Going Out

By Paul Robicheau

Photo Credit: Chapman Baehler

Stone Temple Pilots are back with a big bang, baby, seemingly true-to-form in more ways than one.

On a positive note—with its artful mash of post-grunge hard rock, glam-pop, psychedelia and country—the San Diego band’s eponymous new CD doesn’t sound like a group that spent half the past decade on the shelf.

“There was just something that undeniably happens when the four of us get into a room to make some music,” guitarist Dean DeLeo says from his Malibu home. “I don’t know that [the band] ever stopped. We just had to take a break from it.”

Of course, there was ample reason for the hiatus. Singer Scott Weiland’s documented drug and alcohol abuse led to jail time and cancelled tours as well as inner-band tensions. In turn, Velvet Revolver, his subsequent group with outcasts from Guns N’ Roses, cited his “erratic onstage behavior” in giving Weiland the boot.

So where does that leave Stone Temple Pilots as the band roars through a tour slated to hit Bank of America Pavilion on Sept. 1?

A March concert filmed in Chicago and making the rounds on cable shows a fully engaged and charismatic STP, ripping through new tracks “Behind the Lines” and the Southern-flavored “Hickory Dichotomy,” as well as ’90s hits like “Interstate Love Song,” “Plush” and “Vasoline.” Yet reports from other cities have been mixed. Bloggers in Milwaukee, Washington, D.C., and Milan have reported that Weiland appeared wasted and out of focus, and forgot lyrics.

DeLeo opts to sidestep the issue. “I always want to be the best that I can be, and I want the band to be the best it can be,” he says. The guitarist offers that Milan was a hot, packed room on the last night of the European tour and that “Scott had us all cracking up,” as he tried to pass off the band as Italian. That wasn’t so hard with DeLeo and his bassist brother Robert, but Weiland added vowels to his and drummer Eric Kretz’s last names.

As for the upcoming Boston show, New Jersey native DeLeo adds, “To get into the Northeast, the most rabid, crazed fans on the planet, it’s the absolute best.… This is a reciprocal party we’re having, man. It’s your party. We’re just out there working for you. If you make us feel good, we’re gonna let it all hang out.”

DeLeo says Weiland even nixed the guitarist’s proposal that STP hire a utility player to provide keyboards, extra guitar and vocal layers in concert. “I would like to venture off into other material that is more ‘studio-friendly,’ and Scott’s completely against it,” DeLeo says. “He’s just like, ‘No, it’s not us, man. I just want the four of us up there making a racket.’ I’m like, ‘OK man, I respect that. I dig it.’”

Indeed, STP fills the bill as a classic four-piece rock band that thrives on big riffs. “I can always go back to Zeppelin, man, the way God meant it to be: guitar, bass and drums, and a singer,” DeLeo says, noting how Led Zeppelin’s Jimmy Page “had so much going on at the guitar end of things, it was always interesting to see what line he was going to grab [live]. There’s something challenging about that, and there’s also something very stripped down and honest about it.”

DeLeo’s influences range from classic rock to Brazilian music, which fueled two recent B-sides, “Samba Nova” and “About a Fool.” “It just goes back to what we were fed as babies,” the 44-year-old guitarist says, noting he and Robert would hear the Brazilian greats João Gilberto and Antonio Carlos Jobim played around the house. “I had the luxury of growing up in the ’60s and ’70s, and what we called popular music and what people are calling R&B now, give me a break. It’s a pile of shit today.”

The DeLeo brothers produced the new album, working in both Kretz’s custom-made studio and Robert’s just-finished one. Weiland, meanwhile, recorded vocals at his own studio with producer Don Was, who served as liaison to the sessions.

“Scott insisted back to [STP’s 1992 debut] Core, ‘I don’t want anybody around when I’m doing vocals,’” says DeLeo, who adds that he feels quite similarly as a guitarist when it comes to “trying to let my freak flag fly” with other musicians in the room.

STP has a proven process and chemistry, and they roll with it.

Stone Temple Pilots play Bank of America Pavilion on Sept. 1.