Song of the Day: Scott Weiland, "Barbarella"

For reasons beyond my understanding, there are a handful of recent-ish reviews of my deeply out of print book up on Goodreads. They all basically give the proper assessment: it’s not especially good or even coherent, but the enthusiasm is there. There is one sentiment that popped up that I thought deserved further exploration: that I was too mean to Stone Temple Pilots.

I loved a lot of STP stuff when they were first on the rise (I particularly dug 1996’s Tiny Music: Songs From the Vatican Gift Shop). But for whatever reason I was really mean to them in the pages of Accidental Revolution. Admittedly, that band had wrapped up business on a pretty intense nadir (neither 1999’s No. 4 nor 2001’s Shangri-La-Di-Da have more than two good songs on them) and I was also largely parroting the critical consensus about that band at the time they were on their ascent. STP were lumped in with a handful of bands who were not from Seattle but who road the alt-rock wave to great success, and they were among the most successful of those artists (notably Bush and Candlebox, for example). That was a real misnomer, because both Tiny Music and 1994’s Purple have a lot of sounds and textures that you wouldn’t find on a Soundgarden record, and frontman Scott Weiland dropped the Vedder-esque croon almost immediately in favor of a much glammier approach. Basically “Plush” sounded too much like a Pearl Jam song, and STP paid for it in reviews for the bulk of their existence.

So I’m sorry to STP for being unkind to them in a book that basically nobody read. To make up for it, let’s honor the late Weiland with a single from his 1998 solo album 12 Bar Blues, an album recorded while he was supposed to be getting cleaned up following a drug-related arrest. During this same period, the rest of the guys in STP formed a side project called Talk Show, and that is basically an STP album with a different guy singing. But 12 Bar Blues is a delightfully strange amalgamation of bizarre sonic ideas that includes forays into cabaret-core, horny industrial, chamber pop, and this sweeping half-electronic epic that was released as a single and got a big-budget video. I bought 12 Bar Blues during a family trip to Baltimore, my first time ever in the city I now call home, so this music (along with Pulp’s This Is Hardcore, also purchased during that vacation at the Sound Garden in Fell’s Point) always inexplicably makes me think of Camden Yards.