When I woke up this morning pretty much the first thing I saw online was the news of Scott Weiland's death, and most of the music I've listened to today has been Stone Temple Pilots. I actually had already started making this playlist ages ago and had it partially finished. And I had returned to it pretty recently because, with Chester Bennington's departure from the band, there were rumblings of Weiland rejoining the band. I really thought I would get to peg this post to some good news, instead of this.  I did get to see the band live once, at a festival in 2008, just after they got back together post-Velvet Revolver. They were awesome, and they played pretty much all the hits and nothing else, which was cool, but a lot of my favorite songs by them aren't the hits.

Stone Temple Pilots Deep Album Cuts (Spotify playlist):

1. Lounge Fly
2. Ride The Cliche
3. Naked Sunday
4. Silvergun Superman
5. Art School Girl
6. Still Remains
7. Adhesive
8. Where The River Goes
9. Glide
10. Army Ants
11. Pop's Love Suicide
12. Too Cool Queenie
13. Sex & Violence
14. Meatplow
15. Seven Caged Tigers
16. I Got You
17. Crackerman
18, Transmissions From A Lonely Room
19. And So I Know

Tracks 3, 8 and 17 from Core (1992)
Tracks 1, 4, 6, 10 and 14 from Purple (1994)
Tracks 2, 5, 7, 11, 15 and 19 from Tiny Music... Songs From The Vatican Gift Shop (1996)
Tracks 9, 13 and 16 from No. 4 (1999)
Tracks 12 and 18 from Shangri-La Dee Da (2001)

Let's talk about a little alternative rock band who scored an angsty hit called "Creep" in 1993 and seemed to have no cred or future, but then they made a quantum leap forward on their second album, and added more Bowie-esque vocals and classic rock sophistication and post modern humor to their third album. I mean, I'm not seriously comparing Stone Temple Pilots to Radiohead, I just think it's funny that they had similar career arcs for a few years.

Their 2010 self-titled album isn't on Spotify, which is a shame, but I kinda wanted to focus on the '90s stuff anyway. When I was a vigilant 11-year-old MTV viewer, Stone Temple Pilots were maybe the first band I got to snobbishly feel like I was above -- I just had a viscerally negative reaction to "Sex Type Thing" and "Plush." But the between-album soundtrack single "Big Empty" won me over big time, and then Purple arrived and suddenly this band had undeniably great songs and awesome-looking videos and album artwork and just seemed suddenly like more than "the grunge band that's not from Seattle."

Core was a gigantic album -- sold 8 million to Nevermind's 10 million, to give you some sense of its impact. And each album that followed sold less than the one before, but they really got better quickly. Purple is chock full of jams -- "Kitchenware & Candybars" is one of my favorites but I didn't even include it because of the cumbersome (though hilarious) hidden track at the end. And Tiny Music... Songs From The Vatican Gift Shop really showed what a strange unique band they were becoming, before they kind of retreated back to something more like their core (no pun intended) sound. And a lot of that progression seemed to come directly from Scott Weiland's voice, lyrics, and sense of humor, while the DeLeo brothers and Eric Kretz just kind of kept the riffs and grooves coming. They may not have done terribly interesting things, together or apart, in the last decade or so, but I always maintained some fondness for the band. When someone like Weiland survives that long as an on-and-off addict, I really root for them to comeback someday all triumphant and clean like Robert Downey Jr. or something, and I'm sad that that didn't happen.

Previous playlists in the Deep Album Cuts series:
Vol. 1: Brandy
Vol. 2: Whitney Houston
Vol. 3: Madonna
Vol. 4: My Chemical Romance
Vol. 5: Brad Paisley
Vol. 6: George Jones
Vol. 7: The Doors
Vol. 8: Jay-Z
Vol. 9: Robin Thicke
Vol. 10: R. Kelly
Vol. 11: Fall Out Boy
Vol. 12: TLC
Vol. 13: Pink
Vol. 14: Queen
Vol. 15: Steely Dan
Vol. 16: Trick Daddy
Vol. 17: Paramore
Vol. 18: Elton John
Vol. 19: Missy Elliott
Vol. 20: Mariah Carey
Vol. 21: The Pretenders
Vol. 22: "Weird Al" Yankovic
Vol. 23: Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers
Vol. 24: Foo Fighters
Vol. 25: Counting Crows
Vol. 26: T.I.
Vol. 27: Jackson Browne
Vol. 28: Usher
Vol. 29: Mary J. Blige
Vol. 30: The Black Crowes
Vol. 31: Ne-Yo
Vol. 32: Blink-182
Vol. 33: One Direction
Vol. 34: Kelly Clarkson
Vol. 35: The B-52's
Vol. 36: Ludacris
Vol. 37: They Might Be Giants
Vol. 38: T-Pain
Vol. 39: Snoop Dogg
Vol. 40: Ciara
Vol. 41: Creedence Clearwater Revival
Vol. 42: Dwight Yoakam
Vol. 43: Demi Lovato
Vol. 44: Prince
Vol. 45: Duran Duran
Vol. 46: Rihanna
Vol. 47: Janet Jackson
Vol. 48: Sara Bareilles
Vol. 49: Motley Crue
Vol. 50: The Who
Vol. 51: Coldplay
Vol. 52: Alicia Keys

This entry was posted on Friday, December 04, 2015 at 7:09 PM. You can skip to the end and leave a response.