Robbed hit of the week 6/10/19 - Stone Temple Pilots' "Big Empty"...
from the albums The Crow (Original Soundtrack) and Purple (both 1994)
Billboard Hot 100 peak: unqualified to chart
Billboard Hot 100 airplay peak: #50
This week's "robbed hit" comes from the grunge rock band Stone Temple Pilots, whose debut album Core had spun off a huge airplay hit with "Plush", which topped Billboard magazine's Mainstream Rock radio list, and made the top-40 on the pop airplay chart, but was unable to place on the Billboard pop Hot 100 since it wasn't commercially available as a "single". At the start of 1994, the group contributed a song to the soundtrack of the Brandon Lee movie The Crow, which became a morbidly successful film as its star died in the making of it. In fact, they were going to just re-record an earlier track, "Only Dying", until that tragedy. Instead they would donate a song that would also serve as the lead single of their upcoming second album Purple, "Big Empty". Written by lead singer Scott Weiland and guitarist Dean DeLeo, the brooding song got them back on the radio in a big way, and helped The Crow soundtrack to top the albums sales chart...
Although "Big Empty", like "Plush", wasn't able to chart on the Hot 100 in Billboard because it was an album-only track, nevertheless it garnered enough airplay on mainstream radio to go to #50 on their Hot 100 Airplay portion of that list. The song was a much bigger success on rock radio, spending five weeks at #3 on Billboard's Mainstream Rock chart, and peaking at #7 on their Modern Rock radio format list. Internationally, the song (released as a single) were minor hits Down Under in New Zealand (#47) and Australia (#63).
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The band never filmed an official music video for "Big Empty". Instead, MTV used footage from their Unplugged series featuring the band that wasn't shown before...
Next up, the band in concert in Pennsylvania in 2001...
And finally, live in 2010...
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