Stone Temple Pilots

Contributed by Nathan Howard

My father, grateful though I am to him for my first concert (the Stones), tempered his Jagger with Weber. I was painfully aware both of the fact that we could afford, but still didn't buy, cable and of the fact that cable was the only way to watch music videos. Cable was doubly wasteful in my father’s eyes because not only was it a needless thirty-dollar luxury but it also threatened to prevent me from being otherwise productive (playing outside, doing homework, cleaning room, you remember the litany…).

Winter 1996 brought with it three months of free Videotron cable, Musiqueplus, and the music video. Elated, the first music video I can remember seeing is “Big Bang Baby”. I’m sure I saw others earlier, at friends houses say, but I can’t quite remember them. I remember STP because Scott Weiland scared me. Eyeliner on men was not part of my universe, and, though I didn’t quite know what heroin addiction looked like, I knew enough to conclude that it must have some connection to cable television.

Scott Weiland’s battle with that kryptonite of late 20th century grunge proved to be the band’s greatest stumbling block and the band perennially canceled or cut short touring during their career. The band also suffered at the hands of critics. To wit, Rolling Stone’s review of STP’s first album, “Core”:

With Eric Kretz bashing the skins like a Bonham manqué and axman Robert DeLeo ladling murk, Core is a testosteronefest. So thickly the sweat drips that when Weiland, resident shaman, gruffly mourns, "I'm half the man I used to be" ("Creep"), one shudders. "Plush" devoured radio with its mix of guitar grandiosity and woolly philosophizing; "Wicked Garden," another big single, waxes equally pompous. The inner child of Stone Temple Pilots is Iron Maiden, and that kid just won't quit howling

Now I can’t see for the life of me how the Maiden comparison is a) derogatory or b) valid, but other critics rightly lambasted STP for aping Vedder’s trademark ‘manly man-drawl’ – a drawl still lamentably echoed by Nickleback. The Weiland cum Vedder of early STP is most evident on “Interstate Love Song”, a song that until writing this article I thought actually WAS a Pearl Jam Song.

The band’s total output includes the relevant (Core, 1992; Purple 1994; and Tiny Music… 1996), the irrelevant (No. 4, 1999; Shangri-La Dee Da, 2001), and the trying-to-run-out-our-record-contract, a.k.a cash grab (Thank You, 2003; Buy This, 2008). Scott Weiland sang for the pleasantly mediocre Velvet Revolver but left for reasons so obvious as to obviate the need or desire for speculation. The DeLeo brothers were in the largely unremarkable but surprisingly functional “supergroup” Army of Anyone with Richard Patrick of Filter.

A reunited STP, according to Spin, plans on releasing an album in 2010.