Stone Temple Pilots… man, those guys were a whole different animal.
I first heard them in late ’92 when Core came out. “Sex Type Thing” was all over the radio and some of the older guys at the record store were already complaining that they sounded too much like Pearl Jam. I didn’t care — I liked the songs. Scott Weiland had this voice that was smooth but still had bite, and the riffs were huge. I ended up playing that album a lot more than I thought I would.
By ’93 and ’94 they were everywhere. They went from being a new band to selling out arenas really fast. A lot of the real old-school Seattle crowd never fully accepted them. They called them posers or said they were just jumping on the grunge bandwagon. I get why people felt that way, but I always thought it was a little unfair. They were from San Diego, sure, but they fit into the whole early-nineties rock thing pretty damn well.
They put out Purple in ’94, which I thought was even better than the first one, and then Tiny Music… Songs from the Vatican Gift Shop in ’96. After that things got messy with Scott’s problems and the band going on hiatus a couple times. They came back with No. 4 in ’99 and Shangri-La Dee Da last year. They’re still together in 2002, but it feels like they’ve been through a lot.
These days I still pull out Core or Purple sometimes when I’m in the mood. They weren’t the purest Seattle band, but they were part of the soundtrack of those years whether some people like it or not. Stone Temple Pilots got huge fast and they took a lot of shit for it, but I always liked their songs.
They were one of those bands that just belonged to the nineties.