In 2001, Stone Temple Pilots released Shangri-La Dee Da, their last album before their initial breakup. Singer Scott Weiland was reportedly sober for its recording, describing the process as a kind of restoration of “innocence” which Weiland associated with the band’s debut album, 1992’s Core. “Everything was fresh and real and organic and we were living it completely,” he told the Toronto Star.
On Shangri-La Dee Da, Weiland sang songs about addiction and manic depression – both of which he struggled with in his life – with an intimacy and sensitivity that were harrowing. The album depicted a loss of control that consumed everything, and the songs themselves seem to deliberately embody the fluctuating rhythms of addiction. Listening to Bi-Polar Bear or Transmissions from a Lonely Room now feels like hovering near a black hole.
Weiland died on Thursday of cardiac arrest. He was on tour, promoting his 2015 album Blaster with his new band, the Wildabouts. It was his first solo effort to function as a traditional kind of glam rock record; his earlier records, 1998’s 12 Bar Blues and 2008’s “Happy” in Galoshes, were more alien and estranged. 12 Bar Blues in particular is a record of profound dislocation and distraction. The songs drift recklessly through ideas and sounds, and often feel as if they’ll collapse into unreadable wreckage.
12 Bar Blues seemed at the time an expansion of the weirdness embedded in the Stone Temple Pilots’ 1996 album Tiny Music … Songs From the Vatican Gift Shop. It’s an odd, cracked looking glass of a rock record. It doesn’t particularly resemble grunge in rhythm or composition. They deliberately absorbed the Beatles and glam rock into the design of their songs. The guitar tone is skeletal – narrow and fluorescent, like bone – and Weiland suddenly sings in a higher, more fragile register.
Weiland’s voice was incidentally multidimensional, elusive, chameleonic; he was capable of a low, guttural moan that often confused listeners into mistaking him for Pearl Jam’s Eddie Vedder. He could also shift abruptly into a kind of bladed falsetto. His delivery – reptilian yet conversational – was heavily informed by David Bowie.
I saw Scott Weiland perform in 2011, two years before he was kicked out of the Stone Temple Pilots; it was a small show at the PC Richard and Son Theater in New York, intended to promote his Christmas album, The Most Wonderful Time of the Year. His face had limited animation, and his voice had somewhat contracted into a raw blur. He spoke almost exclusively in free associations, digressing from the military to Hedwig and the Angry Inch to Pete Townshend in a fractured if enthusiastic rhythm.
I wrote at the time, “He danced in his old way, a sort of boneless shimmying, but it was muted and weary.” He was surrounded by jazz musicians and small constellations of Christmas lights. They gently crept through a strange jazz arrangement of the Stone Temple Pilots song Vasoline.
Weiland’s face was locked into an inelastic grin, but he still seemed so genuinely happy, so grateful to just perform. He conveyed this throughout his career, in the elasticity of his movements, in the dexterity and relentless animation of the songs he wrote. Here are five essential Stone Temple Pilots songs:
Lady Picture Show
Stone Temple Pilots would often redesign their hits and rerelease them as singles; Lady Picture Show is like a first draft of Sour Girl but is the more charming of the two, a gentle, psychedelic storm inherited from the Beatles.
Hollywood Bitch
This song is essentially Big Bang Baby Part 2, but the chorus is more of a captivating swirl.
Trippin’ on a Hole in a Paper Heart
This is a slight evolution of Vasoline; they made it more desperate and asymmetrical. Weiland sings “I’m not dead and I’m not for sale” in the chorus, a lyric he would later repurpose for the title of his 2012 memoir.
Interstate Love Song
An incredible rock song that is also quietly a country song.
Bi-Polar Bear
Weiland wrote this song about his struggles with bipolar disorder; he sings it almost entirely in falsetto. It unfolds suddenly from gentle acoustic strums into a cavernous atmosphere mainly generated from the overdriven drums. It feels like being vacuumed into a manic rhythm.
