After forming in 1989 under the name Mighty Joe Young, the band signed with Atlantic Records and changed its name to Stone Temple Pilots.

The band was simultaneously voted Best New Band by Rolling Stone's readers and Worst New Band by the magazine's music critics. The following month the group won Favorite Pop/Rock New Artist and Heavy Metal/Hard Rock New Artist at the American Music Awards.

The band decided on the name "Core", referring to the apple of the Biblical story of Adam and Eve. Keeping to this theme, the album also features songs such as "Wicked Garden" and "Sin".

Sell your soul and sign an autograph
Big bang baby, it's a crash, crash, crash
I wanna cry but I gotta laugh
Orange crush mama is a laugh, laugh, laugh

Lead singer Scott Weiland encountered problems with drug addiction in the late-1990s, which inspired some of his songs and resulted in prison time.

During an interview with SongFacts in 2014, Scott Weiland confirmed that the key line in "Vasoline" came from a misheard lyric: His parents put on the Eagles song "Life in the Fast Lane", and Weiland thought they were singing, "Flies in the Vasoline." In his autobiography, he adds that the song "is about being stuck in the same situation over and over again. It's about me becoming a junkie. It's about lying to Jannina [his first wife] and lying to the band about my heroin addiction."

Lovely disguise, read between the lines
You rock the magic plane with no abbreviation
Three, four you sell what you bought
And there ain't no magic pen to get back what you lost

The band, sans Weiland, recruited Dave Coutts, the frontman of Ten Inch Men, and performed under the moniker Talk Show. Talk Show released one self-titled album in 1997 before dissolving.

The trippy video, which features what can only be described as super-creepy Teletubby-like creatures, was based on a dream Weiland had. Sarah Michelle Gellar, who was a huge fan of the band, played the female lead in the video. At the time, Gellar was a rising star thanks to her TV series Buffy the Vampire Slayer.

Weiland responded to the firing with his own statement, "I learned of my supposed 'termination' from Stone Temple Pilots this morning by reading about it in the press. Not sure how I can be 'terminated' from a band that I founded, fronted and co-wrote many of its biggest hits, but that's something for the lawyers to figure out."