Soon the trio were joined by drummer Eric Kretz. A chance encounter with Robert DeLeo prompted them to ditch the Duran Duran and Ultravox influences and form a new band, Swing. Weiland and his best friend, guitarist Corey Hickok, had a band called Soi Distant, whose pretentious, would-be European-sounding name was matched by their pretentious, would-be European-sounding music.
But he definitely had the gift of singing.” “He was fresh out of college, kind of on a fratboy, jock kind of trip.
“He was a completely different person back then,” says Robert. As a teen he’d dabbled with marijuana and cocaine and been sent to rehab by his mum and stepdad for his troubles. Cleveland-born but raised in Orange Country, Weiland was an all‑American quarterback type with a wild streak a mile wide. It was in LA that Robert met a skinny suburban kid named Scott Weiland. He and his elder brother Dean had grown up on the other side of America in small‑town New Jersey, where they spent their early years listening and playing along to Led Zeppelin, T.Rex and Cheap Trick. Robert DeLeo moved to Los Angeles in 1984 with $1,200 in his pocket and ambition in his head. While the journey since taken by the band that made it has been marked by breathless highs and heartbreaking lows, the album that started it off stands as a validation of everything Stone Temple Pilots set out to achieve.Įarly promo shot: (l-r) Scott Weiland, Robert DeLeo, Eric Kretz, Dean DeLeo In 2017 Core turned 25, and the craft DeLeo talks about hasn’t just stood the test of time, it has aged better than many of its contemporaries. The whole mentality of STP at all times was: ‘Let’s write the best songs.’ That’s what it was all about. “When you model yourself on someone you admire, and you see they got the slings and arrows too, it gives you a kind of strength. “We grew up listening to bands like Led Zeppelin, who got heavy criticism,” says bassist Robert DeLeo, a man with the slicked-back hair, deep-set eyes and warm vocal tones of a 1920s stage hypnotist. But certainly both bands were forced to endure an inordinate amount of shit being undeservedly dumped on them early in their careers, and both eventually rose above it with dignity and pride intact. Not musically – the surviving members of STP aren’t foolish enough to draw a parallel there. If there’s a band that Stone Temple Pilots should be compared to, it’s Led Zeppelin. But Stone Temple Pilots were their own men – and men of the people at that, as the eight million people who bought Core can testify. Sure, it slotted neatly into prevailing trends, and yes, singer Scott Weiland’s chameleonic baritone evoked both Eddie Vedder and Kurt Cobain. The band’s debut album, Core, was simultaneously confident and pained, anthemic and intimate.
The vitriol heaped upon Stone Temple Pilots was vastly out of proportion to their supposed crimes against cool. Jesus, they weren’t even from the right city. They had the temerity to sign to a major label without putting in the hours on some godforsaken indie label than no one but the hippest hipster knew about. It's like it's too little, stretched over too much time.In that brief conversation, those animated sofa-dwellers with the single-digit IQs neatly summed up the reception the Los Angeles band had received from sections of the mainstream music press: they were copyists, opportunists, bandwagon jumpers. Even four minutes, for the single version, feels too long. It's exhausting and a bit too tedious to go on for five minutes (as the album version does). Weiland's chameleon vocals sound a bit too much like Eddie Vedder in this track (and a lot of Core, for that matter) for those to be unique, either, although his voice is always pleasant to hear, powerful and passionate.įor me, the song is just a bit too repetitive, and aside from the rather explosive final chorus, which, out of everything in this song, stands out in particular because of Weiland's vocal delivery there, every other part of the song - the verses, the chorus-bridge, the choruses that aren't the last chorus - has the same amount of energy. They took a page from the grunge guidebook and wrote vague lyrics about a dark subject matter (in this case, the murder of a young girl), so there's nothing really special about the words. Compared to some of their other hits, I never understood the fawning over this one in particular.
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