As Stone Temple Pilots were approaching making their second album, their A&R man Tom Carolan pulled the band aside and offered four simple words of advice: “Fasten your seat belts.” It’s a line that their bassist Robert DeLeo has repeated when working with young artists on the cusp of their own breakthrough. “It’s a ride that sometimes you’re not going to be able to control,” he says.
He should know. By the time they were getting ready to make that second album, Stone Temple Pilots were already aboard the roller-coaster and picking up speed rapidly. Their 1992 debut album Core had made them the latest grunge rockers to break big, but many peers and critics viewed frontman Scott Weiland, drummer Eric Kretz, Robert and his guitarist brother Dean with suspicion. They were the men apart in a grunge clique based predominantly 1,000 miles north in Seattle.
In Weiland they had a showman singer whose voice could morph from a raspy, Eddie Vedderesque growl to smooth, Layne Staley-style crooning, sometimes in the same verse. Their music injected classic-rock riffs with glam stomps here, a breezy Americana twang there, and a punky theatricality over the top. It was almost as if the band realised that rock music didn’t have to just stare at its shoes, it could be entertaining too.
As it happens, they were having so much fun touring that they barely
