It was during this time that the remaining Pilots began working with Ten Inch Men vocalist Dave Coutts. In the months following his 1995 arrest, Weiland released two songs with a side project called The Magnificent Bastards, one a telling cover of John Lennon’s “How Do You Sleep?” for the Working Class Hero tribute disc, the other a Nirvana-esque original on the Tank Girl soundtrack. The free-association lyrics are too oblique or stupid to mean much to anyone outside (or possibly inside) the group (“Adhesive Love” seems like a silly way to almost sing “Peace and Love,” while “Ride the Cliché” isn’t about anything at all), and the music isn’t breaking any boundaries, but Tiny Music tricks this dragon out in a second set of stripes. Even “Trippin’ on a Hole in a Paper Heart,” a Pearl Jammy composition that could have gone in that direction, is reined in with a Robin Zanderesque vocal. There are exceptions, like the relaxed cocktail pop of “And So I Know” and the blustery “Art School Girl,” but not enough to alter the primary impression. Reinvented as a Lollapalooza-era Cheap Trick, down to the alluring Beatlisms amid the tuneful electric crunch, STP gives its no-stylistic-integrity all to catchy power pop on Tiny Music…Songs From the Vatican Gift Shop. Nonetheless, he and the band got themselves sorted out long enough to make a third album before remanding the singer to a medical facility for further treatment. So was Weiland’s heroin addiction, which erupted into public view with a May 1995 drug bust, the first of many. The odd acoustic pop of “Pretty Penny” provides an intriguing contrast to the loudness (and doesn’t sound anything like Nirvana’s “Polly” - well, not too much), but the syncopated Jane’sish monotony of “Army Ants” is a bad sign. The roaringly melodic “Interstate Love Song,” “Vasoline” and the “Creep”-soundalike “Big Empty” all repeat Core‘s downbeat hard rock with maximum efficiency. Weiland possesses a strong, gritty voice and the others can certainly play, but the group can’t seem to shake off its kleptomaniacal instincts.
The bass/guitar brotherhood of Robert and Dean DeLeo makes a solid but flexible noise on the album, and Eric Kretz drums with the hamhanded power of John Bonham, driving songs like the Nirvana-seeking “Sex Type Thing” (whose ironic idea of a crude come-on is “I’m gonna learn ya my philosophy / You wanna know about my atrocity?”), “Sin” and “Crackerman.”Īgain produced by O’Brien, Purple (a title that appears nowhere on the package) is tighter and more confident, drawing the band closer to a characteristic sound but not quite getting there.
Where the best of the Northwest groups STP aped were fighting to break tired rock formulae, the Californians served up their innovations pre- digested and refined for mass consumption, writing songs catchier, more radio-friendly and less compellingly serious than their bull-headed counterparts to the north.
“Plush” and “Piece of Pie” were understandably mistaken for Pearl Jam, and Scott Weiland’s dry, constricted vocals on the dramatic, semi-acoustic “Creep” (“I’m half the man I used to be”) sound uncannily like Kurt Cobain.
Tweaked to commanding post-metal power by producer Brendan O’Brien (Black Crowes, Pearl Jam, Red Hot Chili Peppers), Core resonates with the sonic effects of Nirvana, Pearl Jam and Soundgarden in plain view. Stone Temple Pilots arose from obscurity in San Diego, where the group was formed as Mighty Joe Young, to worldwide attention so quickly and with a sound so close to what was happening on radio via Seattle that the backlash set in before the quartet’s debut album, Core, finished reeling off its succession of hits.
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