But when that stuff would come in the roller-rink when you’re at junior high looking at the girls, that’s rock’n’roll to me, y’know?”
"Big Bang Baby has the beat and glitter of seventies glam-rock stuff like Sweet.
Or with Trippin’ On A Hole In A Paper Heart, that one came because I was a big fan of David Garibaldi’s drumming in Tower Of Power, along with some Steely Dan guitar chords off of Peg or something. “We weren’t afraid of having some camp, like Art School Girl. “We just knew we didn’t want Tiny Music to be similar to Core or Purple,” says Kretz. “I don’t know about my favourite guitar riffs on that album, but I do like the trumpet solo on Adhesive.” With all four members on the writing credits, to revisit Tiny Music is to hear everything from Beatles-esque jangle (Lady Picture Show) to Django Reinhardt gypsy jazz (Daisy). “ Pearl Jam had the same problem at first, being compared as a cheap Nirvana or a fake alternative band,” Weiland said in that same Spin interview, “which is ridiculous in the first place.”īut while STP’s 1992’s debut album Core and its ’94 follow-up Purple had at least partially invited the ‘grunge’ tag, this third album threw sub-genres at the wall. Like most bands clumped under the ‘grunge’ banner, by late ’95 Stone Temple Pilots were sick of their perception. “Y’know, play tennis, drink margaritas, ‘I just had an idea, let’s go jam…’” “Recording and living together in a house just lent itself to a more playful atmosphere,” he says. But Kretz too is at pains to point out that when the days at Westerly Ranch were good, they were some of the band’s happiest times.
It falls to Kretz to give the full picture, to explain the heartbreak and frustration when what he calls the singer’s “demon” took charge. And to hear the guitarist’s rose-tinted account of making Tiny Music, you might imagine these sessions as a blissful summer camp without a cloud in the sky. Before our interview, we are asked by management not to push for the gory details of Weiland’s addictions. DeLeo doesn’t want to talk about the lows. It was this unsettling stop/start pattern that bled into the sessions for Tiny Music. In June, in a Rolling Stone interview, he was repentant: “I’m going to do something about it before it kills me or fucks up everything in my life.” He escaped lightly, with just a year’s probation. Weeks later, in May, he was arrested for possession of cocaine and heroin. In April 1995 the recently married singer told Spin magazine that “drugs fuck things up… I’m trying to make the best out of the time that I do have right now”. At the time of Tiny Music… Songs From The Vatican Gift Shop, Weiland could be either side of the coin, depending on the day.