Stone Temple Pilots

Mon 14th Mar, 2011 in Features

Playing The Girl from Ipanema at an arena show in Brazil is kinda like busting out Tie Me Kangaroo Down, Sport or Waltzing Matilda to a packed crowd at the MCG. It can either conjure up those latent pangs of patriotism, or go horribly pear-shaped.

Thankfully, for Stone Temple Pilots’ bassist Robert DeLeo, his finger-picked performance of the Antonio Carlos Jobim standard – in a panama hat, sunglasses and on a nylon-string guitar, no less – sparked a mass sing-a-long at Rio’s 2500-capacity Circo Voador outdoor stadium. “I didn’t think they’d know it because the audience were really young, but they all ended up singing along in Portuguese,” he says down the phone from Lima, Peru, where the band are winding up a South American tour. “It was really beautiful, man.”

If singer Scott Weiland is the band’s unpredictable muse – an unwieldy character with a history of addictions and incarcerations rivaling any of rock’s great frontmen – DeLeo is their chillaxed, renaissance man; their spiritual centre. True to his adopted home of California (he originally hails from Mont Clair, New Jersey, near Springsteen’s famed Asbury Park), he punctuates sentences with “man”, repeatedly reminds us how “blessed” he is and looks forward to hitting up surfing hotspots such as Dee Why in NSW and Burleigh Heads in Queensland on the band’s maiden Australian tour this month. “I can’t wait to get to Australia and go surfing,” exclaims DeLeo, who counts Aussie surf champ Mark Richards among his childhood heroes. “Japan was as close as we got in 1994.”

The youngest of four siblings – his older brother Dean plays guitar in the band – DeLeo describes himself as an “old soul”, who grew up on a steady diet of, well, whatever was coming out of the room next door. “There’d be Cat Stevens in one room, and Led Zeppelin and The Who in another, but I was also interested in the bands that influenced them,” he recalls. DeLeo still has a broad appreciation for all sorts of music – from country to bossa nova and jazz. He sparks up when I remind him of a Guitar World interview from the mid-1990s, in which he namechecks jazz saxophonist Stan Getz, and bemoans how they don’t write songs like Jim Croce’s Operator anymore. “The idea of putting a coin in an old phone box – no one’s going to write a song like that now given the way technology’s progressed,” he says.

On a recent day off in Brazil, DeLeo spent an afternoon wandering through the foothills of Rio, marveling at a city that gave birth to some of his musical heroes: Jobim and tropicalia pioneers Gilberto Gil and Caetano Veloso. It’s not what you’d typically expect from a bass player in a commercial rock band, but it perfectly illustrates what set Stone Temple Pilots apart from ’90s contemporaries such as Pearl Jam, Soundgarden and later Bush.

Despite a classic single in Plush, their debut album Core (1992) was savaged by critics for cashing in on grunge (although, in fairness, they were developing their sound in San Diego, almost in tandem with what was going on in Seattle). Upon re-listening, it sounds middling and dated, but shows glimpses of what was to come. 1994’s Purple was the band’s quantum leap. It’s full of invention, pomp and swagger, and takes in a myriad of influences – from the heavy Zepplin-esque riffage of Vaseline to the Middle Eastern-flavoured Pretty Penny. It’s not surprising to hear that one of the album’s biggest hits, Interstate Love Song, took inspiration from Brazilian pop. “The original version started out as a bossa nova track,” reveals DeLeo, before beat-boxing the opening few bars. “We changed it to fit the band.”

The band’s experimental urges came to a head on 1996’s Tiny Music … Songs From The Vatican Gift Shop, their artistic high watermark which endeared them somewhat to the critics. But it triggered a decade of false starts and missed opportunities, with Weiland continually battling his demons (he later joined “supergroup” Velvet Revolver), and the DeLeo brothers pursuing other projects (the short-lived Talk Show with Kretz and singer Dave Coutts, and Army of Anyone with Filter’s Richard Patrick).

Stone Temple Pilots never really broke up during that time, frequently regrouping only for Weiland to fall off the wagon again. But like family they stuck it out, and now enter their nineteenth year as a functioning band again; relatively speaking, of course.