Cerwin Vega have released Part 2 of their interview with late Stone Temple Pilots frontman Scott Weiland, which is now being released posthumously. Alternative Nation has transcribed several quotes. The interview was Weiland’s final one to take place at his now closed Lavish Studios, and was filmed during the final months of his life. In the interview, Weiland discussed his memories of recording Stone Temple Pilots’ Tiny Music…Songs From The Vatican Gift Shop just months before the classic album’s 20th anniversary, which is on March 26th.
On the Swing/Mighty Joe Young days: “My guitar player Corey Hickok and I decided that the rock and roll band we formed wasn’t going to get any further. We called this bass player by the name of Robert DeLeo who we met at shows that we used to play, he would get on stage and play a song with us. So we formed a band with Robert DeLeo and then started auditioning drummers, and then we found Eric Kretz. That was the first version of what Mighty Joe Young would be, and later would have to change the name to STP. In those days, Robert had his own studio in one of the bedrooms in his apartment. We would write songs, and record songs, and play shows up in LA. We got to a point where I took a couple years off of college, my parents gave me their grace. I decided I was going to go for it full on.”
On wanting to be a performance artist: “I watched old certain performers, like old film of David Bowie, Jane’s Addiction, and saw that frontmen like that were artists in the studio, but also performance artists when they played on stage. I wanted to have that kind of dynamic, I wanted to be a performance artist, and I wanted to really own the stage. Being the shoegazer wasn’t my thing, I wanted to be the whirling dervish.”
On Tiny Music…Songs From The Vatican Gift Shop: “I think that one goal that I always had, and lucky enough it worked out with STP, is every album we changed our sound, using different amps, like old vintage small amps instead of Dean’s live rig. We also progressed in the songwriting too. If you listen to Purple compared to Core, there’s a different sound. The real jump was Tiny Music. We approached the songs in a real experimental kind of way.
A lot of the songs were kind of vibey, it had more of a garage kind of sound to it. [For] “Big Bang Baby” we had Eric record the drums outside on the grass on the lawn, to get that just kind of dry sound. It was a huge house, the foyer of the ceilings were about 35 feet high. We set Dean’s amp in the middle of that, and put mics probably about 15 to 20 feet away. We got just a natural reverb that just sounded incredible. We just experimented a lot, and we had a great producer in Brendan O’Brien.”
