The story of Stone Temple Pilots

Two drifters, two brothers and a drummer

The man who would front Stone Temple Pilots was born Scott Richard Kline on the twenty seventh of October 1967 in San Jose, California. His parents split when he was small, and at five he was adopted by his stepfather, David Weiland, and took his name. The family moved to Bainbridge Township in Ohio. There, at the age of twelve, Scott was raped by an older boy from his school bus. He buried the memory for decades, and it only came back to him in therapy during rehab, long after he was famous. He told the story in his 2011 memoir. As a teenager he moved back to California, to Huntington Beach, where he went to Edison High School and fell hard for punk rock.[1] [2] [3] [4]

The other half of the story starts on the other side of the country. Dean and Robert DeLeo were both born in Montclair, New Jersey, and grew up in the Jersey Shore town of Point Pleasant Beach. Dean, the elder, was born in August 1961. Robert followed in February 1966. They had an older half brother who acted for a living, Scott Marlowe. In 1985 Scott Weiland and the friends in his band, guitarist Corey Hickok and drummer David Allin, kept seeing Robert play bass around town. They were so impressed that they went looking for him. Scott and Robert ended up sharing an apartment in San Diego and writing together, in a band they called Swing.[1] [2] [3] [4]

Swing went through a few people before it found its shape. Allin left, and the band spotted a drummer named Eric Kretz, born in 1966, playing a club in Long Beach, and talked him into joining. Then in 1989 Hickok quit. After auditioning a string of guitarists, Robert suggested his older brother. Dean had actually walked away from music by then. He was a successful businessman who only played guitar as a hobby. It took some persuading, but he said yes, and the four piece lineup that would sell tens of millions of records was complete. They renamed themselves Mighty Joe Young, after the old monster movie, and around 1990 cut a demo that even had funk and yodeling on it.[1] [2] [3] [4]

None of them had money. Robert worked at a guitar shop on the corner of Sunset and Gardner in Los Angeles, and Scott worked diagonally across the street, driving models to their photo shoots. Before that he had done paste up work at a legal newspaper. Scott did not really play an instrument, so when an idea hit him he would run over and hum it, and Robert would grab a guitar off the wall and work it out. Eric remembered Scott suddenly singing a new melody at a Mexican restaurant in Beverly Hills, veins bulging, while the rest of them pounded the table in time. That idea became Dead and Bloated, the song that would open their first album.[1] [2] [3]

Mighty Joe Young built a following in San Diego clubs. One early gig had them opening for Henry Rollins at the Whisky a Go Go. Another had them supporting a band called Electric Love Hogs, whose guitarist, Dave Kushner, would one day play beside Scott in Velvet Revolver. In 1992 they signed to Atlantic Records and began recording with the Atlanta producer Brendan O'Brien. The album was already being mastered when their lawyer called with bad news. A blues musician already owned the name Mighty Joe Young. Scott had loved the STP motor oil stickers as a kid, so the band hunted for words to fit those initials. Dean floated Stereo Temple Pirates, and it mutated into Stone Temple Pilots.[1] [2] [3] [4]

Core, and the critics who hated it

Core came out on the twenty ninth of September 1992. The title pointed to the story of Adam and Eve, and the cover showed Eve taking the apple. It was heavy and dark, closer to Alice in Chains than anything the band would make later. Brendan O'Brien, who had just engineered the Black Crowes and mixed the Red Hot Chili Peppers' Blood Sugar Sex Magik, produced it, and Core helped make his name too. The record opens with Scott's voice alone, singing into the pickup of Dean's electric guitar. He had planned to use a megaphone, but the band told him to try the pickup instead, and it gave that first line its strange, boxed in sound.[1] [2] [3]

The first single, Sex Type Thing, went to radio in September 1992, and it started a fight. The song is sung in the voice of a predatory man, and some listeners heard it as a celebration of date rape. Entertainment Weekly compared it to a boxer's rape defense set to grunge. Scott said the opposite was true. He wrote the narrator to be mocked, and he was stunned that anyone took him literally. In 1993 the band invited feminist groups to speak at their concerts and headlined a Rock for Choice benefit in Hollywood. On the British TV show The Word, Scott performed the song in a dress, lipstick and a tiara, and told any sexist, racist or homophobic viewers to switch off.[1] [2] [3]

The song that changed everything was Plush. Robert wrote the music, built from country and ragtime chord exercises, and Scott wrote the words in a hot tub at the Oakwood Apartments. Atlantic wanted it as the first single. The band refused, and even buried it at track nine, because they did not want to be a one hit wonder. It went to radio in February 1993 and on the twenty sixth of June it hit number one on the Billboard album rock chart, the first alternative song ever to top it. Billboard named it the chart's biggest song of 1993. The video, shot in a Seattle country bar, showed Scott with bright red hair. He said if management wanted to make him a clown, he would play the clown.[1] [2]

Fans and critics could not have disagreed more. Reviewers called STP opportunists and Pearl Jam copycats. In January 1994, Rolling Stone's readers voted them Best New Band, while the magazine's own critics voted them Worst New Band in the same issue. The public won. Core reached number three in July 1993 and went on to sell more than eight million copies in America. The band opened arena shows for Megadeth and Rage Against the Machine, but turned down a big support slot with Aerosmith, heroes of theirs, because Scott did not want to seem hypocritical about sexism. They won the MTV award for Best New Artist, and in March 1994 Plush won the Grammy for Best Hard Rock Performance.[1] [2] [3] [4] [5]

Purple, and the first needle

In 1993, on a package tour with the Butthole Surfers and the Flaming Lips, the band hit New York and played a show dressed up as Kiss, the band all four of them had worshipped as kids. According to Scott's memoir, some of the musicians on the tour ordered heroin that day, and he put in an order too. He snorted his first line before going on stage and later described the high as the peace he had always been looking for. It was the beginning of an addiction that would shape the rest of his life and the band's. In November 1993 they also taped MTV Unplugged, where they played a brand new song called Big Empty for the first time.[1] [2] [3]

Big Empty had been recorded in May 1993 for the soundtrack of The Crow. Their first choice for the film, a Core era song called Piece of Pie, was pulled after the death of the film's star, Brandon Lee. In March 1994 the band flew to Atlanta to make their second album with O'Brien at Southern Tracks. Blender magazine later reported that Scott's first priority there was finding a dealer. The music was recorded, mixed and mastered in about three and a half weeks. The others tracked by day, playing wiffle ball in the parking lot between takes, while Scott sang his parts at night and finished all his vocals in a single week. He admitted the old camaraderie was gone.[1] [2] [3]

Purple came out on the seventh of June 1994 and went straight to number one in America, selling about two hundred and fifty thousand copies in its first week. Robert had written Interstate Love Song as a bossa nova tune on a cheap nylon string guitar in an Atlanta hotel room. Scott nailed his vocal in one take, and the words were about lying to his girlfriend Janina about his drug use. The song held the top of the album rock chart for fifteen weeks, a record at the time. Vasoline, with Robert's bass run through a wah pedal, had topped the chart just before it, giving the band seventeen straight weeks at number one. Scott married Janina Castaneda in September 1994.[1] [2] [3] [4]

Purple was strange to look at. The only title on the cover was the Chinese character for purple, over a painting of a child riding a mythical beast. The illustrator said he had been hired to copy an old Chinese opium label owned by one of the band. The back cover showed a cake iced with the words Twelve Gracious Melodies, a hint at a hidden twelfth track. Critics were still unkind, and Robert Christgau called it a dud, but the record sold three million copies within four months and later passed six million. Right after the sessions, Scott checked into treatment for what was officially called psychological fatigue. He later admitted it was his first try at detox.[1] [2]

Talk Show, Tiny Music and a lost year

By early 1995 things were falling apart. The band threw out two weeks of new recordings because Scott was in no state to work. On the fifteenth of May 1995 he was arrested for possession of heroin and cocaine. Once out on bond, he holed up at the Chateau Marmont hotel in Los Angeles, where Courtney Love had the room next door, and the two used drugs together. He was later convicted of buying crack cocaine and put on probation. He started a side band, the Magnificent Bastards, and cut a song for the Tank Girl soundtrack. Meanwhile the DeLeos and Eric Kretz, convinced the band had hit bottom, started a new group with singer Dave Coutts. They called it Talk Show.[1] [2] [3] [4]

Stone Temple Pilots never officially split, and in October 1995 they tried again. They rented Westerly Ranch, a huge house in Santa Ynez, near Santa Barbara, and moved in with O'Brien, a crew and a cook. Part of the plan was to keep Scott focused and away from his suppliers. The DeLeos went through about thirty songs they had written in his absence and marked each one for either Scott or Dave Coutts. The house became the studio. Eric recorded the drums for Big Bang Baby on the front lawn and the drums for Lady Picture Show in a cedar closet in the attic. Robert admitted that some mornings they would check Scott's bedroom to make sure he was still alive.[1]

Tiny Music, Songs from the Vatican Gift Shop arrived in March 1996, debuting at number four. It was a sharp turn toward glam rock, sixties pop and psychedelia, with bossa nova on And So I Know, a trumpet on Adhesive and Scott singing in a higher, raspier voice. All three singles, Big Bang Baby, Trippin' on a Hole in a Paper Heart and Lady Picture Show, reached number one on the rock chart. Scott later wrote that Lady Picture Show was about a dancer who survived a gang rape and struggled to trust love afterwards. Pitchfork gave the album a brutal zero point eight out of ten, but Rolling Stone called it their best yet, and years later Billy Corgan said it was the record that won him over.[1] [2] [3]

The tour never really happened. The band pulled out of a support slot on the Kiss reunion tour, though they did get Steven Tyler and Joe Perry on stage at Madison Square Garden. In December 1996 the remaining dates were cancelled when Scott relapsed and went back to rehab, reportedly his fourteenth stint in three years. The band went on hiatus. Talk Show put out one album in 1997, which stalled at number one hundred and thirty one. Scott released his first solo album, 12 Bar Blues, in 1998, an adventurous record with guests including Sheryl Crow and Daniel Lanois. That June he was arrested in Manhattan's East Village carrying heroin, hours before a solo show at Irving Plaza, and the rest of the tour was cancelled.[1] [2] [3] [4]

No. 4, jail, and the end of the first run

In late 1998 the four of them regrouped for a back to basics rock record. No. 4 came out on the twenty sixth of October 1999, harder and heavier than anything since Core. Promotion was crippled because Scott had just been handed a one year jail sentence, and he spent about five months behind bars for drug possession. Even so, the album went platinum and the single Down earned a Grammy nomination. There was one odd hiccup. The cover, a white star on a black field under the band's name, looked almost identical to a 1998 EP by a small Washington band called Power Lloyd, who sent a cease and desist letter after someone at MTV noticed.[1] [2] [3]

The biggest hit from No. 4 was Sour Girl, written by Scott and Dean. Its video starred Sarah Michelle Gellar, then at the height of Buffy the Vampire Slayer fame and a genuine fan of the band. Sour Girl reached number seventy eight on the Billboard Hot 100, and as of 2026 it is still the band's only entry on that chart. Scott's personal life was changing fast. He and Janina divorced in 2000, and on the twentieth of May that year he married the model Mary Forsberg. Their son Noah was born in 2000 and their daughter Lucy in 2002. In 2001 Scott revealed that he had been diagnosed with bipolar disorder.[1] [2]

For their fifth album the band rented a villa in Malibu early in 2001 and lived there with O'Brien, their partners and a film crew. They recorded around thirty songs and planned a double album dedicated to the memory of the singer Andrew Wood, but Atlantic and O'Brien pushed for a single disc. A documentary modeled on the Beatles film Let It Be was shot and never released. Eric called it the happiest five weeks of his life. Shangri-La Dee Da came out on the nineteenth of June 2001. The single Days of the Week was about how heroin had damaged Scott's marriage, and Bi-Polar Bear described his illness. The album peaked at number nine, their first not to go platinum.[1] [2]

That autumn STP headlined the Family Values Tour alongside Linkin Park, whose young singer Chester Bennington had grown up idolizing them. A new song, All in the Suit That You Wear, was meant to lead the Spider-Man soundtrack, but Chad Kroeger's Hero got the spot. Then, after the last show of their autumn 2002 tour, there was a backstage altercation between Dean and Scott. Dean later said that by the end they wanted to kill one another. Atlantic released a greatest hits set, Thank You, in November 2003, and days later the DeLeos told Guitar One magazine the band was finished. Robert said they had nearly failed to finish Purple and should never have started the third record.[1] [2] [3] [4] [5]

Revolver, Army and a beach party

Scott did not stay idle. Former Guns N' Roses members Slash, Duff McKagan and Matt Sorum, with guitarist Dave Kushner, were hunting for a singer. Scott knew Duff from the gym and had been in rehab at the same time as Sorum. The first batch of demos they sent him sounded, he said, like Bad Company gone wrong, but a second batch reminded him of Core. The new band became Velvet Revolver, a name built from Slash's idea and Scott's twist on it. Scott was arrested for drugs in his studio parking lot during the sessions, and a court order kept him in a halfway house, so he could only work three hours a day. Even so, Contraband debuted at number one in June 2004.[1] [2]

Velvet Revolver's Slither won the Grammy for Best Hard Rock Performance in 2005, the same award Scott had won with Plush eleven years earlier. In his memoir he was blunt about it, saying he joined largely for the money and could not call it the music of his soul. Early in 2007 his younger brother Michael died of cardiomyopathy, and Scott wrote about him on the second album, Libertad. In November 2007 he crashed his car on a Los Angeles freeway and was charged with driving under the influence. On the UK tour in March 2008 the band barely spoke to him, and in Glasgow he told the crowd it was their last tour. On the first of April 2008 he was out.[1] [2] [3] [4]

The DeLeo brothers had been busy too. Filter singer Richard Patrick asked them to help write for his next album, and the collaboration turned into a new band, Army of Anyone, with drummer Ray Luzier. Their only album, produced by Bob Ezrin, came out in November 2006, and the single Goodbye made the rock top three, but sales were modest and the band went on hiatus in 2007. Luzier went on to join Korn. Eric Kretz kept a lower profile, running his own Bomb Shelter Studios and drumming with a band called Spiralarms. For a few years, a reunion looked impossible.[1] [2] [3]

According to Dean, the thaw began with a phone call from Scott's wife, Mary Forsberg. She invited the DeLeo brothers to a private beach party, and the old friends started talking again. A concert promoter's offer to headline summer festivals did the rest. Weeks after leaving Velvet Revolver, Scott was back with Stone Temple Pilots, and they played a private warm up at the Houdini Mansion before launching a long reunion tour in May 2008. Big Empty opened almost every night. There was one scare. In June, Atlantic sued Scott and Eric, claiming they had threatened to walk away from the band's contract. The label soon dropped the case, and the band's lawyer called it a misunderstanding.[1] [2] [3] [4]

The reunion produced a sixth album, simply called Stone Temple Pilots, released on the twenty fifth of May 2010. Against Atlantic's wishes, Robert insisted that he and Dean produce it, their first album without O'Brien. It was made in pieces, with the others in Robert's basement studio and Eric's studio and Scott singing separately at his own place, and Don Was stepping in to glue it together. Robert later said he never wanted to make a record that way again. Still, the single Between the Lines made the biggest jump in the history of Billboard's rock songs chart, from forty to two, before hitting number one. The album reached number two, held off only by a Glee soundtrack.[1] [2]

The firing, Chester, and a tour bus in Minnesota

The peace did not last. A tour marking twenty years of Core was supposed to celebrate the band in 2012, but in Abbotsford, British Columbia, they came on nearly two hours late and cut the set short, and the next night was cancelled for vocal rest. In December, Slash told a Minneapolis radio station he had heard Scott had been fired from STP. On the twenty sixth of February 2013, Scott told Rolling Stone he had neither quit nor been fired. The next day the band posted a one line statement saying he had been terminated. Scott replied that he had learned about it from the press, and wondered aloud how anyone could be fired from a band he had founded.[1] [2] [3] [4]

Lawsuits followed. The DeLeos and Kretz sued to stop Scott presenting himself as a member, and he countersued to dissolve the band. Both cases were settled out of court, and the three kept the name. They had already found a new voice. On the eighteenth of May 2013, at the KROQ Weenie Roast in California, Chester Bennington of Linkin Park walked on stage with them. Chester had named STP as one of his first musical loves and had called joining them a lifelong dream. The next day they released Out of Time as a free download, and it went to number one on the rock chart. A five song EP, High Rise, followed in October 2013.[1] [2] [3] [4]

Scott's last years were hard. He toured the first two STP albums with his own band, the Wildabouts. In March 2015, the day before their album Blaster came out, his guitarist and close friend Jeremy Brown was found dead at thirty four, from accidental multiple drug intoxication. In April a video of Scott slurring his way through Vasoline went viral. His wife Jamie said his antipsychotic medication had been set too high. Then both his parents were diagnosed with cancer, and a court had given Mary Forsberg full custody of their children. On the ninth of November 2015, Chester announced he was leaving STP on good terms to focus on Linkin Park.[1] [2] [3] [4]

On the third of December 2015, Scott Weiland was found dead in the bedroom of his tour bus in Bloomington, Minnesota. He was forty eight. Police found a small amount of cocaine, and the Wildabouts' bassist was arrested, though those charges were later dropped. Two weeks later the medical examiner ruled it an accidental overdose of cocaine, alcohol and the drug MDA, and also noted heart disease and asthma. His old bandmates said he had been gifted beyond words, and that his gift and his curse were bound together. Mary Forsberg wrote a raw essay with their children, asking fans not to glorify his death. He was buried at Hollywood Forever Cemetery on the tenth of December.[1] [2] [3] [4] [5] [6]

Heartbreak, and a singer from Michigan

In February 2016 the three remaining members did something unusual. They opened an online audition to anyone in the world. In a short video Robert looked into the camera and said Stone Temple Pilots wanted you, while their statement stressed that no one would ever replace Scott. In the end around fifteen thousand people applied. Then, in July 2017, came a second blow. On the twentieth of July, Chester Bennington died by suicide at his home in Palos Verdes Estates, California, at the age of forty one. It was two months after the suicide of his close friend Chris Cornell, at whose funeral Chester had sung. In less than two years, both singers who had fronted Stone Temple Pilots were gone.[1] [2] [3] [4]

The singer they chose was Jeff Gutt, born in 1976 and raised in southeast Michigan. He had fronted the band Dry Cell and was known to television viewers from The X Factor. In 2012 his version of Hallelujah won over all four judges, yet he was cut at boot camp, a decision Simon Cowell later said he regretted. He came back in 2013 and finished second. At his STP audition in September 2016, the band played him an instrumental and he made up a melody on the spot. That song became Meadow. He was picked from around fifteen thousand hopefuls and made his debut on the fourteenth of November 2017, at a free show at the Troubadour in West Hollywood.[1] [2] [3]

A second self titled album followed on the sixteenth of March 2018, with Scott and Chester both remembered in the liner notes. Meadow reached number six on the rock chart, and that summer STP shared a rotating headline tour with Bush and the Cult. Then the band surprised everyone. Perdida, released on the seventh of February 2020, was a mostly acoustic record made on vintage instruments, with strings, a flute solo and even an old instrument called a Marxophone. The title is Spanish for loss. Jeff said only one song, I Didn't Know the Time, touched on Chester, whom he had known since 2000. Robert even sang lead on one track.[1] [2] [3] [4] [5] [6]

Stone Temple Pilots kept touring into the 2020s. In 2024 they shared the top of the bill on a summer tour of America with the band Live, and from mid August to mid September they celebrated thirty years of Purple by playing the whole album every night. The members have kept busy outside the band too. Robert released a solo album, Lessons Learned, in 2022, and has played bass for the Hollywood Vampires and the Japanese band B'z. Dean formed a project called Trip the Witch with the guitarist Tom Bukovac, with Jon Anderson singing on its first single. As of 2026 the lineup is the DeLeo brothers, Eric Kretz and Jeff Gutt.[1] [2] [3] [4] [5]

The critical verdict has turned around completely. The band once voted worst new band now shows up on lists of the greatest grunge albums, with Core and Purple both ranked by Rolling Stone. In the 1990s alone they sold about forty million records worldwide, with sixteen top ten rock hits, eight of them number ones. After Scott died, Billy Corgan wrote that the great voices of their generation were Scott, Layne Staley and Kurt Cobain. Guns N' Roses have covered Velvet Revolver's Slither in his honor since 2018. And Scott's son Noah formed a band in 2020 with Slash's son London on drums, a band that fell apart the following year after Noah was fired for drug use.[1] [2] [3] [4] [5]

The people around Stone Temple Pilots

Scott Weiland and Robert DeLeo. They met in 1985, shared an apartment in San Diego and wrote the band's first songs together, with Scott humming ideas and Robert turning them into riffs on shop guitars. Robert wrote the music for Plush, Interstate Love Song and Between the Lines, and Scott gave them words. Robert also watched Scott's addiction up close, recalling checking whether he was still alive at the Tiny Music house.[1] [2] [3] [4]

Scott Weiland and Dean DeLeo. Dean said there was nobody better to make music with, but their clashes defined the band's darkest moments. A backstage altercation between them after the last show of 2002 helped end the first run, and Dean admitted they wanted to kill one another. Years later he watched Scott spiral with real grief, calling it awful to see someone of that talent sink so far.[1] [2] [3]

Dean DeLeo and Robert DeLeo. The brothers from Point Pleasant Beach have played together in every version of the band, plus Talk Show, Army of Anyone and the production chair on the 2010 album. Robert pulled Dean back into music when he had quit to run a business. Robert usually writes on bass, and Dean once said telling a story on a bass was remarkable.[1] [2] [3] [4]

Stone Temple Pilots and Brendan O'Brien. The Atlanta producer made all five of the band's first albums, from Core to Shangri-La Dee Da, and played piano, percussion and more on them. Core helped launch his career alongside the Chili Peppers' Blood Sugar Sex Magik. He pushed them to record fast and live, and after they split Scott brought him in to produce Velvet Revolver's Libertad.[1] [2] [3] [4]

Scott Weiland and Janina Castaneda. Scott married Janina in September 1994 and they divorced in 2000. He said Interstate Love Song came from the lies he told her about his heroin use, that Vasoline was partly about lying to her and the band, and that Sour Girl was written about the end of their marriage, not about his second wife.[1] [2] [3] [4]

Scott Weiland and Mary Forsberg. The model married Scott in May 2000, and they had Noah and Lucy before divorcing in 2007. She helped spark the 2008 STP reunion by inviting the DeLeos to a beach party. After his death she wrote a raw essay with their children, saying they had lost their father years earlier and asking fans not to glorify it.[1] [2] [3]

Scott Weiland and Jamie Wachtel. Scott met the photographer while filming a Christmas video in 2011, and they married at their Los Angeles home in June 2013. She toured with him in his last months, described his bipolar episodes and medication struggles to Billboard, and in 2024 publicly disputed the ruling that he died of an overdose.[1] [2]

Scott Weiland and Slash. They fronted and led Velvet Revolver together from 2003, winning a Grammy for Slither, but it ended badly with Scott fired in 2008. Slash later told radio that Scott had been fired from STP before it was announced. They reunited for one benefit show in 2012, and after Scott died Slash's Guns N' Roses began covering Slither.[1] [2] [3]

Chester Bennington and Stone Temple Pilots. Chester grew up naming STP among his first inspirations and toured with them on the Family Values Tour in 2001. He became their singer in 2013, recorded the High Rise EP, and left on good terms in November 2015. He died in July 2017, and the band remembered him in the notes of their next album.[1] [2] [3] [4]

Jeff Gutt and Stone Temple Pilots. The Michigan singer and X Factor runner up auditioned in 2016 and won the job by improvising the melody for Meadow. He has sung on the 2018 album and Perdida, writing most of Perdida's lyrics. He had known Chester Bennington since 2000 but never met Scott Weiland.[1] [2] [3]

Scott Weiland and Courtney Love. In 1995, after his first arrest, Scott holed up at the Chateau Marmont, where Courtney Love was staying in the next room. He wrote that they used drugs together and grew close for a while, though they were never lovers. Shangri-La Dee Da's Too Cool Queenie is widely thought to be about her.[1] [2] [3]

Rare facts about Stone Temple Pilots

• Stone Temple Pilots deliberately buried Plush at track nine on Core so they would not become a one hit wonder. Atlantic wanted Plush as the first single. The band chose Sex Type Thing instead and hid Plush deep on the album, wanting a career rather than a single big moment.[1]
• Plush was written in a hot tub at the Oakwood Apartments. Scott Weiland wrote the words while sitting in a hot tub at the apartment complex. The BBC noted the band were so close they wrote their breakthrough hit while sharing one.[1] [2]
• Plush was the first alternative song ever to reach number one on Billboard's album rock chart. It topped the chart on the twenty sixth of June 1993 and was named the chart's biggest song of the year. It was not sold as a single in America, so it could not enter the Hot 100.[1]
• Interstate Love Song began life as a bossa nova tune on a cheap nylon string guitar. Robert DeLeo wrote it in a hotel room while touring Core. Scott turned the intro melody into the chorus and sang the final vocal in a single take.[1]
• Interstate Love Song spent fifteen weeks at number one on the album rock chart, a record at the time. It replaced Vasoline at the top, giving the band seventeen straight weeks at number one.[1]
• Sour Girl is the only Stone Temple Pilots song ever to enter the Billboard Hot 100. It peaked at number seventy eight in 2000. Its video starred Sarah Michelle Gellar and was directed by David Slade, who later directed a Twilight film.[1]
• In 1993 Stone Temple Pilots turned down a high profile support slot on an Aerosmith tour. Scott said he was a huge Aerosmith fan but worried touring with a band built on sex rock would look hypocritical after Sex Type Thing.[1]
• In one 1994 Rolling Stone poll, the band was voted both Best New Band and Worst New Band. The readers picked them as best new band, while the magazine's critics picked them as the worst, in the same issue.[1] [2]
• The band's very first show as Mighty Joe Young was opening for Henry Rollins at the Whisky a Go Go. They also opened for Electric Love Hogs, whose guitarist Dave Kushner later joined Scott in Velvet Revolver.[1] [2]
• Scott Weiland did not play an instrument when STP started, so he hummed riffs for Robert DeLeo to work out. Dead and Bloated began that way. Robert worked at a guitar shop on Sunset Boulevard and Scott drove models to photo shoots across the street.[1] [2]
• The first line of Core was sung into the pickup of Dean DeLeo's guitar. Scott had planned to use a megaphone for the opening of Dead and Bloated, but the band suggested the guitar pickup and kept the eerie result.[1]
• Before Plush broke big, Dean DeLeo had quit music to become a successful businessman. He only played guitar as a hobby when his brother Robert talked him into joining the band in 1989.[1]
• Big Empty was debuted on MTV Unplugged seven months before Purple came out. There was never an official video, so MTV put the Unplugged performance into heavy rotation to promote The Crow soundtrack. The song won an MTV Movie Award in 1995.[1]
• Purple's only title on the cover is a Chinese character, and the back shows a cake promising Twelve Gracious Melodies. The cake was a clue that the album held a hidden twelfth track beyond the eleven listed songs.[1]
• Purple's Lounge Fly was recorded at Paisley Park Studios in Minnesota. It was cut there, in Chanhassen, in July 1993 with Brendan O'Brien, and Butthole Surfers guitarist Paul Leary played the ending guitar solo.[1]
• Scott said the key idea in Vasoline came from mishearing an Eagles song as a child. When his parents played Life in the Fast Lane, he thought the words were about flies in Vaseline, and the image stuck.[1]
• On Tiny Music, the drums for Big Bang Baby were recorded on a front lawn. The band made the album in a mansion in Santa Ynez, using the attic cedar closet for Lady Picture Show drums and the tiled foyer for reverb.[1]
• Tumble in the Rough is the only Stone Temple Pilots song credited solely to Scott Weiland for music and words. It appears on Tiny Music, Songs from the Vatican Gift Shop, the album where the band swerved into glam and sixties pop.[1]
• Pitchfork gave Tiny Music a score of zero point eight out of ten. Critic Ryan Schreiber attacked its riffs and lyrics, while Rolling Stone called it the band's best album yet.[1]
• A Stone Temple Pilots song was meant to lead the Spider-Man soundtrack but lost out to Chad Kroeger. All in the Suit That You Wear was recorded for the 2002 film, but Hero got the lead spot. It became their final single before the split.[1] [2]
• Shangri-La Dee Da was first planned as a double album, and a Let It Be style documentary about it was never released. The band recorded about thirty songs in a Malibu villa while photographer Chapman Baehler filmed. Atlantic and O'Brien pushed for a single disc.[1]
• The No. 4 album cover drew a cease and desist letter from a little known Washington band. Power Lloyd said the white star on black under the band name copied their 1998 EP. Someone at MTV spotted the resemblance.[1]
• Scott Weiland won the Grammy for Best Hard Rock Performance with two different bands. He won it with Stone Temple Pilots for Plush in 1994 and with Velvet Revolver for Slither in 2005.[1] [2]
• While recording Velvet Revolver's first album, Scott could only work three hours a day because of a court order. After a drug arrest in his studio parking lot, he was required to stay in a halfway house during the sessions.[1]
• In 2000 Scott Weiland sang with the surviving members of the Doors on VH1 Storytellers. He sang Break On Through and Five to One, and Jim Morrison was one of his biggest vocal influences.[1] [2]
• Between the Lines made the biggest jump ever on Billboard's rock songs chart, from forty to two. It went on to top that chart for seven weeks and earned a Grammy nomination in 2011.[1]
• The band's 2010 comeback album was kept from number one by a Glee soundtrack. It sold about sixty two thousand copies in its first week but finished behind Glee, The Music, Volume Three.[1]
• The cover of STP's 2010 album uses artwork by Shepard Fairey. The piece is called Peace Fingers Red. Eric Kretz said it reflected the band's wish to spread peace and love.[1]
• Out of Time, the first Stone Temple Pilots single with Chester Bennington, was a WWE event theme song. It was the official theme for the Hell in a Cell pay per view and became the band's seventh number one on the mainstream rock chart.[1] [2]
• Jeff Gutt was chosen from about fifteen thousand applicants in an open online audition. The band played him the music for Meadow at his audition, and he improvised the vocal melody on the spot.[1] [2]
• Before joining STP, Jeff Gutt finished second on The X Factor USA in 2013. A year earlier he was cut at boot camp despite a standing ovation for Hallelujah, which Simon Cowell later called a regret.[1]
• Perdida, the band's 2020 album, takes its name from the Spanish word for loss. Jeff Gutt wrote most of the lyrics, and Eric Kretz promised a wicked flute solo before its release.[1] [2]
• Scott Weiland's first solo album cover was a tribute to John Coltrane's Blue Train. 12 Bar Blues came out in 1998, and a remaster of its song Where's the Man later appeared in the film Beetlejuice Beetlejuice.[1]
• Scott Weiland's son Noah formed a band with the sons of Slash and Metallica's Robert Trujillo. Suspect208 debuted in 2020 and was compared to Purple era STP, but broke up in 2021 after Noah was fired.[1]
• In 1998 Scott was arrested in Manhattan's East Village with heroin, hours before a solo show. Police said he had ten small bags worth about ten dollars each. The rest of his first solo tour was cancelled.[1]
• In 1993 the band played a New York show in full Kiss makeup. All four had been Kiss fans as kids and played Roseland Ballroom made up as their heroes. In 1996 they pulled out of a support slot on the Kiss reunion tour.[1] [2]

Disputed stories

These stories are told often but the accounts don't agree. Here are the versions and who says what.