Most Influential Albums: Stone Temple Pilots - Core

This was the first CD I ever bought.

I purchased this album the day Jurassic Park was released in theaters - June 11, 1993. My brother Chris, my buddy Dustin Keith, and I were planning to see that Cretaceous blockbuster flick and had time to kill. Earlier in the day, Chris drove Dustin and I to a guy's house to buy some comic books the fella needed to unload for monetary reasons. I still have those comics, including a copy of X-Men #1 autographed by Jim Lee - and am hoping all the other kid's moms threw their comic mags away while they were off at college so mine will actually be worth something significant one day. But I digress...

That summer, for a few months previous, my brother and I had been flipping out over this song that would play on the radio as we drove home from church on Wednesday nights. Windows down (the A/C was busted), radio blaring, American-made Ford steel creaking as we hurled ourselves at breakneck speed down I-44 in Tulsa listening to this song. We strongly suspected it was Pearl Jam, but the chorus had no lyrical hook, so it was anyone's guess to what the title was, and it wouldn't have helped guessing since the word "Plush" is never uttered in the song.

I eventually heard a radio personality (this was the era of the death of the real D.J.'s) announce the name of the group. I think I called a record store and asked if they had the "Stone Tower Captains" album or something along those lines. No dice.

But on that fateful day when we were killing time at Tulsa's Promenade mall before watching dinosaurs killing Samuel Jackson and eating Newman from Seinfeld, I saw the cover of this album in the CD bin at Camelot Music (a terribly overpriced precursor to FYE and those other vile mall music shops). Stone Temple Pilots... THAT'S what they were called. My brother had recently acquired an archaic CD player from a kid at school, so I opted for the CD instead of the usual cassette tape. It was 1993 - this was the freakin' future, man.

The album itself doesn't offer up much in the way of surprises, but what it does, it does REALLY well. It's a heavy, rocking collection of grunge-inspired, heroin-fueled angst. The raw, biting attitude is expected, as are the vague, surreal "what does it mean to you?" lyrics. But the band is locked in within nanoseconds of each other, the production quality and sonic clarity are outstanding (Brendan O'Brien, my fave producer, was at the helm), and Scott Weiland's voice never sounded better. My guess is he hadn't yet cocaine-carved his septum into a Grand Canyon diorama. Also, Dean DeLeo's chord usage is a master-lesson in songwriting.

"Dead and Bloated" kicks off the album. Not just kicks, but drop-kicks with atom bombs strapped to its boots. Groove like that is hard to find. For some reason, most drummers seem to hate Eric Kretz - I have no idea why since he's better than most of the guys in the game. True, he's never flashy, but in the departments of groove and feel, he's over-stocked. Other highlights are the radio staples "Wicked Garden", "Sex Type Thing", the groove-o-saurus "Where The River Goes", and my fave "Crackerman".

Listening to this CD as often as I did got my mind leaning more creatively towards song structures and chord progressions. It also gave a bit of inspiration to my dying my hair fire-engine red (as Scott's was in the video for "Plush") several years later.

Don't own it? Listen and buy it here: