After a tumultuous 10 years together and five years apart, the members of Stone Temple Pilots (STP) have reunited.
On April 7, the band announced a 65-city North American tour, which kicked off May 17 with a private performance at the famed Houdini House in the Hollywood Hills. The Grammy-winning group performed a tight, 30-minute set, and it felt like the '90s as it rocked through “Plush,” “Vasoline” and “Big Empty.”
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Stone Temple Pilots, with Wolfmother, Black Rebel Motorcycle Club
When: 7 p.m. Sunday
Where: Concerts on the Green (Qualcomm Stadium), 9449 Friars Road, Mission Valley
Tickets: $48.50
Phone: (619) 220-TIXS
Online: ticketmaster.com
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Fans in San Diego can expect to hear these and other favorites when STP performs Sunday at AEG Live Concerts on the Green, adjacent to Qualcomm Stadium in Mission Valley.
The quartet – singer Scott Weiland, 41, guitarist Dean DeLeo, 46, bassist Robert DeLeo, 42, and drummer Eric Kretz, 42 – each took on solo projects during the band's split. Their hiatus found Dean DeLeo living in La Jolla, while Weiland and his family spent a year or two in Coronado. Weiland's post-STP band, Velvet Revolver, was the most successful.
That group, which includes guitarist Slash and several other former members of Guns N' Roses, announced April 1 that Weiland was no longer a member. In a written statement, Slash said of Velvet Revolver: “This band is all about its fans and its music, and Scott Weiland isn't 100 percent committed to either. Among other things, his increasingly erratic onstage behavior and personal problems have forced us to move on.”
This followed an onstage declaration by Weiland, midway through a Velvet Revolver show in Glasgow, Scotland, that the band was coming to an end – a development he had neglected to inform his Velvet Revolver bandmates about before he told the audience.
However, had all gone according to plan, Weiland would have reunited with STP for a summer tour, then returned to Velvet Revolver to record a third album and do more touring.
“There was a mutual understanding, given that Scott's relation with the DeLeo brothers has been intact all this time,” Slash said in a February interview in Night&Day.
“Scott was like: 'It would be fun to do some (STP) shows in the summer,' when it came up that there were offers to do some gigs. It will not impact Velvet Revolver, not unless something more than that (summer reunion) happens.”
Weiland has been arrested several times for drug possession and did a few stints in rehab during his time with Stone Temple Pilots. He pleaded not guilty in March to charges of driving under the influence of drugs stemming from a November car crash. Undaunted by an eight-day jail sentence that would have resulted in the cancellation of some dates on its reunion tour (he eventually served just six hours in June), STP pressed ahead. Weiland (who recently said that he'd attempted to detox about “40 or so” times) and his bandmates had at least several million reasons (as in dollars) to get back together.
“This is basically a business we're running, man. It truly is,” Dean DeLeo told the Detroit News shortly after the tour began.
But it hasn't been all smooth sailing for STP.
On May 31, Weiland and Robert DeLeo were reported to have engaged in a heated shouting match at a concert in New Jersey. And last month saw Atlantic Records, the label for which STP has sold an estimated 35 million albums, file suit against Weiland and Kretz after the two tried to leave Atlantic before their recording contract had concluded.
Not surprisingly, the band's members have been maintaining a silence with the media during their ongoing tour. They were more talkative prior to their May 17 reunion show (their first performance in five years) in Hollywood, where the four musicians sat down to talk about the past and future of Stone Temple Pilots:
Q: Why was now the time to reunite?
Weiland: “Well, I kept on dropping hints in the press constantly. Every time I did an interview and everyone would always ask ”
Dean DeLeo: “And I usually read Scott's press, so I was getting the signals.”
Weiland: “(They'd say), 'Do you ever think you guys will reunite?' And I'd say I can't really see the story being over. I always picture another bookend.”
Q: You felt like a reunion was inevitable?
Weiland: “I did. After everything we'd achieved, as close as we've been, the way that we got together and it's really quite an interesting story. For it to end the way it did was very kind of anticlimactic. I feel like one of our best albums we ever made was our last album (“Shangri-La Dee Da”). The people we're working for and with us did not get where we were coming from and tried to market it as a completely different record and so it never got the chance that it should have gotten. That record feels very special to me, as I know it does to all of us. So I felt like the story's not finished. There's more to be revealed. There's more to be told. And I thought that because as much everyone really does care about each other that one day it'll all kind of come around and we'll talk and we'll air things out and we'll end up wanting to play music together again.”
Q: What sort of things had to happen before you could get back together?
Robert DeLeo: “A lot has happened over the past five years. We've individually accomplished a lot in our lives. I think we're all proud of that. We're proud of each other. And, you know, things happen for a reason. I don't think there's really any coincidence in life. And this was something that felt – I don't know if right's the word – but it felt like we should get together and do this.”
Q: Do you feel the passage of time?
Dean DeLeo: “I think it's about getting on stage with these guys and playing loud rock and roll. It feels like no time has gone by. It still feels the same.”
Weiland: “Except I think we're a bit smarter, a lot more wiser. Because the music business has shrunken so much and has eaten itself, those survivors out there, they're a lot more cutthroat. You definitely have to watch your back and you have to be smart in order to not get taken advantage of. So I think we've all learned from those experiences.”
Q: Are you going to record after this tour? Do you see yourselves putting out another album?
Weiland: “Yeah.”
Dean DeLeo: “That sounds great. Love to.”
Q: What happened with Velvet Revolver?
Weiland: “This happened very organically. It wasn't people trying to angle and beg. It just happened the way it sort of happened. I got a call from Dean. I was on tour. He said, 'Man, are you sitting down?' I said yeah. He said, 'I was talking with our agent, and some offers came through.' We'd all been starting to talk more often. I had talked to Slash, mentioned it to him, and things were cool for a while. And this last tour, things just disintegrated really badly. I just came to the point where I decided that if I'm going to commit the next 10 years of my life to touring then I want to do it with people I want to make music with. People who I get inspired by making music with. I have to start weeding out stuff. It's kind of like going through your closet going, 'Eh, I don't need this anymore. It takes up too much space.' Certain things don't feel good, although it may put money in your bank account, but it doesn't feel good at the end of the day. It became one of those situations.
This feels good. It feels right. It's always inspiring. It's always that high.
Q: What about the drugs?
Dean DeLeo: “You got any? I shot some good dope in the '70s.”
Weiland: “I was never in New York in the '70s. It all began in 1992 for me. I think I have the world record for detoxes though.”
Q: Yeah, how many?
Weiland: “I couldn't count, but I think it's over 40. That's a good song title, though, 'What about the drugs?' ”
