While the music of Stone Temple Pilots’ debut Core sounds as electrifying and vital as the day it was released 25 years ago, there’s one integral thing missing from the album’s silver anniversary celebrations: the band’s striking vocalist Scott Weiland.
“He was a lion back then,” Stone Temple Pilots bassist Robert DeLeo says of his fallen comrade. “He was a lion.”
Weiland’s death in 2015 renders the album’s anniversary reissue a bittersweet time for his surviving bandmates. The release of Core marked a time before the singer’s issues with drugs and the law shifted attention away from the band’s extraordinary, Grammy-winning rock, with the fledgling group simply sharing a humble wish for their music to be heard.
“Scott was so hungry to make a dream happen, that is really what it boils down to,” DeLeo says. “He wanted to make the dream come true of writing music, and we all passionately shared that vision. He contributed so much to this and he isn’t here to look back and enjoy what we created. We were really all on the same page of trying to create the best record we could make and the best songs we could make. That was always the chemistry we had back then.”
Despite being based 1300 miles south of grunge’s Seattle epicentre, the San Diego-based STP never let geographical borders hinder their ascendance. Core peaked at number three on the US Billboard chart and sold more than four million album in the States, with the album also going platinum in Australia. DeLeo admits the band could never have been ready for the rollercoaster ride of ups and down triggered by Core’s release.
“Our A&R guy at Atlantic Records at the time, Tom Carolan, said to us, ‘Fasten your seatbelts’, and he was correct about that. You can never expect what we achieved – the album took on a life of its own. I don’t think you are ever ready for that. Being that young, I look back at it like I was getting tickets to the circus.”
The deluxe 4CD/DVD reissue of Core is filled out with forgotten material rescued from DeLeo’s garage, as well as early demos of classic STP songs such as "Plush". When DeLeo first played Weiland his early sketch of the unforgettable song, his frontman dismissed it as sounding like classic rock staples Boston.
“Maybe that was just my guitar playing!” DeLeo laughs. “I have to be honest, when I was 10 years old there were three records I bought with my own money in 1976. I walked down to the record store in my hometown and I bought the first Boston record, Led Zeppelin’s Presence and Todd Rundgren’s Utopia. Growing up in the ‘70s, I like to think I learnt well from great artists. Listening to that music was so inspiring, not only on a musical level but also as a kid hitting puberty. A lot of those people are my friends now and I have to stop and tell them, ‘thank you for raising me’, because they did.”
Also included on Core for its first official release is Stone Temple Pilots’ iconic MTV Unplugged performance from 1993. Recorded just a day before Nirvana’s similarly untouchable Unplugged effort, images of Weiland’s stirring performance in a rocking chair are indelibly stamped on a generation of grunge fans.
“I believe Scott came up with the chair idea,” DeLeo recalls. “He kind of looked at [MTV Unplugged] like a fireside chat, so that’s where the rocking chair idea came up. I was frightened of that performance because we had never really been in that [acoustic] environment. We were younger and had always relied on volume, so I was frightened. When I watch that performance now – particularly in the chorus of Creep in my answer ‘Then I feel as the dawn it fades to grey’ – I can see my hands shaking!”
Listening back to the brilliance of STP’s output of the early 1990s, you have to feel a little sorry for DeLeo and his bandmates, guitarist Dean DeLeo and drummer Eric Kretz. Weiland’s drug addiction and time spent behind bars in the ‘90s saw the band scratching tours, cancelling studio sessions and delayed by their frontman’s struggles to clean himself up. “Yeah, I think I’m going to be reincarnated as a bus bench,” DeLeo admits with dark humour. Even so, the death of Weiland – not to mention the recent passing of his sometime-replacement, Linkin Park’s Chester Bennington - hasn’t spelt the end of Stone Temple Pilots just yet. After all the waiting around, DeLeo is keen to make up for lost time.
“We’ve been busy trying to create a new record,” DeLeo admits. “We haven’t decided on someone for sure yet, but hopefully soon we’ll have an announcement and have that expression of STP and perform live again. There are many aspects of STP that are hitting us emotionally and artistically right now – a lot has happened. The reissue of Core is so interesting to me, since Scott isn’t here anymore and he should be here enjoying that. It would be nice to perform these songs again, because they’re such a huge part of our lives.”
Pick up your copy of the remastered Core here.
