Stone Temple Pilots on critical breakthrough ‘Tiny Music’: ‘People in this world catching on to what we did — that’s pretty amazing’

“I think when we went in to do Core, he really was getting in touch with that internal strife, which is a Catch-22, because it ultimately leads a singer to a key that unlocks a door to many different things that make people go, ‘Wow, that’s deep!’ — but ultimately, it leads to someone’s demise,” says Robert. “It goes back to people like Jim Morrison, you know? I’ve talked with [the Doors’] Robby [Krieger] and John [Densmore] about things like that, and it’s sad to see that someone ultimately goes to that place, somewhat not in control of the door they opened.”

Aside from the early negative reception from music journalists, Stone Temple Pilots had already experienced great highs in their career before Tiny Music, selling 8 million copies of Core alone. But that career was plagued by tragedy. Robert recalls Weiland’s much-publicized drug problems really starting up during a 1993 tour with the Butthole Surfers, and says now, as they prepared to do their third album, “I think resentment was growing since Purple,” the group’s sophomore LP. “There were some things there that Scott was, um, sampling and testing out. There was a conversation there, almost at the end of Purple, where we had a little conversation and went up into the room with [producer] Brendan [O’Brien] and said, ‘What are we going to do here?’ … Yeah, there was some things that came into that record that was the start of things that ultimately continued.” By the time STP finally began working on Tiny Music… Songs From the Vatican Gift Shop, “Things were getting bad,” says Eric.

Still, Kretz and the DeLeos have many fond memories of the Tiny Music era. It was certainly STP’s grandest and most ecco shoes ambitious album in many ways, which reflected the setting in which it was recorded. “We really thought we’d get ‘back to basics’ and really get back into our blues background, so we rented a 60,000-square-foot house [Westerly Ranch] on a hundred acres on the Santa Ynez Valley,” Dean quips sarcastically, remembering laying down tracks in a foyer that was “almost as big as a high school gymnasium.”

“It was all about cred, man, all about cred!” Robert laughs. “But it was something we always wanted to do. We always looked back at records like [Elton John’s] Goodbye Yellow Brick Road that were made in a house, all these people that made records in houses.” Kretz chuckles as he looks back on his decision to record his drum parts for “Big Bang Baby” on the Westerly estate’s front lawn (the sprinklers were pre-set to go off in an hour and the band members didn’t know how to turn them off, so that take had to be quick) and for “Lady Picture Show” in the attic’s cedar-lined closet (“good in theory — until I got up there and started sweating at 110 degrees”).

The guys also crack up remembering making their genius, deliberately low-budget “Big Bang Baby” video, which was inspired by early-MTV ‘80s clips like Toni Basil’s “Mickey” and David Bowie’s “DJ” and was an act of rebellion against the 1990s’ “million-dollar” videos packed with the usual “yachts and helicopter shots.” Instead, they had “this guy with a gorilla mask on hitting somebody over the head with a bottle,” recalls Robert. Dean laughs, “I forgot that was in there! I just saw that video recently and I was like, ‘Oh my gosh!’ It was just so fun.”

And the STP guys also chuckle remembering the one Tiny Music cut that was a solo Weiland composition, “Tumble in the Rough,” because the process was so frustrating yet amusing. “Yeah, [Scott] didn’t really know how to play an instrument, but he would definitely get it across vocally. He did pick up a guitar for ‘Tumble in the Rough’ and he drove us crazy with that, because every time we were around him, he played two chords and he’d go, ‘Duh duh duh duh duh! Man, I got this idea! Nuh nuh nuh nuh nuh nuh!’ And he would do that over and over. So, we just musically made a song out of that. But that’s what he had.

“But you gotta look at that energy that he had doing that; there was a raw, like, ‘I’m just learning to play guitar!’ kind of energy,” Robert continues. “And there’s so many aspects that Scott didn’t know about musically, which made that interesting. You know, if he was a guy who knew as much as we did musically, it would have been a different band. But he came from a different place, and to be able to sit there and play two bar chords and go, ‘Check this out…’”

“…with sheer conviction,” marvels Dean wistfully, adding: “To be affiliated with somebody of that musical magnitude and to be so fulfilled by it, and to watch this person just go into this deep hole of demise was just f***ing awful. It was just awful, man.”