Stone Temple Pilots

When "Core" came out in 1992 and "Plush" started playing everywhere, critics greeted them with an accusation that followed them for years: that Stone Temple Pilots were opportunists, upstarts riding the Seattle grunge wave, that Scott Weiland's voice was an imitation of Eddie Vedder and that the whole band was a product designed to sell the sound of the moment. They called them a copy. Fakes. Manufactured.

Time said otherwise, and emphatically. Stone Temple Pilots turned out to be one of the most versatile and talented rock bands of their generation, and the proof is that no imitator can do what they did: shed their skin album after album without ever stopping sounding like themselves.

The voice that was nobody's copy

Yes, "Core" had the weight and the rawness of its era. But the next album was enough to dismantle the accusation. With "Purple" in 1994 and "Tiny Music" in 1996, the band let its hair down: out came luminous melodies, guitars with a sixties air, psychedelia, twisted pop, glam. "Interstate Love Song", one of the best rock songs of the nineties, sounds nothing like Seattle: it is a road song, elegant, with swing, that no grunge band could have written. That is where it became clear that Weiland was imitating no one: he was a chameleonic frontman, able to change voice and character the way other people change suits, and the DeLeo brothers wrote with a breadth that pure grunge never had.

"Plush" won them a Grammy. And the band they had branded an imitation ended up having something almost none of the "authentic" ones had: range. They could be heavy and they could be beautiful, they could roar and they could caress. Copyists have no range. The greats do.

Scott Weiland

The heart and the wound of this story is Scott Weiland, one of the most magnetic frontmen of his time, and also one of the most tormented. His voice could go from a growl to a caress in a single bar, and his stage presence had something hypnotic about it. But addiction was with him for almost his entire career, in and out of the band, in and out of rehab. He also founded Velvet Revolver, with former members of Guns N' Roses, and had a second life as a star before everything broke again.

He died on 3 December 2015, on his tour bus, in Bloomington, Minnesota, at the age of forty-eight, of an accidental overdose. He went out doing what he had always done: on tour, singing. And there is an extra sadness in this band: the singer who replaced him for a few years, Chester Bennington, of Linkin Park, also died young, shortly afterwards. Stone Temple Pilots buried two of their voices. Few bands carry that.

What to remember

Stone Temple Pilots were greeted as a copy of Pearl Jam and Seattle grunge, and turned out to be the opposite: a chameleonic band that changed style album after album without losing its identity, capable of the rawness of "Core", the open road of "Interstate Love Song" and the psychedelia of "Tiny Music". They won a Grammy with "Plush". And they had, in Scott Weiland, an irreplaceable frontman whom addiction took far too soon.

Remember it this way: they were called fakes, and they turned out to be among the few of their generation with real range. The only fake thing was the accusation.

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This text mentions addiction and a death by overdose. If you or someone you know is struggling with alcohol or drug use, in Chile SENDA's Drugs and Alcohol helpline answers free of charge 24 hours a day on 1412.

Sources

Stone Temple Pilots, American band formed in San Diego, California, made up of Scott Weiland (vocals), Dean DeLeo (guitar), Robert DeLeo (bass) and Eric Kretz (drums). Their debut album, "Core" (1992), included "Plush" and "Sex Type Thing"; "Plush" won the Grammy for best hard rock performance in 1994. The band was initially accused by some critics of emulating Seattle grunge and Eddie Vedder's voice, an assessment revised after the stylistic evolution of "Purple" (1994) and "Tiny Music... Songs from the Vatican Gift Shop" (1996); "Interstate Love Song" is considered one of the standout songs of nineties rock. Scott Weiland, born on 27 October 1967, also founded Velvet Revolver alongside former members of Guns N' Roses; he died on 3 December 2015 in Bloomington, Minnesota, at the age of forty-eight, of an accidental overdose (a mixture of alcohol, cocaine and MDA). Chester Bennington, of Linkin Park, was the vocalist of Stone Temple Pilots between 2013 and 2015 and died in 2017. Guns N' Roses and Chester Bennington have their own profiles in this series. Profile compiled for Rebobinados with fact-checking; interpretations of the meaning of the work are offered as the author's reading. No song lyrics are reproduced, for copyright reasons. Information drawn from Wikipedia, Rolling Stone, CNN, SPIN, NBC News and other coverage.