Stone Temple Pilots

Out of all the so called grunge bands of the 1990s, Stone Temple Pilots owed more to hard rock than the flannel driven sounds of Soundgarden or Nirvana to which I always looked at with more punk rock than grunge.  STP wasn't from the great NW, from southern California and having a charismatic front man in Scott Wieland, who had more in common with Jim Morrison than Kurt Corbain. Wieland can deliver the goods vocal wise but most of the time his band mates wanted to strangle him.  (ask Slash).  I actually enjoyed the two albums that Scott did with the the ex GnR guitarist in Velvet Revolver (Libertard  criminally overlooked and underrated).

In the early 90s, STP competed with Soundgarden's Badmotorfinger and Nirvana's Nevermind, Pearl Jam 10 and to a lesser extent Candlebox's first album  but even though Core sounds grunge, part of the reason is that record goes on too long although they had hits with Wicked Garden, Dead And Bloated and Crackerman although I do like the 8 minute closer Where The River Goes but there's also crap like Wet My Bad or Sin to bore me.  The first four albums were produced by Brendan O'Brien, Core being the least whereas No 4 remains their best.  But more about that later.

The second effort Purple shows STP moving away from the hard rock and imitation grunge to a more pop sound although they still rock hard with Unglued, Meatplow and Vasolene although they show a pop side with Interstate Love Song and Pretty Polly. And then you get goofy shit like Army Ants, nuff said.

Tiny Music is their pop rock attempt and sounds more like a hard rock Cheap Trick and they got a few hits with Trippin On A Hole In A Paper Heart and Lady Picture Show but I also enjoy Pop's Love Suicide going into Tumble In The Rough and then Big Bang Baby.  Side 2 kinda falls apart. By then the other guys were getting tired of Scott Wieland's act so they threw him out and got Dave Coutts to sing and they called it Talk Show.  Made one album for Atlantic which recalled more of a popper side of the Beatles but it sold poorly.  Wieland did Twelve Bar Blues

Somehow the Deleo Brothers and Wieland kissed and made up and put out the roaring No. 4 album, my favorite STP album.  It's really a compromise of the previous three albums but they never rocked harder than they did on lead off track Down and even more so on Heaven And Hot Rods. They could tone it down on the ultra cool Sour Girl but the surprise track is the final one Atlanta, to which Wieland channels his inner Jim Morrison into a five minute ballad that should have been heard on radio.

But after that, the albums were as good nor memorable.Shangri La Dee Da sounds as tossed off as the title suggests.  It sounded like a followup to No. 4 but the songs were all that great.  Days In The Week was the hit but in band fighting started up again and they broke up.  Atlantic cherry picked the best known songs for the Thank You best of which included a unremarkable new track All  In The Suit That You Wear and a acoustic version of Plush.  Wieland went back to a solo career, The DeLeo brothers picked up Richard Patrick of Filter for the one off Army Of Anyone album in 2006.

The 2010 Stone Temple Pilots album is very different from the others, it was self produced (with Don Was helping out) and was somewhat an improvement over the lackadaisical Shangri La Dee Da, but this record is their most pop sounding, the hard edges that made No. 4 or Core hard rocking were gone and perhaps gone for good.   But I actually enjoyed their pop moves, it seems to fit in well with the band despite it being a poor selling album.

Perhaps the STP legacy was that they didn't owe their music to grunge but rather was a throwback to the stadium rock of the 1970s which annoyed the hip critics who hated their music.  Nevertheless, Stone Temple Pilots have become the classic rock band of the 1990s now their music is now heard on the classic rock stations and modern rock as well.  With Scott Wieland thrown out of the band for the 40th or 4th time you could make the argument that they are done but somehow I can picture them getting back together again somewhere down the road.  For it has shown that no matter what the DeLeo Brothers and Eric Krentz do, that they can't make it over the hump without the enigma that is Scott Wieland.

As they say this is not over........yet.  And so they regroup by adding Chester Bennington (Linkin Park) and made a five song EP that while passable, Wieland's personality and songwriting is missed.  A couple good songs (Out Of Time, Black Heart) but even for a EP the lesser songs are just that.  Uneven. In November of 2015 Chester Bennington left STP to return back to Linkin Park.  What the guys will do in the future remains to be seen but there's always a chance Wieland will resume back into the lead singer role, pending if both him and the band can tolerate each other.

That will never happened.  Scott Wieland was found dead in his tour bus prior before a show in Minnesota December 3, 2015.  He was 48.  Chester Bennington killed himself in 2017.  In November of 2017 Jeffrey Adam Gutt was named new vocalist of STP, Gutt was a X factor contestant and did cover versions of Hallelujah and Pink (Aerosmith, not the female singer BTW).  The 2018 album ushers in a new edition of STP, to which Gutt is a more suitable replacement than Bennington and at times the album shows flashes of brilliance but without Scott Wieland the results are not as memorable so to speak.  Actually it's better than Shangri La Dee Da but I still like the 2010 S/T better than the 2018 S/T.



The Albums

Core (Atlantic 1992) B-
Stone Temple Pilots (Better known as Purple) (Atlantic 1994) B+
Tiny Music Or Songs From The Vatican (Atlantic 1996) A-
No. 4 (Atlantic 1999) A-
Shangri La Dee Da (Atlantic 2001) C+
Thank You (Atlantic 2003) B+
Stone Temple Pilots (Atlantic 2010) B+
Stone Temple Pilots (Rhino 2018) B

STP related:
Talk Show (Atlantic 1998) B
Scott Wieland: 12 Bar Blues (Atlantic 1998) B+
Velvet Revolver: Contraband (RCA 2005) B
Velvet Revolver: Libertard (RCA 2007) B+
Army Of Anyone (Firm/EMI 2006) C+
Scott Wieland: Happy In Galoshes (Softdrive/New West 2008) B
Scott Wieland: The Most Wonderful Time Of Year (Atco 2011) B
Stone Temple Pilots/Chester Bennington High Rise EP (Play Pen/ADA 2013) C+