Stone Temple Pilots
The San Diego band behind "Plush," "Interstate Love Song" and "Vasoline." Some critics called them grunge imitators, and one Rolling Stone poll named them the critics' worst new band and the readers' best. They became one of the biggest-selling rock bands of the '90s.
Stone Temple Pilots formed in San Diego: singer Scott Weiland, drummer Eric Kretz, and brothers Robert DeLeo on bass and Dean DeLeo on guitar. They started out as Swing, then Mighty Joe Young. While they were recording their first album, their lawyer told them a bluesman already owned the name Mighty Joe Young. They wanted to keep the initials of the STP motor oil stickers they had loved as kids and tried out several phrases before settling on Stone Temple Pilots. Core came out on Atlantic on September 29, 1992, peaked at No. 3, and produced "Sex Type Thing," "Plush," "Creep" and "Wicked Garden." It was eventually certified 8× platinum.
The backlash arrived with the success. Some in the music press dismissed the band as grunge imitators. In a January 1994 Rolling Stone poll, readers voted them Best New Band and the magazine's critics voted them Worst New Band. Two months later "Plush" won the Grammy for Best Hard Rock Performance. Purple, finished in less than a month, debuted at No. 1 on June 7, 1994. Its "Interstate Love Song," which Robert DeLeo first wrote as a bossa nova on a cheap nylon-string guitar, spent 15 weeks at No. 1 on Billboard's album rock chart. Weiland later said the words were about "the lies I was trying to conceal while making the Purple record." By October, Purple had sold three million copies.
For 1996's Tiny Music... Songs from the Vatican Gift Shop, the band turned toward glam and psychedelic rock. Rolling Stone, which had dismissed them early on, called it their best album yet and noted "the clattering, upbeat character of the music" given Weiland's much-publicized run-ins with drugs and the law. The touring fell apart: the band withdrew from its slot opening Kiss's reunion tour, and dates were canceled so Weiland could go to rehab. They came back with No. 4 in 1999 and "Sour Girl," whose video starred Sarah Michelle Gellar, then split in 2003, having sold 17.5 million albums in the U.S. and 40 million worldwide. They later reunited, then fired Weiland in 2013, and he died in December 2015.
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