Stone Temple Pilots: News, History & Updates
Biography By SCOTT WEILAND
Exclusively for Alternative Nation (In 2015):
Robert DeLeo used to come and watch my first band Soi-Disant play at a place called Kiss the Club. When we were teenagers, we’d play there three times a week, and he would come and watch us play, and he would come up and play on a song or two.
When I decided with my best friend and guitar player, Corey Hickok, that we needed to make a change with the band, we got a hold of Robert and started writing songs with him. It was more Red Hot Chili Peppers oriented, like early Chili Peppers oriented. A punk funk kind of vibe.
[When Robert’s brother] Dean came in as our new guitarist, it started with “Where The River Goes”. Dean came in at our first rehearsal, and brought that song in. At first it was clean guitar, then we made it distorted guitar, and it went from a Cure sounding riff into a Led Zeppelin sounding riff.
[We released Core in 1992, and] in the early days, the [Grunge comparisons] didn’t matter to me so much, because I felt it was the first real movement in rock and roll since punk rock. It tapped into sociopolitical connotations, and pop culture. It just had a vibe. It influenced fashion, I mean it was a huge, huge movement. But after that, I wanted us to be a band that changed, and we were, we changed from Core to Purple, then Tiny Music especially, we made a garage sounding album.
Stone Temple Pilots and Velvet Revolver sold 6, 7, 8 million records at a time, and that just doesn’t happen in rock and roll any more. Taylor Swift might sell, might smell, a million records.
