In Defense Of: Stone Temple Pilots

I was thinking about it the other day – and, you know what? I think that the Stone Temple Pilots got a bum rap in the 1990s from music writers, myself included. They were treated like Salman Rushdie following the publication of "The Satanic Verses," and it's like a fatwa was issued by the Ayatollahs of the music industry - you know, "bring me the heads of Scott Weiland, Eric Kreutz, and the DeLeo brothers."

In fairness, it was easy to bash the Stone Temple Pilots. In an era where bands were rewarded for years slugging it away in the trenches, Stone Temple Pilots emerged from just about nowhere and seemed to piggyback on the successes of similar-sounding bands like Pearl Jam and Soundgarden. Righteous indignation, in all fairness, seemed like the way to go when protesting the band’s successes; I mean, are you going to root for the band that built its way up from playing in front of 5 people in a dusky club, or are you going to root for the band that seems like a carbon copy of that band without the dues-paying?

As a result, Stone Temple Pilots got massacred for their perceived sins. The uber-credible Pavement (on one of the catchiest songs, “Range Life,” from what is disputably their best album, “Crooked Rain, Crooked Rain”) riffed on them, saying “Stone Temple Pilots, they’re eligible bachelors, they’re foxy to me – are they foxy to you? I don’t understand what they mean, and I could really give a fuck.” The most crushing blow, though, was the Spin magazine review of the band’s second album. (I tried to find it online, but had no success.) From what I can recall – and bear with me, as we’re talking something I read 12 or 13 years ago, the album was reviewed by Rob Sheffield and he slammed the album with a mercilessness that reminded me of the speech uttered by the great comedy writer Jim Downey, playing the Academic Decathlon Judge in the movie “Billy Madison”:

“…what you've just said is one of the most insanely idiotic things I've ever heard. At no point in your rambling, incoherent response was there anything that could even be considered a rational thought. Everyone in this room is now dumber for having listened to it. I award you no points, and may God have mercy on your soul.”

It was pretty merciless.

I piled on, too – when I was in college, I wrote a weekly music column for a paper, and I regularly slammed Scott Weiland’s lyrics (which were terrible, admittedly – I mean, “her name is what it means” – it’s not good. I mean, it’s not Anthony Kiedis bad, but it’s not good). What can I say? They were easy to pick on.

However, time has been kind to the Stone Temple Pilots. By the time they released their third studio album, they seemed to shed their poseur label a bit, releasing themselves of grunge-rock pretension and even showing off a sense of humor (the video for “Big Bang Baby,” the first single from that album, was a hilarious dig at early-80s MTV staples). They never really gained that sense of once-necessary credibility, although Scott Weiland’s string of drug-related arrests over the course of the past two decades served to tragically provide them with an edge that hadn’t been there prior (at least publically). That being said, at least two of their songs have withstood the test of time and have made it to constant rotation on classic rock radio formats (“Plush” and “Interstate Love Song”), and for good reason – they’re crazily catchy songs that are quite good.

I think that the best thing that could have happened for the music of the Stone Temple Pilots was the end of the credibility-obsessed nineties. By the time the decade ended, pre-fabricated, insubstantial acts like Ricky Martin and the Backstreet Boys were dominating pop radio. This marginalized so-called modern rock bands in terms of airplay on top-40 radio and the video music channels. It slowed the flood of mediocre grunge-rock bands to the point where one would be lucky if they heard any guitars at all on these mainstream channels. It also unleashed bands that had even less credibility than Stone Temple Pilots – bands like Nickelback, Puddle of Mudd, and Limp Bizkit rose to prominence. Scott Weiland is a polarizing figure in music, but when placed next to folks like Chad Kroger and Fred Durst, he looks like the picture of credibility, durability, and quality.

Stone Temple Pilots’ music is better suited to a classic-rock format, anyway. When you place a song like “Interstate Love Song” in between bands like Styx and Journey, issues like credibility fade away. It becomes all about the music, really, which is (when you think about it logically) what music should be all about. If loving the songs are wrong, then I don’t want to ever be right. I take back what I said. My fatwa has been rescinded.