Stone Temple Pilots, November 2018
There are bands you grow up with, bands that soundtrack a particular version of yourself, and then there are bands you somehow get to meet twice in the same lifetime, under completely different circumstances. For me, Stone Temple Pilots exist in both categories.
The first time was chaos, scale, and pure volume. Edgefest at Downsview Park, shoulder to shoulder with tens of thousands of people, a full summer sky hanging over Toronto. The original lineup. Scott Weiland at the front, elastic and dangerous, somehow loose and locked in at the same time. The De Leo brothers building those unmistakable grooves and textures that felt heavier and smarter than most of what surrounded them on festival bills at the time. Linkin Park was on the same lineup, the crowd primed for intensity, and STP felt like elders who still had something to prove. It was loud in that way only big outdoor festivals can be loud, where the sound hits your chest before it registers in your ears. You weren’t analyzing tones or arrangements. You were just inside it, part of a massive, shared moment that felt untouchable.
Years later, the second experience could not have been more different.
This time, I was working a show at Centre In The Square. Smaller room. Tighter energy. A different lineup, a different era of the band, but the same name stitched across the backdrop. Instead of being swallowed by a crowd, I was walking backstage, weaving between road cases, cables, and guitar techs doing last minute checks. Instead of watching the De Leo brothers from a field, I was literally walking past their rigs. Rows of guitars resting quietly before the show. Bass cabinets humming faintly. Pedalboards laid out like blueprints. It was the machinery behind the mythology.
There is something grounding about seeing a band this way. The songs that once felt untouchable suddenly reveal the work behind them. The choices. The discipline. The fact that this thing you once experienced as a teenager or twenty something in a sea of people is still being carefully assembled every night by professionals who care deeply about how it sounds and feels. The new lineup brought its own energy, respectful of the past without trying to cosplay it. Different voice, same spine. Those De Leo lines still doing the heavy lifting, still unmistakable within seconds.
What struck me most was how both versions felt true in their own context. The original lineup at Edgefest was about presence and danger and a sense that anything could go off the rails at any moment. The later iteration was about endurance. About a band that refused to let the music calcify into nostalgia alone. One was about youth and excess. The other was about craft and continuity.
Seeing Stone Temple Pilots both ways gave me a strange kind of closure and appreciation at the same time. It reminded me that bands, like people, are not static. They fracture, rebuild, adapt, and sometimes surprise you by still sounding like themselves after everything changes. From the roar of Downsview Park to the quiet hum backstage at Centre In The Square, STP somehow managed to exist convincingly in both worlds.
Not many bands get to do that. Fewer still get to let you witness it from both sides of the curtain.
