I got all nostalgic recently so decided to track down some of the music I listened to back when my hair was shoulder length and brown.  One of the bands I was then obsessed with was Stone Temple Pilots, a Seattle based 4 piece who enjoyed moderate mainstream success as far as that sort of thing can be measured from taping music awards shows and watching Rage. It is only with the benefit of the internet that I have discovered just how negatively ‘grunge’ audiences and ‘rock’ journalists received the band during their heyday.  Many regarded Stone Temple Pilots as weak, ‘grunge’ bandwagonists, desperately imitating both the lyrical content and musical style of ‘grunge’ giants such as Pearl Jam and Nirvana.  I was rather ignorant in those days of the rigid conventions music journalists were working with so perhaps they had a point, but I reckon many who condemned STP back in the early/mid 90s might want to compare their efforts to current crop of poncing try-hards which proliferate the ‘rock’ scene today and get some fucking perspective.

Short Stack - keepin' it real. 

Anyways, when I went to you know where to track down the MTV Unplugged performance of Stone Temple Pilots’ brilliant rendition of ‘Creep’, I was mortified—MORTIFIED— to see the amount of comments left on any uploaded version of the clip exclaiming the individual had always thought that STP’s ‘Creep’ was a Nirvana song called ‘Half The Man I Used To Be’.  It should be stated at this point that those individuals who wilfully exhibit their ignorance online aren’t normal people; these are internet people we are dealing with and as we all know (present company excluded) internet people aren’t the sharpest tools in the shed in terms of general knowledge and the application of logic.  So while it might—MIGHT—be possible for a couple of people to assume the line include in the chorus of ‘Creep’ (‘I’m half the man I used to be/this I feel as the dawn it fades to grey’) is the actual title of the song, and that some people might—MIGHT—struggle to discern Scott Weiland’s vocals from those of Kurt Cobain, I still cannot believe the sheer number of people who made (and continue to make)this same mistake.  I’m not talking one or two, either.  I have personally encountered anywhere between 7 to 10 different comments from different people responding to different videos of ‘Creep’ with: ‘I always thought this was a Nirvana song called ‘Half The Man I Used To Be’’, adding lol to the end of the statement in a feeble attempt to make the comment more digestible.  Seriously, how is it even statistically possible for so many people to fuck up so majorly?  For so many people to be similarly misguided one would have to assume that this apocryphal Nirvana song was a single.  Yet such is Nirvana’s enduring mainstream success that even the most pop-orientated listener could probably recite Nirvana’s entire music catalogue and notice that no song entitled ‘Half The Man I Used To Be’ exists within it.  So how/where the hell did the confusion first originate? 

Anyways, here’s the video in question.  Notice how youthful /professional/attractive Scott Weiland was before all that unpleasantness (ie: Velvet Revolver).