When Stone Temple Pilots burst onto the scene in late 1992, fans—and critics—weren’t sure what to make of them. The debut album, Core, featured the hits “Sex Type Thing” and the Grammy-winning “Plush,” but some dubbed the San Diego rockers a wannabe grunge band.
Stone Temple Pilots were even named the “worst new band” by Rolling Stone editors in a year-end recap of the music of 1993, per Ultimate Classic Rock.
The classic lineup of the band – Scott Weiland (lead vocals), Dean DeLeo (guitar), Robert DeLeo (bass), and Eric Kretz (drums) – didn’t aspire to get the “grunge” label.
In a 2023 interview with 107.7 The Bone, Robert DeLeo explained, “I don't think the four of us ever put any kind of name on what kind of music we were making. We happened to come out at a time when the people in this business were creating these terms — it's all a selling point, and we got caught up, as well as other bands, in a selling point for record companies to make money.”
"It's all pretty ridiculous. 'Interstate Love Song,' grunge? I don't think so. I actually wrote that as a bossa nova song, that's what it started out as,” he added.
DeLeo’s reference to “Interstate Love Song,” a country-twinged single from the band’s follow-up album, Purple, is significant because that was the song that helped them unload the “grunge” label and become taken more seriously by critics.
In an interview with Metal Hammer, DeLeo said he “knew” the songs written for Purple were “pretty special,” most notably “Interstate Love Song,” which he composed while riding in a Winnebago while touring with STP. He added that the music took “around 10 minutes” to write, but was still “a different level of writing“ for him.
“When I first wrote the song, it actually started out as a bossa nova piece,” he told Billboardin an interview. “I had been getting introduced to a lot of bossa nova and samba at the time like Joao Gilberto and Jorge Ben, and I wrote it on a cheap $25 guitar that was sitting in the back of the truck we used to ride around in with the gear on our first tour. Maybe one day we will record it the way I originally intended it to be, but that’s how it started. The twang, however, added a nice Jerry Reed/Glen Campbell hook to it.”
In 1994, “Interstate Love Song” soared to No. 1 on Billboard’s Mainstream Rock Songs chart and stayed there for 15 weeks.
DeLeo had a feeling the song would stand the test of time. In 2002, he told KNAC, “When I write songs like ‘Interstate Love Song,’ I think I’ll hear that tune years from now."
Not only did “Interstate Love Song” change the trajectory for Stone Temple Pilots, sufficiently freeing them from the "worst band" label, but Spin magazine named it "one of the best songs of the ‘90s.”
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