Purple Might Be the Best Sophomore Album of the 1990s

In January 1994, Rolling Stone published a poll in which readers voted Stone Temple Pilots the Best New Band of 1993. In the same issue, the magazine's critics voted them the Worst New Band of 1993. Both results appeared on the same page. Five months later, Purple debuted at number one on the Billboard 200 with 252,000 copies sold in its first week. It stayed there for three weeks and eventually went six times platinum. The argument was settled — just not in the way anyone expected.

The critics were not entirely wrong about Core. It arrived in 1992 at the peak of grunge's commercial moment and sounded like it knew that. “Plush” leaned on a Vedder-adjacent vocal delivery. The riffs had a Seattle weight to them. The accusations of imitation were lazy but not completely baseless. What the critics missed was the evidence underneath — Dean DeLeo's guitar parts were more considered than anything happening in Seattle, Robert DeLeo's bass lines were melodic in a way that belonged to a different tradition entirely, and Scott Weiland's actual vocal range was broader than anyone was letting him use yet. Purple used all three.

How the Album Got Made

The band went into Purple coming off a year and a half of touring Core without a break. They took one month off, spent time in a Los Angeles rehearsal space working out arrangements, then flew to Atlanta to record with producer Brendan O'Brien at Southern Tracks Recording Studio. They tracked basic performances in the first ten days. Mixing took another five. The entire album was recorded, mixed, and mastered in approximately three and a half weeks during March 1994.

O'Brien encouraged the band to track using a PA system to simulate a live environment, and the speed of the sessions meant there was no time for second-guessing. Drummer Eric Kretz later described it as the most streamlined recording experience of his life. The urgency is audible — Purple has a live energy that Core, for all its heaviness, does not quite have. Songs feel captured rather than constructed.

Scott Weiland's drug use had begun to create distance between him and the other members by this point, but it had not yet affected his performances. The lyrics on Purple carry that tension implicitly — “Pretty Penny,” “Silvergun Superman,” “Still Remains” are not abstract. They are specific about damage in a way Core's lyrics were not.

Dean DeLeo's Guitar Parts

The case for Purple as a great guitar album starts with Dean DeLeo's gear and ends with his songwriting. His primary instruments were a 1978 Gibson Les Paul Standard and a 1957 Gibson Les Paul TV Special fitted with P-90 pickups that he acquired just before the sessions. He paired the TV Special with a 1966 Marshall 18-watt 2x10 combo — a combination he has cited repeatedly as one of his favorite recording setups. The P-90 pickups on that guitar have a rawness that humbuckers cannot replicate, and it is audible throughout the record.

His live rig ran through a Boss CE-1 Stereo Chorus Ensemble, splitting into a Vox AC30 for the chimey clean side and a Marshall-driven rack for crunch. The stereo split is mic'd separately and blended by the engineer to create the sound of two guitarists. Dean has used this approach since 1990 and has said the rig has not fundamentally changed in that time. What sounds like a dense, layered guitar arrangement on a record like Purple is often one guitarist running a carefully designed split signal.

The songwriting itself ranges from straightforward hard rock (“Meatplow,” “Unsung”) to something stranger. “Lounge Fly” is a seven-minute psychedelic experiment that would not have fit on Core. “Pretty Penny” is an acoustic ballad with orchestration. “Still Remains” has a country-adjacent chord progression that shows up more explicitly on “Interstate Love Song.” Dean DeLeo has consistently been more interested in texture and range than the grunge template allowed for, and Purple is where that finally had room.

Robert DeLeo and the Bass Sound

Robert DeLeo's bass work on Purple is one of the most underappreciated elements of the record. He ran his 1961 Fender Bassman — originally his brother Dean's amp — through a special-order cabinet with JBL 15-inch speakers, and the result is a bass tone with warmth and definition that sits differently in the mix than the distorted bass tones popular in grunge. Robert plays melodically. His bass lines frequently answer the vocal rather than double the guitar, and on songs like “Pretty Penny” and “Still Remains” the bass is essentially a co-melody. He has said the Bassman was the foundation of every STP bass tone he ever made, and he panicked when it finally failed decades later.

Interstate Love Song and the Slide Guitar Question

“Interstate Love Song” spent fifteen weeks at number one on the Album Rock Tracks chart — a record at the time. The song's success was partly attributable to its accessibility, but the guitar work deserves credit. Dean DeLeo plays slide on multiple sections of the track, and the slide work has a looseness and feel that studio-polished grunge records of the era rarely had. The song's chord progression has a country-adjacent quality that was deliberate — STP were not a grunge band that happened to have some other influences, they were a band with a broad range of influences that grunge critics could not see past.

“Big Empty” was the first song recorded for the album, tracked at the Record Plant in Los Angeles in May 1993 for The Crow soundtrack. It set the template: a slow build, slide guitar threaded through the verses, Weiland's voice at its most controlled. The full album delivered on that promise and then went further.

What the Critics Missed and Why It Matters

The Pearl Jam comparison stuck to Stone Temple Pilots longer than it deserved to, and it stuck specifically because Weiland's vocal delivery on Core had genuine Vedder-adjacent qualities. What it missed was that Vedder himself was doing something specific and regional, and what STP were doing came from somewhere else — from San Diego, from Robert DeLeo's Motown bass influences, from Dean DeLeo's obsession with vintage Gibsons and obscure Marshall combos, from Weiland's actual vocal range which was wider and more theatrical than he was initially allowed to demonstrate.

Purple demonstrated all of that. It also demonstrated something more basic: that a band everyone had decided was derivative could write twelve songs in a row without a filler track. Play the album front to back today. Nothing wastes your time. That is rarer than it sounds, and it is the actual argument for Purple as one of the best sophomore albums of the decade — not the sales figures, not the chart position, not the revenge-on-the-critics narrative. Just the songs, holding up.

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