“We all handled it differently, but safe to say it can be a deadly thing.”Īnd so it proved. “I don’t know too many that could handle that type of attention coming at you at such speed,” he says. However, thanks in part to the success of Interstate Love Song and its sister singles Vasoline and Big Empty, Purple was a massive commercial success, topping the Billboard chart for three weeks and selling more than six million copies.ĭeLeo admits that the band’s seemingly instant celebrity became a problem. Everything except the writing and performing of the songs was simply fluff." “We were working with people of Brendan’s stature, and those were the opinions that mattered to me. “Such criticism was never really a concern to me,” he says patiently. “It was a privilege to make records with him, and we certainly were not trying to copy anybody else.”Ī quarter-century down the line, those written accusations of his band being Pearl Jam rip-offs now prompt the bassist to give a wry smile. In an interview from the time, drummer Eric Kretz said: “We would maybe be worrying that a song sounded a little too close to Alice In Chains or Pearl Jam, and each time Brendan talked us out of that.” “It’s pretty incredible to think that Purple was tracked, mixed and out of the door in just eleven days.” “We trusted Brendan completely and the process felt very natural,” DeLeo recalls.
He also liked to leave the listener to make up their own minds as to a song’s interpretation.”Īs with Core, STP retained the services of producer Brendan O’Brien for Purple. “But as a writer, Scott always was very poetic. “The meaning wasn’t completely obvious, but when you know what the song was about it’s a very poetic piece,” DeLeo says now. “The words are about the lies I was trying to conceal while making the Purple record,” he later admitted. Their relationship was on the rocks due to the singer’s hidden yet worsening addiction to heroin, and the words he came up with for it bled out deceit and broken promises.Įach night he would bury his shame and call Castaneda and insist that he was clean. While the band worked at Southern Tracks Recording in Atlanta, his fiancé Janina Castaneda remained at home in California. While recording the song for Purple, vocalist Scott Weiland threw in the Interstate part of the title.