People may be calling this summer’s Stone Temple Pilots tour a reunion outing. But that’s probably not the word guitarist Dean DeLeo would use, even though in the five years since the group’s last show, the four band members moved on to different projects.

“It wasn’t a breakup, man,” he said in a phone interview shortly before the mid-May start of the band’s tour. “We were shoulder to shoulder for 14 years, man. And you know, you start getting a little tired of one another’s routines, let’s just say.”

So maybe it was inevitable that Stone Temple Pilots would resume its career. But even as recently as early 2007, it didn’t seem like the band’s future was anywhere in sight.

Singer Scott Weiland was firmly entrenched in Velvet Revolver, the successful band in its own right that also featured three former members of Guns ’N Roses.

The other three erstwhile Stone Temple Pilots members — DeLeo, his brother Robert DeLeo (bass) and Kretz — had joined forces with singer Richard Patrick from Filter in the band Army of Anyone.

What wasn’t known publicly as Velvet Revolver continued to grind on behind its new album Libertad, and that the DeLeo brothers and Kretz kept at a low profile, was that by fall of 2007, the seeds for a Stone Temple Pilots reunion had already been sewn.

It all started with a phone call to Dean DeLeo from Weiland’s wife, Mary. She was involved in a private party and wanted to know if Farm Fur, a 12-piece band that included DeLeo and Steve Ferrone, the drummer with Tom Petty & the Heartbreakers, would play the event. Before the call was over, she asked DeLeo if he wanted to speak to Weiland. Talk turned to the idea of Weiland singing with Farm Fur at the party.

“A couple of months after that we were in a room again with agents and lawyers, and voila, a 65-date tour is spawned,” DeLeo said.

So Stone Temple Pilots is back up and running, resuming a career that some feel has seen as many missed opportunities as triumphs.