Stone Temple Pilots - Grunge's great shapeshifters

It's curious how media mechanisms can establish what an artist's story and background are, and shape opinion even beyond their own intentions, which in some cases amount to nothing more than a mere personal judgment, whether negative or positive, thereby influencing readers in a way that is legitimately critical, though at times misleading and entirely unaware of how things actually happened. Such is the case of Stone Temple Pilots, the first great misunderstanding of the grunge era, towards whom the media continue to harbor a (often) unjustified hostility. We will attempt, then, an equally subjective reassessment, one that runs sharply against the grain of this kind of analysis.

Stone Temple Pilots formed in San Diego, at the far south of California, in the late '80s, when Pixies, Dinosaur Jr. and Jane's Addiction emerged from the underground, offering a different take on the rock conventions in vogue during the Eighties. What was happening in Seattle, with the first compilations and singles released by Pavitt and Poneman's Sub Pop, interested no one, and had interested only a few until Geffen decided to sign Nirvana. Rather, it was the Californian crossover movement, successor to the fortunate hardcore era, that drew the greatest attention from young American alternative kids, who didn't see themselves reflected in the street-rock of Guns n' Roses.

In this seemingly chaotic scenario, Mighty Joe Young, the earlier incarnation of the future Stone Temple Pilots, begin to emerge in search of what's known as the deep kick. By 1989 the band already has its definitive lineup: Scott Weiland on vocals, brothers Dean and Robert DeLeo (of Italian descent) on guitar and bass respectively, and Eric Kretz on drums. Their music is steeped to an almost unlikely degree in the funk of the Emi-era Red Hot Chili Peppers, while also showing clear echoes of the arrangement style of the band that would become their true and greater source of inspiration: Perry Farrell's Jane's Addiction. Songs like "Spanish Flies", "Dirty Dog" and "Bone Machine" paradoxically seem closer to James Brown than to Nirvana. Alongside these songs, Mighty Joe Young's live sets also feature some of the tracks that would later end up on the much-talked-about debut Core, such as "Wicked Garden", "Piece Of Pie" and "Where The River Goes". At the same time, in Seattle, Stone Gossard and Jeff Ament of the future Pearl Jam — the band critics would often accuse Stone Temple Pilots of aping — were writing and promoting, dressed and made up in full glam style, "Shine" by Mother Love Bone for Polygram: a band certainly closer to Guns N' Roses than to the future honest champions of pure, hard Seattle attitude, after having abandoned their teenage project Green River, which then split into Mudhoney and, in the opposite direction, into Mother Love Bone.

A record deal never seems to materialize for Mighty Joe Young, while in Seattle all sorts of things are happening, from the explosion of Nirvana, to the solid success of "Facelift" by Alice In Chains, to Gossard and Ament's conversion to the grunge attitude following the death of Andrew Wood.

When the major record labels based in Los Angeles start signing every single band from the State of Washington one by one, Atlantic is left empty-handed, watching everyone else cash in thanks to the media support of MTV, Rolling Stone, and Cameron Crowe's mediocre "Singles", which manage to frame and flatten into a single scene — the Seattle scene — a musical landscape that was in fact remarkably varied by American standards. This is how bands with almost opposite musical conceptions, like Nirvana and Pearl Jam, not to mention the Soundgarden/Mudhoney relationship, are still commonly lumped together today under the grunge label. The misunderstanding becomes obvious as soon as you take some distance from what Seattle actually meant in those years.

Having established that grunge was probably more of an attitude, a critical stance, a way of being, than a way of making music, Mighty Joe Young only belatedly reap the benefits of the Cobain revolution, and it's not until the very end of 1991 that they get signed by Warner Bros, via Atlantic. In fact, they're forced to delay the release of their first album — initially self-titled — because of an elderly bluesman who hadn't recorded anything in years but refused to let the band use his own stage name. So they become Stone Temple Pilots, a name whose origin has spawned several theories, which we'll happily skip over as irrelevant to the matter at hand.

The earliest songs, some of them carried over from the Mighty Joe Young repertoire, are entrusted to the up-and-coming producer Brendan O'Brien, who had made a name for himself as sound engineer on the Red Hot Chili Peppers' "Blood Sugar Sex Magik", and they clearly reflect a blend of all the influences Stone Temple Pilots carry with them, Jane's Addiction above all, surfacing here and there throughout Core, the album that would remain the band's biggest commercial success.

Core, released only in '92, is an album that doesn't exactly brim with originality, but it undeniably delivers some excellent hard rock performances, holding its own against plenty of other albums from the same period. If "Piece Of Pie", a track dating back to around 1989, echoes the Soundgarden of "Badmotorfinger", it's certainly not because Robert DeLeo, the band's chief songwriter, decided at the last minute to copy a band that had already found success. The songs on this album benefit from a tight, cohesive sound, even though the structural differences between consecutive tracks like "Crackerman" and "Where The River Goes" are fairly obvious. And beyond the hard-hitting sound, which certainly struck a chord and was fashionable among young rock listeners of the time, Stone Temple Pilots also play the depressed, dazed acoustic-ballad card with the single "Creep", splitting Core in half with a much-needed moment of respite. No overview would be complete without mentioning their definitive signature song, "Sex Type Thing", which would go on to become the most obvious closer of their live shows.

Plush wins a Grammy Award for Best Rock Performance, while Scott Weiland wins another for Best New Artist at the 1993 ceremony. That same year, ahead of Nirvana and of course Alice in Chains, Stone Temple Pilots record an unplugged set at the MTV studios which, despite being excellent in quality and featuring some intriguingly reworked arrangements, they would decide never to release officially. The tour that follows their debut album — which, after a long climb, reaches No. 3 on the Billboard 200 — sees them playing to crowds across half of America, including an appearance on the traveling Lollapalooza fair.

Grunge is at the peak of its popularity, and the band forcefully muscles its way into the elite circle that, up to that point, had consisted exclusively of Seattle bands — bands that, among themselves, are already starting to needle each other, jealous of one another's success.

Weiland's theatrical stage presence is a direct descendant of the behavior of the very idols he cites as his own, namely David Bowie, Iggy Pop and Jim Morrison; and the attention paid to Stone Temple Pilots grows enormously following their performance — introduced by a radiant Nicole Kidman — on Saturday Night Live, the famous American TV show that hosted the rock rebels and bestselling artists of those years.

Pearl Jam themselves bring in Brendan O'Brien to produce their second album, "Vs.", while Stone Temple Pilots write the songs for their next album, Purple, while on tour — an album that debuts straight at No. 1 in the US, helped along by the lingering shockwaves of Cobain's suicide, which would also benefit "Superunknown", Soundgarden's masterpiece. Also known as "12 Gracious Melodies", Purple consolidates the Stone Temple Pilots sound, without lingering on the same sonic territory as Core. The differences are crystal clear, yet not everyone seems to notice. For one thing, the song lengths, as well as the noticeably less abrasive production on Purple, and songwriting built along lines that hew closer to the classic pop verse-chorus-verse structure, without shying away from guitar solos courtesy of Dean DeLeo, which were practically absent on the previous album. While Core has to date sold eight million copies in the US alone, its follow-up reaches six million — much to the dismay of detractors — propelled by the success of singles like the lead-off "Vasoline", the irresistible "Interstate Love Song", and the blues-rock of "Big Empty", a track added at the last minute to the soundtrack of "The Crow" after the song the band had originally recorded and earmarked for that compilation, "Only Dying" — one of several tracks dug up and reworked from the Mighty Joe Young days, still unreleased — was scrapped by the band themselves for being uncomfortably prophetic about the fate of the unfortunate Brandon Lee. Purple is probably Stone Temple Pilots' best album: the melodies of "Still Remains" and the Jane's Addiction echoes of "Lounge Fly" remain somewhat hidden high points in the band's career, and all this instantly elevates Weiland to must-cover rockstar status for the media, who see in him and in poor Layne Staley the likely next victims of a system on the verge of collapse, where heroin and alcohol seem to be the only two languages through which the two frontmen manage to communicate with the world.

Scott Weiland nonetheless appears on the cover of Rolling Stone alongside the Icelandic elf Bjork, talking about stints in detox clinics ahead of the band's next album. From this point on, Scott becomes the band's cross to bear and its delight in equal measure, forcing his way into and quickly bailing out of one recovery program after another, causing countless problems for his bandmates, who have little patience left for his well-documented drug addiction.

Tiny Music… Songs From The Vatican Gift Shop is born precisely out of this in/out period, and hits stores right as the grunge phenomenon has, for some time now, breathed its last breath: from this point on, it becomes utterly pointless to keep tabs on the careers of the other bands from the scene, since between breakups, deaths and changes of direction, the magic of that period already feels like a distant memory. The album instead aims to relaunch the band artistically, with solutions once again different from its two predecessors, offering up a kind of hard rock with a britpop aftertaste that catches critics pleasantly off guard — especially in Britain, where the New Musical Express would name it one of its albums of 1996 — and unpleasantly surprises many longtime fans, who watch the post-adolescent rage of Core fade in favor of melodies more indebted to the Lennon–McCartney songwriting duo, not to mention Flaming Lips and Cheap Trick. The gorgeous ballad "Lady Picture Show" should be read in this light, as should the refrains of several other tracks on an album that seems to have been sketched out following a concept already hinted at by its own cover art: the flip side of the star-system, and inevitably, the drug problems of Weiland, who writes all his band's lyrics barring a few rare exceptions. "Trippin On A Hole In A Paper Heart", co-written with drummer Eric Kretz, carries the same rock charge as "Sex Type Thing" and is the only track on the whole album to head in that direction, which elsewhere prefers to cast its spell through the desolate confession of "Adhesive", or the soft-rock of "And So I Know", complete with a solo bordering on jazz, while the video for "Big Bang Baby" relaunches the band's image, seemingly poking fun — with their own weapons — at the critics who still brand them as sell-outs who jumped on the grunge bandwagon at the last minute.

But in the middle of the subsequent tour supporting Aerosmith, Weiland is arrested and thrown in jail for drug possession: the tour is cancelled, and the DeLeo brothers consider disbanding the group.

It's under these circumstances that the Talk Show project is born, featuring the band's three instrumentalists alongside a new singer of questionable artistic pedigree, Dave Coutts. The DeLeos, skilled and prolific songwriters, put together a new album in no time at all, self-produced and tailored to appeal to fans of Tiny Music — who, truth be told, are clearly fewer in number than the fans of Stone Temple Pilots' earlier artistic output. The album turns out to be a flop on every level, almost a pale copy of the band's previous work, despite featuring a couple of decent acoustic ballads such as "Fill The Fields" and "Peeling An Orange", where Dave Coutts — whose voice is closer to Liam Gallagher's than to Weiland's — manages to give his best without being swallowed up by the guitar distortion.

Scott Weiland, not yet free of his drug addiction, delivers his comeback with 12 Bar Blues, to date his only solo album, which re-establishes him as a far more substantial figure than the snobbish gossip about him would suggest. Released in April 1998, 12 Bar Blues is a controversial, difficult album, "a bold step into pop avant-garde", which finds him venturing — alongside Martyn LeNoble of Porno For Pyros, the then up-and-coming pianist Brad Mehldau, and his trusted collaborator Victor Indrizzo, who co-writes several tracks with Scott, with production by Blair Lamb and Daniel Lanois — into territory wildly removed from that of his main band, blending soft-jazz, piano-bar numbers ("Divider") with pop melodies built over jagged, industrial-schooled sounds ("About Nothing"), as well as power-ballads like the single "Barbarella" and carnivalesque numbers like "Lady, Your Roof Brings Me Down". The album is too disorienting to relaunch a career already heavily compromised by addiction, but it would still have done the "Outside"-era David Bowie proud.

Having confirmed that there's strength in unity, Stone Temple Pilots decide to head back into the studio for a new album, a project pushed hard by Weiland, who writes his lyrics from the penitentiary where he's serving a nine-month sentence following yet another arrest during the tour for his solo album. The result is an album, N°4, that finds the band firing up the amps again, unleashing a hard rock charge many thought was gone for good, without giving up the handful of pop and acoustic ballads that by now are as much the band's trademark as the distorted bass-and-guitar riffs and Kretz's violent drumming. It's one of these ballads, "Sour Girl", whose video goes into heavy rotation on MTV — and even on Italy's own Videomusic — that relaunches the band up the American charts, drawing renewed attention to an album packed with great rock tracks like "Down", nominated for Best Hard Rock Performance at the 2000 Grammy Awards, the punk-rock of "Sex & Violence" and "MC5" (a title chosen anything but randomly), and the little gem "I Got You", where Brendan O'Brien, producer of every Stone Temple Pilots album including this one, becomes the band's true fifth member. Barrett Martin of Screaming Trees and Mad Season guests on the Morrison-esque "Atlanta", which closes the record, while on "No Way Out" Stone Temple Pilots probably come as close to metal as they ever would.

N°4 is thus another hit at home, where the band heads out on tour alongside the resurrected Red Hot Chili Peppers, while struggling to make an impression in a Europe that is only just then discovering the crossover/nu-metal bands of the mid-Nineties.

Just when everything seems to be going right, with Stone Temple Pilots the sole survivors alongside Pearl Jam of a phenomenon once called grunge that was on everyone's lips, comes the misstep nobody saw coming — or rather, the confusion of an album like Shangri-La Dee Da, which, despite containing only decent songs, once again throws fans for a loop, landing in their stereos as a hybrid of N°4 and the earlier Tiny Music, with arrangements that work on their own terms but don't suit the essential nature of a band that built its best moments on the bare bass-drums-voice-guitar lineup. Everything seems to go the wrong way, starting with the choice of lead single, "Days Of The Week", a track that could at best have won over Foo Fighters fans, to the decision to headline the Family Values Tour, a touring festival featuring bands like Staind and Linkin Park that had precious little in common with Stone Temple Pilots.

Even though the album contains some excellent rock songs and just as many ballads, like "Hello It's Late" and "Bi-Polar Bear", the failure is plain to see, and when Duff McKagan's call comes through to a still stoned & confused Weiland, intent on bringing Scott into the new project formed by the ex-Guns N' Roses members (Velvet Revolver), the band's end is sealed: the living-apart-together existence Stone Temple Pilots had been keeping up for a while takes a fatal hit, and there's just enough time for an honest, quiet compilation, featuring only one new track, bundled however with a nearly three-hour DVD thrown in almost as a bonus with the CD purchase, before the official farewell.

Velvet Revolver, bolstered by the following that Slash and co. still command, release an album, Contraband, utterly out of step with the times and anachronistic in a climate where there no longer seems to be any room for the music — however broadly reworked — of the former Guns N' Roses members. As with Audioslave, though, the public seems to embrace it all the same, and Contraband manages to sell well pretty much everywhere, consigning to oblivion whatever good things Stone Temple Pilots, the great shapeshifters of grunge, might still have had to offer.

The second Velvet Revolver record (Libertad, 2007) does nothing but confirm the old-style rock'n'roll hedonism of the debut, this time though overseen by a producer as acclaimed as Brendan O'Brien (already behind the desk for every STP album), who helps the band in terms of cohesion and impact. The album, however, doesn't sell as well as its predecessor, and it's the prelude to new drug problems for Weiland (after a good stretch of sobriety), because of which the singer is let go in 2008.

Only two years later, the time seems ripe again for a reconciliation among the STP members. The De Leo brothers, after a lawsuit filed by Atlantic (which was demanding the contractually obligated seventh album), secure the right to produce the new material themselves. Communication with Weiland (sober once more) is still patchy, which is why most of the work is carried out in separate studios (with Don Was lending support). The result is a self-titled album that makes the reunion official and shifts the band's sound back toward a fairly stripped-down, roots-oriented recovery of sixties and seventies influences. Some of the framework of Shangri-La Dee Da is still there, this time better balanced between swagger and melody, but the record as a whole is still hampered by the lack of a real producer capable of striking the spark out of an album that seems designed mostly to confirm the guys' need to play together again.

The apparent new harmony keeps the band touring through 2012, after which the tensions resume (largely tied to doubts over whether Weiland could still do vocal justice to Core's twentieth anniversary), leading to the singer's renewed departure, as he remains in the meantime devoted to his parallel solo career (backed by the Wildabouts).

At that point, in the name of friendship and mutual respect, Stone Temple Pilots decide to ask Chester Bennington of Linkin Park to join the band, giving rise to a project that runs until 2015 and produces an EP, High Rise, which leaves little mark on the discography due to a fairly mannered sound blend overly influenced by the singer's background. The stint with Bennington ends (after a decent run of live activity) due to his concurrent commitments with his main band, ushering in a truly grim period on a human level, in which STP must face both the death of Weiland in 2015, once again tied to addiction (he was found dead on the tour bus in Minnesota, just minutes before he was due to go on stage with his Wildabouts), and that of Bennington, who took his own life in 2017.

An interlude that once again forces everyone to come to terms with troubled karma and reflect on grief, yet one that shapes the drive for personal redemption.

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