-)). I just remember the lead dude screaming while wearing leather chaps, which wasn't as cool to my mind as Carla Bozulich doing the same thing in Ethyl Meatplow.

the dividing line *always* exists

One can exist but it is never fixed. I think its fluidity is actually the best reason for its potential existence.

You already KNOW it's my opinion, right? Jeez.

Well, yeah, but if we're going to use words like 'pop' without specifying what exactly it means then all anyone would ever do is talk at cross-purposes, and maybe that's all that can be done anyway. You dislike a band for not being poppy, I think they're plenty pop, nobody is right and therefore we just...talk. Which, again, is no bad thing.

STP are one of the best singles bands of the 90's. BIG DUMB FUN. Purple was also pretty damn great and essential to my pre-pubescent experience. The lyrics are utter shit BUT THE RIFFS, MAAN... 'EY PUMMEL... The first rock band I fell in love with at the tender age of 9. SCREW ALL Y'ALL, BIYATCHES!

It's funny that this comes up, because this week I pulled out the old NIN cds for the first time in at least a year and a half, and I was happy that all of my favorites ("Closer," "Into The Void," "Suck," "Heresy," "March of the Pigs," "The Perfect Drug," "Where Is Everybody?") still sounded pretty good. I can't listen to NIN for more than a half hour at a time, though. I reach my threshold very quickly, and I probably won't listen to NIN again for another year probably. But it's okay. It's good stuff. Sometimes it feels nice to feel 14 again, the further you get away from that time.

I mean, it's not like I've been defending LIVE or anybody. (Now THERE'S a band who deserves lots of blame for '90s alt rock radio...)

If only they were Sparks.

Though I'll take "Jeremy" over all the early STP bloaters, it's got more drama & crescendo-action.

Well, my point wasn't merely predicting that they'd HAVE a best of album! It was in my 500 (really 600) top metal albums book; I said that once STP put one out, it would probably DESERVE to be in the book (at least if it included four specific songs, two of which, as I mention above, it DOESN'T have by the way). But they had no albums at the TIME that I thought were good enough. Hope that makes sense....

Hey, I live with some very extinct books, I know the feeling!

Chuck spake: Gravity Kills? -- they were doing the industrial rock thing as pop metal, pretty much -- Alex in NYC (or Alex in Manhattan, sorry, I always forget which) should really check out "Falls Apart," which sounds kinda like Killing Joke.

It's not Alex in Manhattan, it's Alex in MAIN-hattan, which is a town in Germany, I believe, and we are two entirely different individuals.

Gravity Kills? I get them all mixed up with Stabbing Westward and God Lives Underwater and all those other sub-NIN bands. I can't remember if it was Gravity Kills or Stabbing Westward who opened for Killing Joke in `94, but in any event they were dire. Moreover, with the possible exception of late, lamented and missing-in-action band Belfegore, I'm not really interested in bands who sound like Killing Joke. I mean, why eat beef jerky when you could eat Filet Mignon, eh?

As far as the Stone Temple Pederasts go,...well, I mean, it's kinda the same thing. Why would someone waste time listening to STP when thy could opt for the definite article? Sure, they wrote the occaissional decent tune (I didn't mind "Vaseline," and "Sex Type Thing" does have a great riff), but I'd much prefer to listen to, say, Soundgarden. Also, way too much drama in that band....and not even interesting drama at that.

Sounds like a rule I'd agree with, Chuck. And yes...both of those videos (Belfegore's manic clip for "All that I Wanted" and the backwards Japanese guy eating in the God Lives Underwater clip) can induce nauseau.

If I could go back in time, I'd tell 15-year old me that someday he would realize Sixteen Stone was better than Nevermind, just to see the look on my/his face.

That's ten songs right there. They'd probably include the failed follow-up singles from the last two records and a new song or two, I'm sure.

They really should put out a NIN best-of. That'd be good...it'd be something like this, probably - Head Like A Hole, Down In It, Sin, March of the Pigs, Closer, Hurt, Wish, Happiness In Slavery, Suck, Burn, Perfect Drug, Into the Void, We're In This Together. That's pretty tight. They'd probably find a way to fuck it up, though.

(I will not bring up "Starfuckers" because that song is SHITTY SHITTY.)

I've always hated "Terrible Lie."

How does that line go about the devil wanting to fuck him in the back of his car?

Nothing quite like the feel of something new.

pitchfork's reminds me of some of my friends.

My fuckin' doorman gave me a CD-R of Velvet Revolver a couple of weeks back, and if I'm not mistaken sports a Stone Temple Pilots tattoo (the boy needs lots of help). While I cannot really understand how people could get that into the shenanigans of the Stone Temple Pilots, I did -- in all fairness -- find myself quite enjoying an airring of "Down" back to back with "Vaseline" whilst fruitlessly searching for an elusive Coil disc at the Virgin Megastore yesterday (gosh, I'm so pathetic -- in my attempt to confess a guilty pleasure, I feel the strenuous need to point out that I was searching for an arguably much hipper disc....god, I'm such a fucking cliche). In any event, I must concede that STP did have a way with big fuckin' hooks.

I'll still take Soundgarden's "Big Dumb Sex" over their "Sex Type Thing" any day of the week (though it does have a damn nice riff).

yeah, malkmus was kidding. but he was kidding in a manner that attempted to deride stone temple pilots

as for my thoughts on stp,

'purple' is a classic of alternative rock. all the right ingredients coming together, and quite a departure from the mediocre and muddled 'core'.

'tiny music' is an odd affair indeed. some classy beatles-esque pop-rock ('lady picture show') and some genuinely fun tunes throughout, but it just somehow fails to leave much of a... mark.

'no. 4' is rubbish. well ok, 'church on tuesday' might have been ok had the chorus not been repeated a thousand times.

http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/8/85/Stpfinalcover.jpg

Stone Temple Pilots is the sixth studio album by American rock band Stone Temple Pilots. The album will be released on May 25, 2010 on Atlantic Records.

The album cover incorporates the artwork Peace Fingers Red, designed by Shepard Fairey. According to Kretz, "It was just something to kind of symbolize more of our attitude right now.... We definitely are in a really good place right now as a band and really want to spread some peace and love across the world as much we can. We're going to do it through music and the celebration of rock and roll."

1. Between the Lines
2. Take a Load Off
3. Huckleberry Crumble
4. Hickory Dichotomy
5. Dare If You Dare
6. Cinnamon
7. Hazy Daze
8. Bagman
9. Peacoat
10. Fast As I Can
11. First Kiss on Mars
12. Maver

this has leaked tonight and i'm pretty excited about hearing it.

This fucking band.

lol, come on now. they just want to spread some peace and love across the world as much they can.

And they're gonna do it through music and the celebration of rock and roll.

don't judge them harshly.

No. 4 is actually a real solid album, though it took me a pretty long while to find it out...best track is probably Glide...

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eNk-JnRwihU

lol 90s

"Hickory Dichotomy"! song title of the year.

http://www.jocknroll.co.uk/images/souphotwired.jpg

i quite like the single.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JzS590AkE6c

A few edits away from a great Onion article.

http://www.rollingstone.com/music/news/stone-temple-pilots-fire-scott-weiland-20130227

it would be really fun to throw rocks at Scott Weiland.

loooool their new singer is Chester Bennington: http://downloads.radio.com/stone-temple-pilots/

yessss i love when microgenerational distinctions are blurred in the name of classic rock

thanks to the field behind them it also looks like a photo for an 4-piece REM "plays Out of Time" reunion

with bennington gradually revealing him as another hard rock putz I finally got around to seeing how he joined a group of diverse weirdos like linkin park, and yup, he got an audition with them through a VP at Zomba

revealing himself, and i found that on wikipedia, didnt mean to make it sound like i was investigating deeply

haha. yeah the fact that Angry Timberlake was added to the lineup not long before they blew up fueled a lot of 'nu metal boy band' type accusations in the early days.

rob delaney ‏@robdelaney 3m
Which is worse? Your wife walking in on you fucking a meatloaf with a picture of her sister’s face taped to it, or the Stone Temple Pilots?

St(arts With) One Temple Pilots

Bring back Dave Coutts

Scott Weiland's totally gonna release a solo album as 'Talk Show' isn't he

http://fbcdn-sphotos-g-a.akamaihd.net/hphotos-ak-ash3/1185517_10151762996922906_723638588_n.jpg

TS: Sublime with Rome vs. Stone Temple Pilots with Chester Bennington

Jesus, the new song's ghastly.

http://i.imgur.com/zcjgEze.png

aw that's sad. first stp album was a big deal to me when i was like 13

pour one out

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=V5UOC0C0x8Q

no fucking way. damn, that's pretty sad.

i think the first concert i ever went to without my parents might have been an STP show (on a bill put together by a local radio station, with asphalt ballet and electric love hogs)

heheheh this was the logo of the radio station that championed these guys

http://www.lchr.org/a/24/6r/kioz1021.jpg

I saw them once with Butthole Surfers and The Disposable Heroes of Hiphoprisy opening. After Gibby takes the stage, Weiland's skinny-ass shimmying seems a little quaint. They were fun, though.

this was sort of the band I got into because my alt rock radio whore friend forced his tastes on me and I acted like his lapdog. but then truly grew to appreciate their stuff.

sad...no deets yet on how but also not incredibly surprised it happened before his 50s.

RIP

Fantastic Singles Band. Surprising he lasted this long. There was a video circulating of him and his solo band from about a year ago doing a club gig down in Victoria or Corpus Christi Tx, where they're attempting to perform "Wicked Garden" (iirc) for the first time on stage, and it even comes off like it's Weiland's first time doing it too--misses notes, lyrics, just fumbles his way through it, earning requisite boos--and it's like, wow, if doing a club gig in a moderate-sized Gulf Coast city wasn't bad enough...RIP

Aw man super sad, dude struggled for so long. RIP

Purple is one of my all time favorite albums.

"If you should die before me
ask if you can bring a friend
pick a flower, hold your breath
and drift away"

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=L35vA9-DZl4

Sad :c

this sucks a lot

http://www.latimes.com/entertainment/music/posts/la-me-scott-weiland-dies-20151203-story.html

He put up a good fight, longer than many have.

Wow -- 48 is shockingly young, which makes it all the more sad to think about all the young musicians from the early '90s who we've been without for the past 20 years.

STP had some great songs. Like them or not, they were part of that whole thing. RIP.

yeah, i was gonna revive this thread -- i'm glad i'm not the only one that felt something about this.

STP were at their peak when i was about 11-years-old. i always liked them. i have fond memories of them.

i'm definitely willing to argue that the guy contributed something to the world; as a 90s kid, his catchy grunge pop/rock songs/singles are irresistible to me, then and now.

he was only 48. damn.

RIP

it's really cool that he used to wear dresses on stage, in the 90s.

I've been playing my '90s alt playlist on shuffle this morning and STP's "Creep" had literally just played before I read this news. "Interstate Love Song" is one of the best singles of the '90s, Purple is honestly a great rock album, and the debut and Tiny Music have their moments. RIP.

did he ever clean up? i mean this news would suggest not, but i hadn't heard any arrest/OD type stories in years

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'"

I guess he at least went out still performing and doing what he loved. The comparisons to Layne Staley in the RIP thread reminded me of the awful stories of Staley basically withering away in isolation during his final days.

I interviewed him eleven years ago, when he was with Velvet Revolver, I think he was clean then, and talked a lot about how much he loved his family and would stay clean for them. But I have interviewed a lot of dudes with substance issues and never met anyone so clearly locked in on destroying himself as Weiland. I'm really sad about this news, but not surprised.

sad stuff. Purple and Tiny Music have so many great songs.

he cleaned up briefly around shangri la dee da which is largely what that record is about. some of the songs about addiction ("transmissions from a lonely room," "bi-polar bear") are incredibly harrowing

i saw him a few years ago just after he got kicked out of stp and was putting out a christmas album. it was a v weird show. his voice and body were audibly and visibly calcified from years of addiction, but he was also super psyched to be there, performing jazzy versions of stone temple pilots singles.

Tiny Music holds up, for me at least, in ways the other STP albums don't.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PWi4qWpS3GA

I used to love this song, so much, when I was 10-years-old. It used to make me feel funny.

i mean i know i'll never convince anyone to listen to an album called shangri la dee da but I was obsessed with that record in high school and think it's maybe their best. but spent so much time with it in a really formative year of my life that i don't even trust my own opinion there lol

Even as a 12- and 13-year-old, I knew that STP weren't as important as Nirvana/Pearl Jam/the Pumpkins in that whole "alternative" world, but damn those first two records were a great addition to it.

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.

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

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?)

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.

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

this is not something i say often but the mute trumpet solo on adhesive really works

I can't imagine junkies playing thrash tbh

I actually asked Dave Mustaine how he played Megadeth songs while on heroin; he said it was mostly about muscle memory.

xpost i totally forgot about that! agreed

ah right I forgot about Mustaine. feel like all the other crazy thrash-related drug flameouts/deaths (the handful I can recall anyway) were all alcohol/coke/meth-related

i totally say nice things about STP at the top of this thread. which was fun to read. chuck and ned fighting about stabbing westward! oh the times we had.

i don't think i ever knew any big fans of this band either really. but they were kinda after my time and i don't know a lot of younger normal people.

wonder what the reaction will be when everclear dies.

my world of younger normal people

maybe it's more the personality types that make those specific genres of music.

and since we're listing who we know that did-or-didn't like STP – my old boss is crestfallen. i jokingly wrote my condolences on his fb wall and he took it at face value. he is very seriously grief-stricken! I have no doubts he took the week off work and is likely totally inaccessible for anyone one his team.

xposts - holy shit, stabbing westward!

okay, as a for instance, i don't know a single pearl jam fan. or maybe people just don't admit that to me. i think i would really have to know more normal middle-american people or something to know pearl jam fans. people who play softball on the weekend with their work buddies? i think that's a thing people do.

When I worked at Roadrunner Records, I worked with two major Pearl Jam fans. (They were Foo Fighters and Billy Joel fans, too. It was a nightmare.)

wonder what the reaction will be when everclear dies.

p sure they'll be talking about that bear mauling incident for weeks on end

wonder what the reaction will be when everclear dies.

i'll be totally devastated tbh

heh Stabbing Westward. I'll still stan for Whither Blister Burn though I've been told that Ungod was more actual industrial. by Whither, Blister it was clear that they wanted to write pop songs and just kinda threw the industro/dance guitar in around that. but it worked.

they sucked after that. had one in them!

My Purple cassette was played pretty regularly way back then. I should listen to it again.

A couple of years ago, I was playing Rock Band at a friends house and I ended up signing one of their songs. I generally don't pay a whole lot of attention to lyrics so even though I had heard the song possibly hundreds of time before when I got to the "when the dogs begin to smell her" part I was like what the hell is this shit.

*starts a so much for the afterglow poll*

one of my best friends is a legitimate die-hard pearl jam fan. totally obsessed. he is a wilderness educator and science teacher in a tiny mountain town in CO, grows and smokes a ton of weed and is an amazing father and is super funny and really just a wonderful person tbh. i don't even like pearl jam but obviously there is a point at which one's music taste doesn't mean shit of course

*starts a so much for the afterglow poll*

― HYPERLINK TO RAP GENIUS (BradNelson)

how much you want?

i'd actually imagine pearl jam fans to be solid citizens who would be good people to be with during a natural disaster. handy. reliable.

isn't some dude a Pearl Jam fan?

I like them too. Pearl Jam's better than STP though.

I know a couple Pearl Jam fans irl. they are Pac Northwest folks (or were during the peak era anyway)

Three of my closest friends are lifelone Pearl Jam fans, which I'm fine with so long as I don't have to shout along to "Yellow Ledbetter" in the car.

I'm a Pearl Jam fan and yeah they're totally better than STP.

I haven't listened to them since that boring avocado s/t album but I like most of the rest. sometimes I'll sing "brain of J" in public for no reason

rip everclear

http://connected-i.com/2011/07/02/art-alexakis-canyon-music-review

*starts a so much for the afterglow poll*

― HYPERLINK TO RAP GENIUS (BradNelson), Monday, December 7, 2015 11:30 AM (9 minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

would gladly vote and talk about this album

i don't know if you guys really count as fans. like, people who buy all their albums and go see them live. that kind of fan. i know everyone here can think of nice things to say about anything.

I saw them in 2000 on a two hour road trip. I do have the rest of their albums except the last two - I even stupidly spent money on those authorized bootlegs they were selling in the store during the Binaural tour. Bought two of em!

not as big of a fan now but I'll still fuck w/ em all day

I've seen them live four times, drunk through two of those performances. They were never less than excellent.

in middle school i was a huuuuuge pearl jam fan. bought all the records, really wanted to see them but never did

now i can't even imagine myself listening to them but boy, i fucking loved vitalogy and no code

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.

― Drugs A. Money, Sunday, December 6, 2015 1:03 PM (Yesterday) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

Not sure about that last sentence either way (they weren't quite that good, were they?) But cosign on everything else in this quote. I pull this one out more than any other when I want to hear STP.

I know more IRL Stone Temple Pilots fans than Pearl Jam fans. Almost everyone I knew in middle school preferred Nirvana to PJ; I kinda did, too, but liked both plenty. This was already a few years after grunge peaked, like 1995-1997.

Pearl Jam in concert (2003?) smoked STP (1996), though the latter were perfectly professional, Weiland included. Local H ('member them?) opened for STP and were fucking fantastic.

i'm sure a lot of things from teh grunge years are better than i remember, aside from the general proportion of contemporary junk that got shine from its proximity, but i have trouble hearing any of it. i listen to nirvana and soundgarden and that's it, of the radio stars. i feel confident that there is nothing wrong with pearl jam and they are a perfectly fine band which i loved back when (eddie v snl "K" tribute to kurdt <3) but i… don't ever want to hear them again.

maybe this is how people who were 70s-80s zeppelin fans feel.

Local H was instrumental in teaching the word "copacetic" to 14 year old dorks in gym class

STP and Nirvana are probably the only ones out of those bands that I regularly revisit, which is pretty funny

one of my best friends in school was so dumm he carved kurt's name into his leg with a knife after kurt died -

he was a bigger grunge fan than any of us maybe (if such things can be measured).

later in life he worked for a while in commercial radio, must have been his dream job at the time. caught up with him on facebork in recent years and he is still a 100% pearl jam superfan.

isn't some dude a Pearl Jam fan?

― Hammer Smashed Bagels, Monday, December 7, 2015 1:37 PM (6 hours ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

i'm not in the Ten Club or anything but yeah i love em

i saw STP live in 2008, right after Weiland came back from Velvet Revolver, and he sounded really good and was on point, but i remember him coming off really strange and nonsensical every time he talked to the crowd between songs. i think he may have just had an odd sense of humor.

I think you all need to read this.

http://www.rollingstone.com/music/news/scott-weiland-s-family-dont-glorify-this-tragedy-20151207

sounds about right. he was truly a mess. the death of an addict can often be a weird mix of grief and relief. i feel bad for anyone who has to deal with that for so long. i don't know if anyone is really gonna glorify his death too much? he was kind of a poster child for the benefits of staying sober. if anything he made it longer than a lot of people probably ever thought he would.

in that howard stern interview he says that he's clean but that he drinks. it's an old interview. but in a lot of later pictures/live footage he definitely looks like a drunk. i mean his face has that hardcore drunk look. and he talked like it too. also in the stern interview he says that he's sick of touring but he has to tour to make money to pay for everything. kinda the worst thing you can do when you're sick. be out there on the road forever. he needed a very long hospital stay.

yeah...the guy sold like TWENTY MILLION ALBUMS but i can't imagine there was much responsible money management in his life.

the letter is pretty hard to read but i'm glad they said it and didn't sugarcoat it. the sentence that briefly imagines him at home, barbecuing with his kids instead of dying along in a tourbus is just heartbreaking. having kids can really summon the best from you as a person, and it's so sad to think about addiction just completely canceling that out and not giving him a chance to be a dad.

on stern he said he needed to make $60,000 a month on the road to pay his bills.

i guess he was either lucky or unlucky enough to have the money to keep going as long as he did.

I wasn't even 10 when STP were on their peak (1993/1994?) and I wasn't really exposed to any of their music until the 'Sour Girl' single came along. It was also the only song I ever knew about them and based on that track alone I thought they were some sort of psychedelic band, not a grunge one. It reminded me of the first Porno for Pyros album and the first Smashing Pumpkins album (why did I knew about these albums and I had never heard of stone temple pilots? I don't know.) and made a mental note about hearing more songs from them which I never did.

yeah I was young enough where "sour girl" was the first time I recognized stp as stp

I was also deep into nu metal so I loved "no way out"

"Sour Girl" was the big STP single for me too, everything else was just glimpses of the garish older videos

Mary Weiland's piece was fucking brutal.

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

― how's life, Monday, December 7, 2015 6:59 AM (Yesterday) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

As someone who's never listened to Lush, what Lush song sounds like it? Because if there are more songs that sound like Big Bang Baby in the world, I want to hear them.

There's a piece in "Big Bang Baby" that cops from the chorus of Lush's "For Love," obliquely.

They are not the same vibe really, but I've cued these youtubes up to the salient parts:

https://youtu.be/G0gAxuvo5rc?t=1m40s
https://youtu.be/iYF7VFvzWGo?t=46s

There's a piece in "Big Bang Baby" that cops from the chorus of Lush's "For Love," obliquely.

Also, "Jumping Jack Flash"

No shit, really?

rufus - who is in the 8th grade - just told me that his teacher brought up pearl jam one day and asked the class - 18 kids - if they knew who pearl jam was and rufus was the only one who raised his hand.

which i guess makes sense.

played a show the other night and my friend's band opened their set with "Interstate Love Song," really brought a smile to my face

rufus - who is in the 8th grade - just told me that his teacher brought up pearl jam one day and asked the class - 18 kids - if they knew who pearl jam was and rufus was the only one who raised his hand.

This reminds me of when I was in 4th grade in 1980 and our teacher was super-upset about John Lennon being shot and none of us knew who he was and my memory is that this made her all the more stricken, like she was all alone with the news

aww, poor teacher.

i was 12 when lennon died. i remember being sad. and i remember going to a department store with my mom and in the electronics department all the televisions had john lennon news on them. just rows and rows of crying fans and distraught people being interviewed. that was media saturation before the internet.

Stuff like that makes me feel kind of glad for our level of jadedness.

http://consequenceofsound.net/2015/12/scott-weiland-died-from-an-accidental-drug-overdose-according-to-medical-examiner/

imagine Kurt accidentally overdosing on cough syrup and ambien in his van on the way home from a solo gig at trans pecos

I was also 12 when Lennon died. We asked our history teacher (probably in her late 50s or early 60s) to hold a minute of silence, and she didn't understand what we were talking about.

very sad for scott. saw them several times in the 90s and wish i could have figured out his bowie/glam lineage as a teenager. was it discussed in music press back then?

yeah, it became a pretty overt talking point by the time of Tiny Music.

Damn. Not exactly an uncommon party cocktail there.

dumb question but can someone explain that combination to me?

i dont really understand the ethanol, mainly

That's just booze, right?

Looked like a night of alcohol, ecstasy, and coke, but who knows to what extent. Also given his age and other health issues, yeah, that would probably be kinda risky.

oh i didnt know ppl drank it for kicks

i thought that was like hard times desperation like getting drunk on mouthwash

No, I'm sure he was just drinking booze, they just decided to use whatever toxicology language. Ethanol here basically means alcohol.

ohhhh ok duh

thank you!!

Seems like a lot of people who get into Heroin and kick it but still want to party do everything else they can to an absurd degree. It's ugly.

good god, "Trippin on a Hole in a Paper Heart" is an incredible fucking song.

i'm finally getting around to my own little retrospective and Big Bang Baby is really rocking me, that soaring bridge (second chorus?) w/ "take it away boys", TEARS i tell ya

i remember hearing WHFS premiere "Big Bang Baby" and it just sounded incredibly intense and perfect -- in retrospect the low budget video is fun and cool-looking but at the time it felt like this deflating antithesis of what the song felt like in my head.

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

tiny music is fucking good. "Lady Picture Show" !!!

Detailed new feature here:

http://www.billboard.com/articles/news/magazine-feature/6859089/scott-weiland-final-months-friends-family-talk-mental-illness-family-struggles

Does anybody remember the anono-band Art of Anarchy (Ron "Bumblefoot" Thal, formerly of Guns N' Roses, Jon Moyer, formerly of Disturbed, and two nobodies)? Their debut album, which I never heard, had Weiland on vocals. Anyway, earlier this week there were rumors that Scott Stapp was going to be the new singer for Stone Temple Pilots, a rumor that was quickly shot down by the band...and now it's revealed that Stapp is, in fact, the new singer for Art of Anarchy.

This has been your daily Post-Grunge Meathead Radio Rock Musical Chairs update.

I saw the name and thought "Wasn't that the band with the singer from Filter?"

Which was actually Army of Anyone.

Which I had forgotten the DeLeo brothers were also members of.

Weird...

trippin on a hole in a paper heart fucking bangs

Had never seen this performance with Junior Brown before.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=A4h-VtWwo3I

(it's not the greatest performance, but it makes me happy just the same)

Killer hat!

how much walking shoes worn thin would be acceptable?

I didn't realize they've now had two entire albums with their post-Bennington singer. Maybe they should have resurrected Talk Show instead.

this post came up randomly on my timeline

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

a different scott. really sad to think what happened to him after

i was reading a bit about him and had no idea he was actually abused as a child

Agreed. It's very sad to think of just how much he degraded in the span of 25 years. A cautionary tale in what addiction can really do to you.

When Weiland passed away, I made this post on my Facebook and this thread reminded me of it...

I am pretty sure that I did the first major interview with Scott Weiland. I was writing for Creem and the label flew me out to interview Stone Temple Pilots when they were supporting Megadeth in the midwest. I forget the itinerary but it involved flying into one place, traveling for a night with the band and flying back to New York, with most of my time being spent in Missouri.

I was able to use the hang time with the band to flesh out the story of the band coming out of the chute and breaking right when Sex Type Thing was starting to get massive radio play.

I have fond memories of the trip - drummer Eric Kretz was a really great guy, I introduced those West Coasters to the wonder that is White Castle (the tour bus stopped by and we ordered like 100 of them at my suggestion - with the unheeded warning that it was the only food that would give you a hangover, man did that bus reek the next day) and I got to hear an amazing story in catering from Nick Menza about the line of cute Asian groupies at the Japanese hotel room of Marty Friedman and how he needed an ice pack on his balls afterwards.

And of course, it was cool to be right in the middle of a band exploding into the mainstream living their dreams.

The key part of the story was breakfast in a Shoney's near the band's hotel with Weiland by himself. He let me pick the Shoney's because I used to work there as one of my earliest jobs when I was a teenager.

We had a really nice chat, which made up most of the piece if memory serves. At one point, we got onto what the whirlwind was like, what he would call success.

As if on cue, some dude came by the table to say hi to the singer. The guy mentioned how he played in a cover band and they were working out "Sex Type Thing" to add to their set.

After he left, Weiland turned to me and laughed and said "I think that's a sign you've made it, when someone in a Shoney's in Missouri says he's covering your stuff." Which would up being the endtro to my story.

The band wound up becoming huge. My guess is that the trappings of that success is one of the reasons he was found dead at 48 (just two years older than I am) on a tour bus yesterday.

I was never a huge fan of the band, personally - they had a few good songs but were more derivative than I cared for - but it was cool to be a small part in helping them succeed even if it seemed that Weiland kind of lost the path a few times there.

I hope that somewhere along the line he was able to remember what it was like when having someone in a midwest breakfast chain telling him that they were doing one of his songs was one of the coolest things in the world.

I did a big piece on him for Kerrang! just as Velvet Revolver was happening, got flown out to his studio in LA and got the whole spiel on his drug addiction and losing his family and almost dying and so on. The studio was lovely, but he'd thrown a bin at the glass between the control room and the studio and it was intact but shattered, and he'd spray-painted "fuck" across it. He told me he was clean and would never stray again, because he didn't want to lose his wife and kid again. But it seemed pretty clear to me that he was in no way okay. I was supposed to meet up with some friends in LA bands that night but I felt so depressed afterwards I cancelled and just took a long bath in my hotel room that night. He seemed so sad.

I think many would agree that “art school girlfriend” is the only really bad song on Tiny Music? Luckily, there is an Zep III-ish outtake on the deluxe edition called “Kretz’s acoustic song” that fits nicely in its place for your retconning purposes.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NOMdi8BEQkE