Return to rock

Stone Temple Pilots, Creed, Alice In Chains

by Matt Ashare

Stone Temple Pilots

A couple of weeks ago, MTV once again zeroed in on what passes for the zeitgeist these days -- which means just about anything that can be quickly packaged and sold to young consumers with the will to accessorize. MTV did so with something called the "Return to Rock" weekend, a couple of days when teeny-poppers and Yo MTV Rappers were forced to take a back seat to an array of white guys with guitars. And, for the first time in years, the notion of Ricki Rachman's bringing back his "Headbangers Ball" (the once popular heavy-metal hoedown that, before the alternative nation put it out of business, was to the late '80s what Yo MTV Raps is to the late '90s) didn't seem all that far-fetched.

As if to confirm that MTV still has its virtual finger on the lucrative pulse of America's youth, the grungy hard-rock/heavy-metal band Creed not only debuted at #1 last week on the Billboard album sales chart with their new Human Clay (Wind-Up) but did so in the face of stiff competition, with new releases by country megastar Garth Brooks and the charismatic hip-hop duo of Method Man and Redman jockeying for the #2 and #3 spots. According to Billboard columnist Geoff Mayfield, Creed are only the third rock act to top the chart this year. That stat says as much about the sad state of commercial rock as it does about the popularity of Creed, especially when you consider that the other two Mayfield is counting are Limp Bizkit and Nine Inch Nails, the former a rap-rock band and the latter a one-man techno-industrial complex. In other words, by my count, Creed are the first rock to top the chart in '99.

So, who hell are Creed? That seems to be a remarkably popular question, even though the Florida-based foursome scored three radio hits off their triple-platinum 1997 debut, My Own Prison, and got Doors guitarist Robbie Krieger excited enough to join them on stage at Woodstock this past summer for renditions of "Roadhouse Blues" and "Riders on the Storm." One simple answer is, they're that band on the radio who sound like Alice in Chains.

Why aren't Creed more of a household name? As Mayfield accurately points out, the media haven't paid much attention to Creed, perhaps because, well, they do sound an awful lot like Alice in Chains. And media types tend to focus more on the first and second waves of a particular style, when words like "hot" and "new" can be tossed around freely, than on the third, fourth, and fifth waves, until you're far enough from the source that it can begin to be called a hot, new revival. So, maybe after two years that have seen hip-hop and R&B dominating rock, the total collapse of the last of the Seattle grunge empire (Soundgarden breaking up/Alice in Chains on an extended hiatus), and a resurgence of the kind of slickly produced dance pop that Nirvana and Pearl Jam drove from the top of the charts, we've finally come far enough down the line for Creed to be spearheading a retro trend.

The blueprint for the deep, dark, menacing churn of Creed's sludge-factory guitars, clenched and knotty vocals, Zeppelinesque rhythm assaults, and overall tone of angst-ridden anguish and soul-searching desperation belongs to Alice in Chains. And you can hear AIC developing what, along with rap rock and industrial metal, became one of the major sonic archetypes for hard rock in the '90s on the new Music Bank (Columbia, in stores October 26), a three-CD, 48-track box-set overview of the band's decade-long career that probably wouldn't be necessary yet if they were still an actual working entity. But with singer Layne Staley on what's turning out to be an extended leave of absence, guitarist Jerry Cantrell enjoying a successful solo career, and four years having passed since the band's last proper studio album, something needed to be done to maintain the valuable AIC brand name.

The box features an assortment of the usual archival enticements -- a previously unreleased Staley/Cantrell tune ("Died"), rare B-sides, demos, remixes, alternate takes, and live recordings, as well as a healthy sampling of album tracks taken from the band's four Columbia CDs and some CD-ROM embellishments. The story it tells is one that traces the emergence of '90s hard rock from the spandex ashes of its '80s counterpart. Early on, in the demos for the band's largely forgotten pre-grunge 1990 debut, Facelift (Columbia), you can hear the clearly defined influence of Guns N' Roses on the AIC sound, both in Staley's attempts to mimic Axl Rose's vocals and in Cantrell's guitar, which awkwardly tries to incorporate some of the boogie blues that defined Slash's playing style.

Elsewhere, Music Bank simply surveys the rock that's become a foundation for bands like Creed, who are to the late '90s what Stone Temple Pilots were to the first half of the decade -- commercially successful, critically maligned (or, at least, ignored) disciples of the great grunge titans. Like the STP of '92's Core (Atlantic), Creed make better pop music than do Alice in Chains. But what Human Clay and Core have to offer in terms of radio-friendly hooks is offset by a corresponding lack of depth or substance or, for lack of a better word, soul. That's not to say pop music can't also be deep and soulful, only that in some cases it's not. Of course, such things are almost purely subjective, so I'm sure there are plenty of young Creed fans hanging on each and every one of singer Scott Stapp's brow-furrowing howling and growling ruminations.

With their cleverly titled new Atlantic album IV (catch the Zeppelin reference and the allusion to singer Scott Weiland's intravenous drug problem), Stone Temple Pilots prove that a band who sound shamelessly derivative in one context (the alterna-grunge years of '92-'95) can easily take on a whole new meaning in different circumstances. Actually, the shift started back in '96, when STP reinvented themselves as something closer to Urge Overkill than to Alice in Chains -- a revved- and glammed-up punking power-pop band as at home plundering Beatlisms as they were copping Zeppelinesque riffs. Unfortunately, the band fell apart before they could capitalize on the rave reviews garnered by Tiny Music . . . Songs from the Vatican Gift Shop (Atlantic). But IV more or less picks up where Tiny Music left off, sweetening the crunch of Dean DeLeo's power chords and Eric Kretz's hammering backbeats with nifty "la, la, la" vocal harmonies, Beatlesque bridges, folky acoustic-guitar interludes, a tune, "Pruno," that mutates from U2-style atmospherics to a glam-rocking chorus that brings to mind David Bowie, and another, "Atlanta," that recalls the moody meandering blues of the Doors, replete with Weiland pulling off a convincing Jim Morrison impersonation.

STP haven't completely abandoned the brooding grunge of their early years, some of which sounds awfully good now that Nirvana are long gone, Alice in Chains are out of commission, and Pearl Jam are in a world of their own. Next to Creed, STP come across as a subtle, nuanced, musically sophisticated band -- a real return to a classic kind of rock that served as a blueprint for Alice in Chains' blueprint for '90s rock. As a result, in what would certainly be an ironic twist, STP could end up being more of a hit with critics in '99 than on the charts, where a genuine return to rock may take more than an MTV weekend and a new Creed album to gain a genuine foothold.