The Greatest Songs Ever! Interstate Love Song

“I heard Keith Richards make a good analogy one time,” says Scott Weiland, recalling the making of “Interstate Love Song.” “‘It’s like you’re an antenna and you know the real good songs are out there and you just draw them right in.’ That song just sort of wrote itself.”

“Interstate Love Song” was one of the defining rock hits of the 1990s, pitting a breezily anthemic riff against an anguished vocal from Weiland. But considering the bad chemicals whizzing around Weiland’s bloodstream — it’s a wonder that Stone Temple Pilots’ antennae were in working order.

In the spring of 1994, the Californian quartet — Weiland on vocals, Eric Kretz on drums and brothers Robert and Dean DeLeo on bass and guitar, respectively — were feeling ambivalent about success. Despite selling three million copies of their 1992 debut, Core, they were crically reviled, dismissed as a second-rate Pearl Jam (who had themselves been dismissed as a second-rate Nirvana). Suspicious of Weilands attitude toward sexual violence, rock critic Robert Christgau wrote that, if STP didn’t intend the song “Sex Type Thing” as a critique of rape, “the whole band should catch AIDS and die.”

“We were kind of in a whirlwind,” says Weiland. “Your entire teen lives you spend fantasizing about being rock & roll musicians, and all of a sudden you’re jettisoned into the stratosphere. There’s no way to prepare for what it’s actually like. We had a lot of potshots taken at us at first, so it wasn’t the easiest thing.”

The other cloud on the horizon was Weiland’s newfound heroin addiction. He’d first tried the drug a year earlier in New York’s Royalton hotel, on the last date of STP’s tour with Texas hellraisers Butthole Surfers. At first his drug buddy was Jannina Castenada, his long-term girlfriend and fjuture wife. But between disagreements over heroin (Castenada quit; Weiland didn’t), the pressures of touring and Weiland’s cold feet about getting married, the relationship became fraught.

In March 1994, STP convened in Cole Rehearsal Studios in Hollywood for two weeks of preproduction and songwriting for their sophomore release, Purple. One of the unfinished songs Robert DeLeo brought to the studio was the as-yet-untitled “Interstate Love Song.” Dean DeLeo recalled later, “We were in Atlanta touring Core, and Robert was playing around with the chords and the melody in a hotel room. I had a feeling about that song immediately.

“It started out as a bossa nova song, believe it or not,” Robert said in 2003. “The entire chord structure is an Antonio Carlos Jobim thing.”

When Weiland heard Robert playing the song on an acoustic guitar, he immediately began humming along, turning the melody from the intro into the chorus. After that, all he needed to do was channel his frustrations about his two troubled love affairs: with Castenada and heroin.

“It has a few different themes,” Weiland says. “Honesty, lack of honesty, my new relationship with heroin. I had been away from [Jannina] for quite a long time, and there were some issues of trust going on. The whole time I as in Atlanta I was telling her I was off it.”

STP’s regular producer, Brendan O’Brien, lived in Atlanta, Georgia, and did most of his work at the Southern Tracks studio, so the band decided to relocate to the city for a month. Weiland’s first priority on arriving in town was finding a dealer. At that stage, though, his habit didn’t get in the way of his music.

“That was the first album I made completely strung out. I was all business, though. As soon as I got what I needed I was back at my flat writing my melodies and lyrics. I was completely compulsive about it. I just dived into it.”

The music might not have suffered, but the band’s internal harmony had gone south. According to Weiland, “It was a little rocky. It was creatively the best experience we could have had. We felt like we could make the record we wanted to make. We felt like we couldn’t miss. On a communication level, it wasn’t the greatest. The camaraderie wasn’t there the way it had been on the first record. There was definitely a wall between me as the frontman and the creative leader, and those guys as the musicians.”

Despite tensions, Purple was completed at dizzying speed: The basic tracks were finished in 10 days, the vocals took another week, and mixing took just five days. Weiland remembers nailing the vocal for “Interstate Love Song” in one or two takes. Behind the apparent efficiency, however, trouble was brewing.

“[Purple] almost didn’t get done,” said Robert DeLeo. “That record ended up with Dean, Eric and myself and [O’Brien] sitting in a room saying, ‘Do we pack this up?’”

As soon as the album was finished, Weiland went in for treatment. The official reason given was “psychological fatigue” but the singer admits that he really checked in to a detox clinic, the first of several attempts to kick his habit.

Released that June, Purple shot to No. 1, eventually selling more than six million copies. “Interstate Love Song” topped the Billboard Album Rock Tracks for 15 weeks. When it was released as a single in September, it crashed into the Top 40. And, despite the concerns expressed in the song, Weiland and Castenada wed that same month; they separated in 1998.

STP had definitely proved the doubters wrong by dwarfing their initial success, but their achievements were compromised by Weiland’s burgeoning drug habit, which led to the collapse of the Purple tour and finally became public the following May, when he was arrested for possession of cocaine and heroin.

“It’s all bittersweet,” said Dean DeLeo. “We had a beautiful stage set designed and great music to play, and the tour imploded after six weeks. It could have been a really nice time in our career.”

This would be the story of STP’s life: periods of inspiration and prolific recording, punctured by enforced hiatuses while Weiland yo-yo’d in and out of rehab. The band decided to split temporarily in 1997, and finally called it a day six years later, after five albums together.

Weiliand has no shortage of regrets. “I felt like a piece of shit most of the time, to tell you the truth, and that what’s really sad about it. As an artist I felt like I was writing the best material of my life but in a lot of ways I was going into a real dark place. I just wish I had been able to enjoy a lot of what happened.