A couple of weeks ago my eye fell on a newspaper clipping from the Detroit Free Press from September 9, 1992. A small section in the ‘Upcoming Music Releases’ list for the fourth quarter of 1992 listed a release for a band named ‘Stone Temple Pilots’. Here it is:
‘“Vatican Gift Shop,” Stone Temple Pilots (Atlantic)‘ it says. You can check any other release listing in any other publication and it will say “Core” as the album title. Of course, “Core” is STP’s debut album, released through Atlantic Records on September 29th 1992.
At the time, this could and would have been dismissed as a typo, an error. It was not until early 1996 that the name ‘Vatican Gift Shop’ was heard again, when STP announced the release of their third album, “Tiny Music… Songs from the Vatican Gift Shop”.
Not so much a typo in 1992 after all. “Vatican Gift Shop” was a title coined by guitarist Dean DeLeo, who also came up with the name “Core”. Dean has since told me that “Vatican Gift Shop” might have indeed originated at that time, but was never really officially going to be the album title for their debut. “Core” as the title was solidified by the whole band pretty quickly. How the other title ended up in publication, remains a mystery.
The band was at that time still called Mighty Joe Young and they actually approved the album artwork for “Core” before they had to change the band name to Stone Temple Pilots for legal reasons. Not a whole lot of details are known about the band’s time around the name change. Should be a good research subject for future posts.