I really wanted to keep him, I liked his playing, and we played well together, and I loved Eric as a person." "It was tough for him because were his friends. "I told him that if he wanted to do something, I wanted to do something, but that we should go do something else," said DeLeo. I started recording some songs for him, and then he asked me to play on the songs, and then he asked me to join his band." He came over with the band that he just broke up with and asked if I could record some songs for the new band he was forming. This was around '86 I guess, because that's when I met Scott. So I had a home studio in an apartment in Long Beach, and started really getting into recording and engineering and writing songs. "I had gotten some inheritance money from our dad passing away. I think that around '87 he got the urge to get some equipment again," Robert DeLeo told KNAC.
The Stone Temple Pilots story starts several years earlier, as the DeLeo brothers left their home base in New Jersey, with older brother Dean getting a job offer in California and briefly giving up music. 29, 1992, the band arrived on the scene by releasing their debut disc Core. A four-piece featuring bassist Robert DeLeo, guitarist Dean DeLeo, drummer Eric Kretz and a charismatic vocalist named Scott Weiland had just taken the name Stone Temple Pilots after forgoing their previous moniker Mighty Joe Young due to a potential legal conflict. As 1992 arrived, the explosion of "grunge" was hitting new heights and a new band from SoCal was ready for their turn in the spotlight.