Their music was a hybrid of hard rock, metal and punk (with a sprinkle of Neil Young here and there), which gave them a wide enough swath of flannel for each band to have its own unique snarl. They pinned their hearts to their sleeves in their lyrics, they created an inclusive environment for women and others marginalized by the poofy-haired rock mainstream of the Eighties, and - taking a cue from punk rock - they did away with the artifice of rock stardom. In less than a decade, Nirvana and a handful of bands from the Seattle area had crawled out of obscurity and commandeered pop culture, rebuilding it in their own image. That’s because, whether the bands liked the term or not, grunge was a movement. It’s going to be passé.”Īt the time, Eddie Vedder was on the cover of Time, fashion designer Marc Jacobs was dressing models in flannel and even The New York Times was questioning, “How did a five-letter word meaning dirt, filth, trash become synonymous with a musical genre, a fashion statement, a pop phenomenon?” Although the word has fallen out of vogue, the music from the time remains vital. “Grunge is as potent a term as new wave,” he told Rolling Stone. The super-deluxe, 25th anniversary edition of Purple is out now.Over 25 years ago, Kurt Cobain predicted that grunge would become corny. “And you know what? Someday I’d still like to record Interstate Love Song as a bossa nova.” “Playing live is a bit like attending a high school reunion – you snap right back into where you were all those years ago,” DeLeo concludes, returning the 125-dollar guitar to its case. Robert DeLeo insists the song still remains valid in the hands of their current lead singer, Jeff Gutt, who joined in 2017 following the death of Weiland’s replacement, Chester Bennington of Linkin Park. Why not? Sometimes when the going gets tough, the only response is to leap into a car, throw down the top and burn rubber.
Stone Temple Pilots continue to tour and record, and perform Interstate Love Song at gigs.
Finally, at the age of 48, following an accidental overdose of cocaine, alcohol and MDA, he was found dead on the tour bus while on the road with his group The Wildabouts in 2015. Over the coming years Weiland would be in and out of both STP and rehab. “We all handled it differently, but safe to say it can be a deadly thing.”Īnd so it proved. “I don’t know too many that could handle that type of attention coming at you at such speed,” he says. However, thanks in part to the success of Interstate Love Song and its sister singles Vasoline and Big Empty, Purple was a massive commercial success, topping the Billboard chart for three weeks and selling more than six million copies.ĭeLeo admits that the band’s seemingly instant celebrity became a problem. Everything except the writing and performing of the songs was simply fluff." “We were working with people of Brendan’s stature, and those were the opinions that mattered to me. “Such criticism was never really a concern to me,” he says patiently. “It was a privilege to make records with him, and we certainly were not trying to copy anybody else.”Ī quarter-century down the line, those written accusations of his band being Pearl Jam rip-offs now prompt the bassist to give a wry smile. In an interview from the time, drummer Eric Kretz said: “We would maybe be worrying that a song sounded a little too close to Alice In Chains or Pearl Jam, and each time Brendan talked us out of that.” “It’s pretty incredible to think that Purple was tracked, mixed and out of the door in just eleven days.” “We trusted Brendan completely and the process felt very natural,” DeLeo recalls. He also liked to leave the listener to make up their own minds as to a song’s interpretation.”Īs with Core, STP retained the services of producer Brendan O’Brien for Purple. “But as a writer, Scott always was very poetic. “The meaning wasn’t completely obvious, but when you know what the song was about it’s a very poetic piece,” DeLeo says now. “The words are about the lies I was trying to conceal while making the Purple record,” he later admitted. Their relationship was on the rocks due to the singer’s hidden yet worsening addiction to heroin, and the words he came up with for it bled out deceit and broken promises.Įach night he would bury his shame and call Castaneda and insist that he was clean. While the band worked at Southern Tracks Recording in Atlanta, his fiancé Janina Castaneda remained at home in California. While recording the song for Purple, vocalist Scott Weiland threw in the Interstate part of the title.
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