Stone Temple Pilots

About Stone Temple Pilots

Stone Temple Pilots came out of San Diego in 1989, which already made them different from the Seattle bands everyone lumped them in with. Scott Weiland and Robert DeLeo met at a Black Flag show, discovered they were dating the same woman, and somehow turned that into a band instead of a fistfight. Add in Dean DeLeo on guitar and Eric Kretz on drums, and you had a group that critics immediately dismissed as Pearl Jam knockoffs.

Core, their 1992 debut, went quintuple platinum anyway. Plush became impossible to escape on MTV and rock radio, with its slinky riff and Weiland's vocal acrobatics doing things that actually didn't sound much like Eddie Vedder if you listened closely. But the grunge tag stuck, and the backlash was immediate. Rolling Stone famously put them on a worst-of list before they'd even released a second album.

Purple in 1994 was their response to anyone calling them derivative. Interstate Love Song and Vasoline were massive, but the album also had the glam stomp of Big Empty and the Beatles-gone-wrong psychedelia of Silvergun Superman. It turned out these guys had range. The album debuted at number one and sold six million copies, which is a solid way to handle your critics.

Tiny Music from 1996 leaned further into glam and pop experimentation. By then Weiland's heroin use was already derailing tours and recording sessions, a pattern that would define the next two decades. The band made some good records in the early 2000s after reuniting, but the story became less about the music and more about whether Weiland would show up, get arrested, or enter rehab again.

When Weiland finally got fired in 2013, they replaced him with Linkin Park's Chester Bennington, which seemed like it might work until Bennington went back to his main gig. Then they found Jeff Gutt, a relative unknown, who's been fronting the band since 2017. It's the kind of move that could've been desperate but somehow wasn't.

The thing about Stone Temple Pilots is they were better than the grunge-by-numbers narrative ever gave them credit for. The DeLeo brothers were genuinely inventive players, and Weiland, for all his chaos, could slip between genres and vocal styles like he was changing shirts. They wrote actual songs with hooks and dynamics, not just loud-quiet-loud templates.

They're still out there playing, which feels both improbable and appropriate. Gutt sounds good, the songs hold up, and they've outlasted most of their '90s peers through sheer stubborn competence. Not the most romantic legacy, but probably the most honest one for a band that always worked harder than people wanted to admit.

STP shows were volatile. Weiland's command over a crowd was real but unpredictable—he'd either be magnetic or completely absent. The band locked in hard when he was present, and audiences responded with genuine intensity, moshing without aggression. Sets felt like a timeline through their catalog.

Known for Plush, Interstate Love Song, Vasoline, Creep, Scott Weiland

See Stone Temple Pilots Live