Songfacts®:

• Stone Temple Pilots went for a raw rock sound on their third album, Tiny Music... Songs From The Vatican Gift Shop. On the lead single, "Big Bang Baby," the lyrics are secondary. Scott Weiland called them "Bowie-esque stream-of-conciousness lyrics that didn't need to make sense."
  
  That helps explain lines like:
  
  There's a hole in your head
  Where the birds can't sing along
• The "Big bang baby, it's a crash, crash, crash" line is what Scott Weiland calls a "loving steal" from the Rolling Stones song "Jumpin' Jack Flash," where Mick Jagger sings, "Jumpin' Jack Flash it's a gas, gas, gas."
• STP bass player Robert DeLeo wrote the music for this track; Weiland wrote the lyrics. In a Songfacts interview, DeLeo said: "I was thinking of those old Little Richard records, trying to get a '50s beat going with the tom and the hand claps. I had that riff roaming around in my head for a long time. It was one of those things where I was like, 'Damn it. I've got to find a way to make a song out of that!'"
• The video finds the band performing in front of a white backdrop that turns trippy. It was directed by the photographer John Eder.
• The album title originally came from the word magnets the band had on the refrigerator in the house they were renting to do the record. Dean DeLeo put the words "Tiny Music" together, then Scott Weiland suggested "Songs From The Vatican Gift Shop."