A twenty-five-dollar guitar, and a clean lie from Atlanta
The riff twangs and then slickens, country in the fingers, something smoother in the chorus, as if two songs had agreed to share a car. Scott Weiland’s voice rides the line between a drawl and a dare. Interstate Love Song sounds, on first pass, like a man in motion who misses someone. Stay for the second verse and the motion is the problem. He is on the phone. He is fine. He is not fine. The band plays it as if the sunshine were part of the cover story.
Robert DeLeo wrote the music on a nylon-string guitar that cost twenty-five dollars, during the tour for Core, in a hotel room and then in the trailer behind the Winnebago, calling the others on a walkie-talkie when the chords felt true. It began as a bossa nova, an Antonio Carlos Jobim shape he did not think a rock crowd would keep. He added a country figure. When Weiland heard it, he hummed the intro’s melody up into a chorus. The words came later, in Atlanta, where the band recorded Purple in 1994 with Brendan O’Brien at Southern Tracks. Weiland’s fiancée, Jannina Castaneda, was back in California. She had stepped away from heroin. He had not. Each night he told her he was off it. The lyric imagines her reading the pause. He sang the vocal in one take.
Kevin Kerslake’s video made the lie visible with a Pinocchio nose, silent-film slapstick over a song that was not joking. On the radio the twang won. Interstate Love Song became the track that outlived the argument about whether Stone Temple Pilots were a Seattle copy, because it did not sound like Seattle. It sounded like a highway and a bad promise. Live, Weiland could turn it into theatre or into a confession, depending on the year and the blood. DeLeo has said he would still like to record it, one day, as the bossa nova it was.
It has a few different themes. Honesty, lack of honesty, my new relationship with heroin. The whole time I was in Atlanta I was telling her I was off it.
(Scott Weiland, Blender, 2005)
Weiland, in a 2005 conversation with Blender and later in the memoir Not Dead & Not for Sale, stopped letting the sunshine stand. The themes were honesty and the lack of it, a new relationship with heroin, the weeks in Atlanta spent insisting he was clean. The hand in rusted shame is not a road metaphor. It is a man hearing himself lie and writing the other person’s side of the receiver. O’Brien’s production keeps the guitars bright enough that you can miss this. The brightness is not an accident. It is how the phone call sounded to the person who wanted to believe it.
What remains is the cheap guitar’s chord, still traveling. Interstate Love Song lets you sing the hook without the heroin, and then refuses, if you read, to let the hook be only a hook. The interstate is the distance required for the lie to work. Hang up, and the riff is still going.
