STP: Tiny Music…Songs From the Vatican Gift Shop, 25th Anniversary Options

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Stone Temple Pilots Prep ‘Tiny Music…Songs From the Vatican Gift Shop’ Deluxe Edition

Deluxe Edition features remastered sound, studio outtakes, and a full concert recorded during a special MTV Spring Break gig in 1997

Stone Temple Pilots are celebrating the 25th anniversary of their 1996 LP Tiny Music…Songs From the Vatican Gift Shop by releasing a three-disc/one-LP deluxe edition featuring a remastered version of the original album, alternate versions and mixes of several of the songs, and a complete concert taped at the Club La Vela in Panama City Beach, Florida, on March 14th, 1997.

Tiny Music…Songs From the Vatican Gift Shop landed in stores after a very difficult period in the group’s history marked by Scott Weiland’s arrest for heroin and cocaine possession and guitarist Dean DeLeo, bassist Robert DeLeo, and drummer Eric Kretz’s decision to form the side project Talk Show with vocalist Dave Coutts.

But they came together with producer Brendan O’Brien in late 1995 at the Westerly Ranch in Santa Ynez, California, to create the album, which generated the hits “Big Bang Baby,” “Trippin’ on a Hole in a Paper Heart,” and “Lady Picture Show.”

“Coming into our third album, we knew we wanted to get into uncharted waters as a band, and not just make an album that was a continuation of the first two, but really experiment with a homegrown mentality,” Kretz tells Rolling Stone. “Deciding to record in a house instead of a proper studio was our collective first choice. Once we started recording, we tried different songs and different overdubs in every nook and cranny the house had to offer.

For Dean DeLeo, going through the tape vault to assemble this new edition of the album was an emotional experience. “Re-listening to this album brought back some beautiful memories of all of us living, writing, and recording the record in the beautiful Santa Ynez Valley,” he tells Rolling Stone. “And of course, every time I revisit this stuff I miss Scott.”

It also gave him the chance to hear music he hadn’t thought about in many years, including “Kretz’s Acoustic Song.” “I always really loved that song, even when Eric laid it out for us back in ’95 or ’96,” DeLeo says. “What I dig most about it is that Eric played everything.”

The very first stop on the Tiny Music tour was the Panama City gig they are releasing on the set. It was filmed for an MTV Spring Break special. “Back in 1997, MTV was a tour de force in the music world,” says Kretz. “To play a whole set in the surroundings of a beach with a crowd that was having more fun than us was really fantastic.”

STP parted ways with Scott Weiland in 2013, two years before his death. They are now fronted by Jeff Gutt. A year ago, they released their 8th LP, Perdida.

Tiny Music…Songs From The Vatican Gift Shop Deluxe Edition Tracklist

Disc One: Original Album 2021 Remaster
“Press Play”
“Pop’s Love Suicide”
“Tumble In The Rough”
“Big Bang Baby”
“Lady Picture Show”
“And So I Know”
“Trippin’ on a Hole in a Paper Heart”
“Art School Girl”
“Adhesive”
“Ride the Cliché”
“Daisy”
“Seven Caged Tigers”

Disc Two: Early Versions, Instrumentals, & Alternate Mixes
“Press Play” – Full-Length Version
“Pop’s Love Suicide” – Early Version
“Tumble in the Rough” – Early Version
“Big Bang Baby” – Early Version
“Lady Picture Show” – Early Version *
“And So I Know” – Early Version
“Trippin’ on a Hole in a Paper Heart” – Early Version
“5 or 4 Times (Art School Girl)” – Early Version
“Adhesive” – Instrumental
“Ride the Cliché” – Instrumental
“Seven Caged Tigers” – Early Version
“Big Bang Baby” – Alternate Version
“Trippin’ on a Hole in a Paper Heart” – Percussion Mix
“Art School Girl” – Jaw Harp Version
“Kretz’s Acoustic Song”

Disc Three: Live at Club La Vela, Panama City Beach, FL (3/14/97)
“Crackerman”
“Meatplow”
“Tumble in the Rough”
“Vasoline”
“Wicked Garden”
“Trippin’ on a Hole in a Paper Heart”
“Plush”
“Big Empty”
“Interstate Love Song”
“Lady Picture Show”
“Unglued”
“Big Bang Baby”
“Dead & Bloated”
“Sex Type Thing”

https://www-rollingstone-com.cdn.ampproject...AFQArABIA%3D%3D

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Here's a good article about the album from Consequence: https://consequence.net/2021/03/stone-templ...music-25-years/

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Stone Temple Pilots’ Tiny Music… Songs from the Vatican Gift Shop Remains a Prized Relic of the Grunge Era
Bryan Rolli
March 23, 2021 | 11:45am ET

In the 1992 comedy Wayne’s World, titular protagonist and lay philosopher Wayne Campbell tells his best friend and hockey partner, Garth Algar, “Led Zeppelin didn’t write tunes that everyone liked. They left that to the Bee Gees.” Apply that sage wisdom to the hard rock landscape of the mid-1990s, and you can make a convincing case for Stone Temple Pilots being their generation’s Led Zeppelin while the Bee Gees in this case were, well, any of the myriad contemporary grunge titans that critics accused STP of mimicking.

Just as critics learned to worship Jimmy Page’s monolithic riffing and Robert Plant’s banshee wail, they slowly came around to Stone Temple Pilots’ effortless pop savvy and staggering musicality on their third album, Tiny Music… Songs from the Vatican Gift Shop, which turns 25 this week. Not only does Tiny Music mark STP’s tragically short-lived creative zenith, but it remains one of the most stylistically adventurous albums of the grunge era.

The press dismissed Stone Temple Pilots as fifth-rate Pearl Jam and Alice in Chains wannabes on their 1992 debut, Core, which nevertheless sold eight million copies in the United States on the strength of piledriving grunge anthems “Sex Type Thing” and “Plush”. (Case in point: Rolling Stone crowned STP Worst New Band in its 1994 critics’ poll while fans voted them Best New Band.) The San Diego quartet’s critical standing improved somewhat on their sophomore LP, Purple, which debuted atop the Billboard 200 and sold 6 million copies in the US, fueled by soaring alt-rock smashes “Interstate Love Song”, “Vasoline”, and “Big Empty”.

But Stone Temple Pilots only finished recording Purple by the skin of their teeth, as frontman Scott Weiland was caught in the throes of an all-consuming heroin addiction that would dog him for years. Cops busted the singer for possession of cocaine and heroin on May 15, 1995; after his wife, Jannina, posted bond, he hopped out of their moving car to go score from his dealer, then holed up at the Chateau Marmont in Los Angeles and embarked on a cinematic bender with his floormate, Courtney Love. Weiland spent the rest of 1995 bouncing between rehab centers, as the future of Stone Temple Pilots hung in the balance.

When the band — Weiland, guitarist Dean DeLeo, bassist Robert DeLeo, and drummer Eric Kretz — finally regrouped in October of ‘95 and headed to Santa Barbara with producer Brendan O’Brien to commence work on their third album, the pressures they faced were manifold. They had to reassure fans that they were in it for the long haul and make amends for the tour dates they scrapped so Weiland could go to rehab. They had to show critics that their upward creative trajectory from Core to Purple wasn’t a fluke. And they had to prove to themselves that they could hold this operation together by a thread long enough to make another album.


On Tiny Music, Stone Temple Pilots passed every test with aplomb. Following the slinky, 81-second instrumental “Press Play”, the album roars to life with the punchy “Pop’s Love Suicide”. Fundamentally, it’s not so different from Purple opener “Meatplow”: a straightforward hard rocker anchored by Dean’s beefy guitar riffs and ornamented with shimmering, ‘70s FM rock trimmings. But it also hints at STP’s radical reinvention, which becomes more apparent with each song on Tiny Music. Weiland completely ditches the gruff, Eddie Vedder-esque baritone that dominated Core and parts of Purple; in its place is a raspy, mid-range sneer lifted from Bowie and Jagger, augmented with bubblegum falsetto harmonies. He underwent a physical transformation, too, slimming down considerably and growing his once-buzzed hair out into curly locks. The bulky, hyper-masculine jock from the Core era now sauntered across the stage with serpentine grace, as seen in the band’s David Letterman performances from 1996.

Stone Temple Pilots continue to synthesize glam, punk, arena rock, and grunge on the breathless “Tumble in the Rough”, on which Weiland acknowledges his demons without self-pity: “I made excuses for a million lies/ But all I got was humble kidney pie/ So what?” Weiland scorns the celebrity industrial complex on “Big Bang Baby”, a swaggering glam-rock romp that tips its hat to both The Rolling Stones’ “Jumpin’ Jack Flash” and R.E.M.’s “Orange Crush”. Tiny Music is littered with these classic rock Easter eggs: “Trippin’ on a Hole in a Paper Heart” reworks the riff from Led Zeppelin’s “Dancing Days” in its arena-sized chorus, in which Weiland bellows that he’s “not dead and not for sale” before Dean rips one of the most scorching solos this side of “Good Times Bad Times”.


Tiny Music’s harder songs gave it a presence on modern rock radio, but its softer, more experimental tracks established Stone Temple Pilots as fearless genre benders. Robert flexes his love of jazz and bossa nova on the lithe “And So I Know,” and the band delves into Beatlesque jangle-pop on the bittersweet “Lady Picture Show”. Weiland exorcises more demons on the disarming shoegaze ballad “Adhesive,” musing that he would probably “sell more records if I’m dead” and “[hoping] it’s near corporate records’ fiscal year.”

Even at his most introspective and forlorn, Weiland avoided melodramatic navel-gazing, singing about his precarious position with tongue firmly rooted in cheek. Critics rarely gave Stone Temple Pilots credit for their fine-tuned sense of irony, but it oozes from the wickedly funny (and catchy) “Art School Girl.” Weiland gushes in an affected whine about hitting up underground art parties with his hipster, leather-clad girlfriend, before the chorus explodes and he howls, “I told you five or four times,” as the band kicks up a garage-punk cacophony behind him. It was STP’s way of taking the piss out of themselves and getting ahead of the critics who saw their art-rock reinvention as just another soulless, opportunistic rebrand.

Tiny Music managed to sway some of Stone Temple Pilots’ most venomous critics. Rolling Stone’s Lorraine Ali awarded the album three out of five stars and wrote, “Crappy tunes aside, STP hit at gut level with an album that’s bolder and more street savvy than those of obvious precursors such as Journey or Def Leppard.” (David Fricke later profiled the band for a 1997 cover story detailing Weiland’s drug-related misadventures.) Pitchfork’s Ryan Schreiber was less generous, giving the album 0.8 out of 10 and begging Weiland to kill himself. (“Don’t just do it for yourself, do it for me.”)

Retrospective assessments have been kinder. Stereogum’s Michael Tedder wrote that the songs on Tiny Music were “some of the most melodically rich Stone Temple Pilots would ever write,” while Smashing Pumpkins frontman Billy Corgan praised the record in a tribute to Weiland following the singer’s death on Dec. 3, 2015. “It was STP’s 3rd album that had got me hooked, a wizardly mix of glam and post-punk, and I confessed to Scott, as well as the band many times, how wrong I’d been in assessing their native brilliance,” Corgan wrote on his website. “And like Bowie can and does, it was Scott’s phrasing that pushed his music into a unique, and hard to pin down, aesthetic sonicsphere.”

Unfortunately, Stone Temple Pilots would never again take such exhilarating creative risks or enjoy the same level of stratospheric success after Tiny Music. They canceled much of their 1996-97 tour so Weiland could return to rehab, and Tiny Music subsequently only sold two million copies in the US, versus Purple’s six million and Core’s eight million. After taking time off to work on other projects, STP regrouped and released the back-to-basics bruiser No. 4 in 1999, but the landscape had changed drastically. Grunge had been supplanted by post-grunge and nu-metal, and while Stone Temple Pilots were still a strong concert draw, they no longer ruled the hard rock roost.

It’s tantalizing to think what Stone Temple Pilots might have accomplished if Weiland had kept his demons at bay and the band had completed the Tiny Music tour and stayed together immediately afterward. As it stands, Tiny Music captures a band firing on all cylinders, triumphing over internal strife, exhaustion, and addiction to craft a thrilling, genre-hopping opus. With grunge already withering in 1996, Stone Temple Pilots delivered a high-water mark for the genre and the crown jewel in their discography.

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Pick up a copy of Tiny Music… Songs from the Vatican Gift Shop ...

[Bremang]

Was hoping for some fully mastered new tracks as bsides but I suppose this is alright.