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. Released 25 years ago on 26th March 1996, the album is a pitch-perfect amalgamation of the band members’ musical personalities, yielding three us #1 hits – “Big Bang Baby,” “Lady Picture Show,” Rhino records announces the upcoming release of a newly remastered version of tiny music… expanded with unreleased studio and live recordings.
It’s coming out July 23rd, but you can hear a previously unreleased version of “Big Bang Baby” right here.
“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,” said Kretz . “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,” “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.”
Stone Temple Pilots 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”.
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