One of the biggest alternative rock bands of all time is back, with a new album, a new vocalist and a new tour that sees them hitting many centres across Canada for the first time.
Stone Temple Pilots are bringing along their pals in Seether, as well as a reunited Default and Age of Days for a rare coast-to-coast Canuck excursion, that is drawing rave reviews from critics and fans alike. With four talented, hard rocking bands, each show is definitely an evening that is guaranteed to please the most ardent of rockers.
The band is doing what is essentially its first-ever cross-Canada tour, which began on the west coast at the Commodore Ballroom in Vancouver on Oct. 22 and wound its way east through shows in B.C, Alberta and Saskatchewan before hitting Winnipeg on Nov. 1. After dipping back into the U.S. for two shows, the tour comes back to the Great White North, with six shows in Ontario, starting in Sudbury Nov. 6 before moving on to London, Peterborough, Oshawa, and by Nov. 11 (Remembrance Day) hitting the Meridian Centre in St. Catharines, before a date at Kitchener’s Centre in the Square Nov. 13. Shows in Laval, Quebec and Moncton bring the Canadian tour to a close by Nov. 16.
“Canada is beautiful, and the audiences have been fantastic. The people are just so nice here. And it’s great to finally do a good long tour of Canada. It’s rare that we will do a run all the way across Canada or even halfway across. A lot of times we are touring, and we will pop up to do Toronto and maybe Winnipeg and Vancouver. So, it’s kind of nice to go all the way across and pretty much stay within the country the whole time and just get a better feel for what the audiences are like and what radio is like up here,” said drummer Eric Kretz, who co-founded the band with Robert and Dean DeLeo, along with the late great former vocalist Scott Weiland, in 1989 in San Diego. New vocalist Jeff Gutt has been in the fold, officially, since the fall of 2017.
“The smaller arenas are perfect set ups for these shows and each show has been great. Everyone is loving the new material live, even though right now it’s just two songs. The set is running only about an hour and 15 minutes because we’ve got four bands on the bill, so right now it’s just two new songs. Meadow and Roll Me Under. I’ve gotta say, man, I love playing Roll Me Under every night. Jeff’s voice is like a mile wide in that song.”
With a catalogue of hits over their seven studio albums, going back to their smash debut record Core, released in 1992, through their second self-titled release this past spring, and first with Gutt on lead vocals, STP has a tough chore putting together set lists on a given night, especially when they are limited to the length of their set. With iconic and genre-defining songs such as Plush, Interstate Love Song, Trippin’ on a Hole in a Paper Heart, Sour Girl, Down, Sex Type Thing, Wicked Garden and Vasoline, it’s not easy to please both the casual fan and the die-hards looking for deeper cuts.
“It’s fun to do the really deeper album cuts, but it has to be the right venue and you have to play for two hours at least to really delve into the stuff properly. When you’re limited to an hour and 10 or an hour and 15 minutes by the curfews and everything, it’s like well, which way do we go? We came to the general consensus of throwing in a few deeper tracks, but we also don’t want people to walk away saying, ‘man, I really wanted to hear Interstate Love Song,’ or ‘I really wanted to hear Sex Type Thing.’ We want to make sure we giver everybody an overall sense of the legacy of STP as well as the new stuff,” said Kretz during the band’s tour stop in Winnipeg.
Gutt has been with the band for nearly a year and a half and started touring as the official frontman of the band with dates earlier this Spring. It must be said that Gutt is no wet behind the ears kid. At 42, he has been a performing artist and songwriter for as long as STP has been a major player on the music scene, beginning his career in 1992, working his way through a number of bands, including the moderately successful Nu-metal group, Dry Cell in the early 2000s. He was also in the bands Acyclic, Band With No Name and Punch. Gutt also appeared on one episode the second season of The X Factor in the U.S. doing a cover of Leonard Cohen’s Hallelujah, but only made it as far as the boot camp stage. He was back the next year and came second overall to Alex & Sierra.
So, he brings both performance chops and songwriting ability to the band, which were things that were high on the lists of all three STP band members, according to Kretz who said other than the quality of the voice and the ability to write, he had no other criteria when looking for a new frontperson.
“There were quite a few boxes that he ticked, but mostly it was his ability to write and write along with the kind of material we were doing and take it in new directions. There were quite a few people that we auditioned who could sing the catalogue, but that’s not what we wanted to base our foundation on, we really wanted to do new material. During the process, which took about a year and a half, one thing I was surprised about was I thought there was going to be more women out there that sang like Janis Joplin – that would have absolutely blown me away, but none of them came around to the auditions,” he said.
“For me, I had no expectations of someone that was established or not established, someone that was old or young, tall or short, man or woman: I was up for everything. And then when Jeff came around, he was filling in all the boxes really well. At his initial audition I think he sang probably five songs from the catalogue, like Pizza Pie and Trippin’ and Dead and Bloated, and stuff like that. And man, he had so much power. We were doing about three to five singers a day at that point, so whoever was in earlier must not have had a very powerful voice, because when Jeff went up there to sing Piece of Pie, he almost blew out the P.A. because he was so loud.
“And from there we brought him back and started writing with him and threw ideas at him over and over, and every time we threw an idea at him, he came up with something, and he still does. That part was important for us in knowing if he was the right choice, because this band has always been about writing – we are writing all the time. Any time we have instruments around we start jamming and often we will get the start of what could be the foundation of a song.”
As a live act, Kretz said he and the DeLeo brothers have been re-energized by Gutt’s voice and stage mastery, and the fans of the band have warmed to him as well.
“He has stepped in very well and he definitely honours the great singers that we have worked with previously. He respects them, and he honours them, and he is also excited to do his own thing. He has been working at it for so long, and just paid his dues in his own right. So now he is like ‘put me in coach, I am ready.’ And it’s been great every night. I love the power of his voice and the pitch and his performance and everything he brings out there. We really want to present the songs just like we were doing 25 years ago with all the piss and vinegar, and Jeff is just right in there with that. So that’s helped keep it exciting. Nothing has become mundane; it’s fresh every night,” Kretz said.
“He is like a bionic singer on stage, man. There have only been a few of those guys out there, like Ronnie James Dio and several others, that just have this power and they nail it every night and their pitch is just right on. It’s really enjoyable to perform and have that part of it just firing on all cylinders. And backstage he is just great, man. He is into meditating before he goes on stage, so it’s really great to see him trying to present something spiritual on top of the energy that rock and roll brings. It’s been great to get to know him over the last year and a half. He is a very wonderful person to hang out with and it’s been a great run so far.”
Stone Temple Pilots have endured some rocky waters as a band, particularly during the lengthy tenure of the brilliant, but mercurial frontman Scott Weiland. His well documented battles with substance abuse caused disruptions and ruptures within the band, precipitating a near break up first in the late 1990s, and then seemingly ending the band for good in 2002.
Not long after the break up, Weiland found himself propelled back into the centre of the rock music world after being recruited as the vocalist for supergroup Velvet Revolver, alongside three former members of Guns N Roses (Slash, Duff McKagan and Matt Sorum) and former Wasted Youth axe man Dave Kushner. The DeLeo brothers also embarked on a similar path with a super group of their own, featuring Filter vocalist Richard Patrick and Korn drummer Ray Luzier.
Kretz wasn’t in the public eye nearly as much, preferring to run his own recording studio, and only gigging occasionally.
STP reunited in 2008, eventually releasing what would be the first of two self-titled albums in 2010, featuring the hit song Between the Lines. The old fault lines within the band resurfaced, and by 2013, Weiland had been fired, replaced not long thereafter by Linkin Park vocalist Chester Bennington with whom the DeLeos and Kretz would record one EP, the five track High Rise.
Bennington wanted to re-focus on Linkin Park and so amicably split with the other three Stone Temple Pilots members in November of 2015. Less than a month later, Weiland died of an overdose while touring with his solo band.
STP began searching for a new singer in earnest in early 2016. During the time Gutt was in his final audition phase for the band in the summer of 2017, Bennington committed suicide. Gutt was announced as the new permanent band member in November, the day before releasing the single Meadow. The second self-titled album came out in March, and the band embarked on a tour with The Cult and Bush in April.
So, to say it’s been an emotional whirlwind for the three original members of Stone Temple Pilots, not to mention their fans, is a bit of an understatement. But its been the love of the music, and the respect and connection with one another that has kept the band going through all the ups and downs, the challenges and triumphs, the periods of intense activity and inactivity, according to Kretz.
“When you’re going through the adversity, you are pretty upset and confused because you’re not sure which way to go. But I think in hindsight, we all grow from struggles in life. And if I think about all my favourite bands, they all went through paths that had incredible highs and incredible lows. Some of them stuck it out, and some of them fell apart. All the adversity makes you stronger, because you never want to give up and you never want to let some of the bad things take over your life. We all have so much respect and love for each, which is a big part of it right there. You kind of go through it together; you lean on each other’s shoulders and help each other out and solider on and make sure that were all doing it for the right reasons – because we really care about the band and the music and not for any other reasons,” he said.
“And that’s what you get in terms of the attitude on the record and from our live performances. STP is too important to let go. And it’s too much fun to let go. I enjoy the songs so much, and so do the other guys. We’re in the music business, but it’s not a business when we’re up there performing. This is what we do man, and we have been doing it together for so long that it’s become a huge part of our life. There have been times on this tour when we have been playing Pizza Pie that I think back to playing that one in the clubs back in 1992 when we got signed, when I was 25 years old, just as we were really starting to travel, and people were buying Core on album and cassette and things were starting to roll for us. Things like that and seeing the people in the audience having just as much fun as we are is incredible.
“We’re still trying to put out the energy we did when we were in our 20s and we have even had people moshing and crowd surfing. It’s nuts, it’s like nobody wants that energy to die, so it’s good to see everybody is unified in that. And it’s great to see different generations at our shows now. There are a few grey beards, but then there’s a lot of college kids and even younger kids who are coming with their parents. And with the younger ones, it’s great to see their faces when they’re just watching a band with bass, drum, guitar and vocals tearing it up on stage. You can see them saying ‘OMG’ because it’s so refreshing.”
For more information on tour dates or the new album, visit www.stonetemplepilots.com.
- Jim Barber is a veteran award-winning journalist and author based in Napanee, ON, who has been writing about music and musicians for a quarter of a century. Besides his journalistic endeavours, he now works as a communications and marketing specialist. Contact him at jimbarberwritingservices@gmail.com.
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