Whatever Happened to Alternative Nation

Whatever Happened To Alternative Nation?

By Steven Hyden

Part 1: 1990: 1990: “Once upon a time, I could love you”

By Steven Hyden Oct 5, 2010 12:00 AM “I don’t want to sound snobby, but I was a snob back then, so why not—it wasn’t punk rock, it wasn’t underground, it wasn’t rebellious to me. I saw it as being very mainstream. Now had I been living in the Midwest and was bored with everything on MTV, and didn’t realize there was all this cool stuff going on, maybe I would have been charged by it too.”

—Robert Roth, singer for the Seattle band Truly, as quoted by Greg Prato in Grunge Is Dead: The Oral History Of Seattle Rock Music There’s an old line that’s been attributed to everyone from Dennis Hopper to Robin Williams to Grace Slick of Jefferson Airplane that goes, “If you remember the ’60s, you weren’t there.” Lately I’ve been thinking about how this quote relates to my current relationship with the mainstream ’90s rock I grew up on. I don’t mean Elliott Smith, Neutral Milk Hotel, Guided By Voices, or Yo La Tengo. That’s stuff I got into during the latter part of the decade, once I was a little older. (And I still listen to those bands now.) I’m talking about groups whose videos were introduced by the quirky, glasses-wearing, fury-provoking VJ Kennedy on MTV’s Alternative Nation: Nirvana, Pearl Jam, Soundgarden, Alice In Chains, Smashing Pumpkins, and many others I lost touch with after high school.

Well, maybe not Nirvana. I’ll still pull my favorite Nirvana records, In Utero and MTV Unplugged In New York, off the shelf every now and then. (MTV Unplugged In New York still sounds so haunted and moving that I wish it weren’t called MTV Unplugged In New York.) Last month, Nevermind turned 19, which means Nirvana’s most

popular album is nearly as old now as Woodstock was when the album was released on September 24, 1991.

Anyone who’s in college or younger doesn’t know a world where Nevermind doesn’t exist. Part of me wants to lord my generational ownership of Kurt Cobain’s music—and that of the other grunge-era alt-rock bands that stormed radio and the music charts in Nirvana’s wake—over those kids, much like baby boomers used to cram Woodstock retrospectives down the throats of people my age.

That way I could say, “You shoulda been there!” whenever “Smells Like Teen Spirit” comes on the radio. And I could track down all the people who chose to see Arcade Fire over the reunited Soundgarden this summer at Lollapalooza, and stridently assert that Superunkown is twice the album The Suburbs or Neon Bible will ever be. I basically want to act like a rapidly aging music fan like myself is supposed to act: Nostalgic for—and fiercely protective of—the music of my youth.

But it would all be ruse. The truth is that I feel little nostalgia for ’90s grunge, and almost no connection to the version of myself that once felt part of the Alternative Nation. I once believed that the rise of so-called alternative music in the early ’90s was the greatest thing to happen in my lifetime—world-changing, no less— but now this notion seems almost too embarrassing to admit in print. Over the years I’ve written these bands out of my personal history: Old concert T-shirts have been worn out or tossed away, CDs have long since been sold off. I remember the ’90s, but it’s like I wasn’t there. Like many people of my generation—including practically every band that was originally associated with the term—“grunge” for me has become something to live down, like cuffed jeans or bad Luke Perry sideburns.

Somewhere along the way, grunge-era alt-rock got tiresome. Today, it’s all but unbearable. Scanning the latest Billboard rock chart, you’ll find bands like Shinedown, Stone Sour, Three Days Grace, and of course Nickelback, who have adopted the pained, groany vocals and sludgy guitars associated with grunge and merged them seamlessly with a leather-pants and soul-patch sensibility that comes straight from hair metal. Unbeknownst to Kurt, Eddie, and Layne, they created a sonic blueprint that would go on to inspire disreputable bands for the next two decades. You can’t blame those guys for inspiring much of what’s awful and soulless about the state of “modern” rock music as we’ve come to know it, but their music is inextricably linked to it nonetheless.

It wasn’t always like this. In the beginning, grunge challenged the sexist and materialistic status quo of mainstream rock ’n’ roll, asserting a bold new concept of what rock stars could and should be. For a couple of years at least, grunge not only made the world safe for idealistic rejects and weirdos who were more comfortable hanging out with Gloria Steinem than Tawny Kitaen, it pretty much made socially conscious, politically correct, fame-averse, brooding loner types the only acceptable kind of rock stars.

The idea behind Whatever Happened To Alternative Nation? is to look back at an era that’s both incredibly important and yet mysteriously absent from my life as a music fan. I’ve gone back and repurchased a lot of the CDs I sold off—which, thanks to the bargain bin at Half-Price Books, has actually been a fairly inexpensive proposition—and reacquainted myself with groups that I once adored before they died off, broke up, or settled into respectable but uninspired careers. My goal is to rediscover what I saw in these bands when I was a teenager, and figure out why the music went from enlightening to deadening so rapidly, from the bucolic early years of Lollapalooza to the apocalyptic assault of Woodstock ’99. Because as easy as it is now to take potshots at the mumbly, histrionic sounds of the ’90s, this is music that meant a great deal to me and many others at the time. Out of respect for my teenaged self, I’m giving it an honest re-examination.

Each installment of Whatever Happened To Alternative Nation? will be tied to a year, starting with 1990—which I’m packaging with this introduction, since it’s really a prologue year—and proceed chronologically up through 1999. However, this isn’t intended to be a definitive history of grunge; I won’t be writing about every single Seattle band, or even most Seattle bands. A lot of it won’t even be about grunge; I also plan on looking at the feel-good bro tunes of Sublime, and the ironic arena-rock posturing of Urge Overkill, among other groups and how they fit in with the overall narrative of ’90s alt-rock’s rise and fall. I promise I’ll completely overlook at least one of your favorite bands; please don’t take it personally.

As a general rule, I’m interested in discussing ’90s bands that were played regularly on MTV and on the radio, even in a small city like my hometown of Appleton, Wisconsin, because this was the last time (as of now, anyway) that rock music acted as the engine under the hood of American pop culture. Inevitably, this series will reflect what I liked and cared about back then, which fortunately matches up with what millions of other teenaged residents of Alternative Nation liked and cared about. More than an exercise in nostalgia—or, worse, an excuse to pick on bands that haven’t aged all that well—I hope to give those who deserve it their due, and maybe figure out how something that seemed so promising at the time went so wrong.

There were a lot of exciting things happening musically in 1990. Pixies, Sonic Youth, Public Enemy, Neil Young & Crazy Horse, Ice Cube, and Jane’s Addiction released classic albums. Nirvana signed to Geffen/DGC Records after being courted by several major record labels; its screechingly poppy 1989 debut Bleach had been a steady, though still largely unheralded, seller. But it was an eight-song demo recorded with Butch Vig at Smart Studios in Madison, Wisconsin—just a quick 90-minute drive from my town—that was really getting people excited as it was widely circulated among record-industry types. Many of those songs, including future classics like “In Bloom” and “Lithium,” formed the core of Nevermind.

Elsewhere, a new group made up of musicians from well regarded but star-crossed hard-rock band Mother Love Bone played its first show with an unknown singer from San Diego named Eddie Vedder at a small club in Seattle. Around the same time, the band quickly wrote an album’s worth of material that would soon be released as Pearl Jam’s 1991 debut, Ten. And Alice In Chains set the table for the upcoming Seattle explosion when its debut, Facelift, went platinum.

As for me, I was rocking to the cutting-edge sounds of Paula Abdul and Milli Vanilli. Oh, and I was into Seattle bands, too: I totally adored that heavy-as-shit, middle-finger-to-the-world anthem “Silent Lucidity” by thinkingman’s prog-metallers Queensryche.

Being a kid in 1990 wasn’t all that different from being a kid in 2010 save for one massive technological step forward for mankind: the Internet. It didn’t exist back then—or, rather, kids like me did not have access to it. I didn’t even have a computer, nor did a lot of my friends. I was 12-going-on-13 in 1990, and my burgeoning interest in music was nurtured by three institutions: local radio, MTV, and the public library, where I could listen to vinyl records for free (CDs weren’t available there yet) and peruse scotch tape-covered copies of Rolling Stone, which is where I first read about “alternative” bands like U2, R.E.M., and The Replacements. If I wanted to buy a tape, I had to either convince my mother to drive me to the mall—a tall order considering how moneyconscious she was as a single parent—or make the one-hour bike ride (one way!) to the only independent record store in town, an oppressively cool place that frankly terrified me, as most things did back then.

Following music took real work if you happened to 1) be under 18, 2) live in a small town, 3) get paid a small allowance, 4) not have a driver’s license, and 5) have limited access to media that could tell you about the latest groups. Keeping up with underground music was practically impossible; you couldn’t just log on and dial up a million blogs offering up free music without leaving your bedroom. Underground music was actually underground; you had to venture out and look for it, and only after somebody let you in on the secret that it was actually there. Maybe I could’ve discovered Pixies’ Bossanova had I searched a little harder, but how could I look for something that I didn’t even know existed? For me, what I heard on the radio and saw on MTV was the only music there even was.

People have a tendency to romanticize the world as it existed when they were children. Looking back, things always seem simpler. I’m not going to paint you a picture of my childhood that looks like a heavily sanitized episode of Mad Men; the ’90s were a strange time of relative wealth and comfort, with a thick patina of selfdefeat and wasted potential. Nevertheless, my memories of 1990 tend to be wrapped in sepia-tinged oldtiminess. I spent a lot of time that year watching Paula Abdul sing one of my favorite songs, “Opposites Attract,” in a video that prominently featured a cartoon cat. How adorably red-cheeked and innocent is that? As far as I can tell, the video for “Opposites Attract” was not intended to be entertainment strictly for little kids. There was a very good chance that you’d see the video for “Unskinny Bop” immediately afterward. This gives you an idea

of how, shall we say, unsophisticated we were as pop-music listeners back then. The video for “Opposites Attract” might not be “(How Much Is) That Doggie In The Window?” but like that cheerfully insipid, pre-rock ’n’ roll Patti Page hit of the early ’50s, it signaled that American culture desperately needed someone to wipe that stupid grin off of its face.

Top 40 offered up a smorgasbord of options for my developing musical palate. I could dig deep into the blues with Alannah Myles’ “Black Velvet.” I could rail against the hypocrisy of our times with Poison’s “Something To Believe In.” I could delve into motivational pop psychology with Wilson Phillips’ “Hold On.” Or I could just dance to the ubiquitous grooves of Madonna’s “Vogue” and MC Hammer’s “U Can’t Touch This.” I loved each and every one of these songs in the ’90, and dozens more: Faith No More’s “Epic,” Sinead O’Connor’s “Nothing Compares 2 U,” Damn Yankees’ “High Enough,” Deee-Lite’s “Groove Is In The Heart,” Nelson’s “(Can’t Live Without Your) Love And Affection” and so on.

Say what you will about that roster of songs today, but there’s no denying that the hit-makers of 1990 haven’t exactly proven enduring. Madonna aside, the major pop stars that had produced single albums spinning off five, six, even seven hit songs just a few years earlier were experiencing fallow periods. Prince was reduced to recording inconsequential background music for Tim Burton’s Batman. Michael Jackson was in hiding as he worked on Dangerous, a dubiously named opus that seemed as plausible as Boy George recording an album called Clean, Sober, And Casually Dressed. George Michael petulantly burned the iconic leather jacket from the cover of 1987’s Faith in the video for his new, unmistakably Faith-sounding single “Freedom.” Bruce Springsteen had moved out to Los Angeles to work with studio musicians, a decision that was successful only from the perspective of making fans desperately appreciative of the E Street Band.

The music industry has a lifetime warranty with the pop audience ensuring that it will produce immediately catchy and inevitably annoying singles on a consistent basis. Nurturing lasting artists is another story; that’s something that seems to happen only in fits and starts. The music I was listening to in 1990 had its pleasures, but ultimately, it went straight to your ears and slipped past your heart. They were just songs you eventually got sick of, nothing more. I certainly couldn’t relate to them on any kind of personal level. I couldn’t turn to them, like a friend, when I needed to smile or bawl my eyes out. If you tried to hold this music too close, you’d wind up feeling alienated. Pop music at the time was for winners, and I had the sneaking suspicion that socially awkward adolescents from Wisconsin were the opposite of winners. (Which I guess would make me the cartoon cat in this equation.)

Nevermind probably would not have impacted me in quite the same way had I been aware of the context it came out of; had I been a little older and a fan of college radio, I’m sure it would’ve just been another record that I liked about as much as Bandwagonesque or Green Mind. But Nirvana was not a band I had to discover; it came right into my world, and discovered me. This is something Nirvana still doesn’t get enough credit for: Kurt Cobain turned himself into a radio star at a time when somebody like him becoming a radio star seemed unfathomable. So, yeah, it’s worth noting that “Smells Like Teen Spirit” sounds like Pixies, and that “Come As You Are” is a direct lift from Killing Joke’s “Eighties.” But Pixies and Killing Joke never got played on the radio in places like Appleton. Nirvana did, and this fact alone makes that band more important than any of Cobain’s underground precursors, who only started to matter on a macro level because they were Nirvana reference points.

It’s hard to convey today how revelatory it was hearing “Smells Like Teen Spirit” come out of your parents’ car stereo for the first time, but this was a bona-fide, according-to-Hoyle, head-slapping pop-culture surprise of the highest order. By the time I started 7th grade, I had already absorbed enough bad TV and cut-rate pop music to get a sense that culture unfolded in a predictable series of fads and trends; nothing ever came along to upset the applecart. But Nirvana clearly was not part of that. It didn’t matter that the band was on a major label; that was just underground-rock semantics and I didn’t speak that language yet. These guys were not supposed to be here, on MTV, sandwiched between Jane Child and Lisa Stanfield videos at 1 p.m. on a Tuesday. Nirvana finding you was like being sucked into a whole new reality tucked inside the simpler, grayer world you’d always known.

All of a sudden it was just there. If something this incredible could exist in the world right under your nose until it streaked in seemingly out of nowhere and smacked you repeatedly across the face, what in the hell else was out there?

I, for one, really wanted to find out. I was in the eighth grade when Nevermind came out, and I remember laughing the first time I saw the “Smells Like Teen Spirit” video. I got it—they were bagging on the cheesy, kidfriendly under-arm deodorant ads MTV used to play ad nauseum. (This is another thing Nirvana doesn’t get enough credit for: It could actually be a pretty funny band.) But I also didn’t know what to make of the song.

Here was this blonde guy who wore his hair in his face, so you couldn’t even see him; what was the point of making a video? He was mumbling something about how it was fun to lose and to pretend, and then he just went, like, nuts, screaming that he was here now and needed to be entertained. It was a far cry from Bret Michaels equating pumping gasoline with sex in "Unskinny Bop," which was a metaphor even a junior high school student like myself could grasp. “Smells Like Teen Spirit” was just … different. Nirvana seemed like a onehit wonder, only you couldn’t get the song out of your head. There was something odd about these guys— that’s the main reason I laughed at them initially—but Nirvana’s strangeness soon went from being a liability to the best thing about them in my book. When Poison sang about getting laid, it just made me feel sad, because I was convinced that no girl would ever, ever even look at me. I had braces, oversized glasses, a mullet that was unimpressive even by mullet standards, and acne dotting my face like Walgreens stores on a city landscape. I was the living embodiment of a weird song with a soft verse and a loud chorus, and here was a band that not only transcended its deficiencies, but made these deficiencies into strengths. To this day, Nirvana songs that are often described as depressing just seem fun to me. It’s the sound of losers shouting down their shame. It was the kind of escapism kids like me craved.

I always hate that moment in documentaries about social movements where somebody insists that whatever incredibly exciting and revolutionary phenomenon they were a part of could never happen again, because the world has inevitably changed for the worse, and today’s kids are just too jaded or clueless to do what they did.

What they’re really saying is that it will never happen for them again, because they’ve reached the age where they’re too jaded and clueless. When you’re young, whatever you’re doing feels revolutionary because the world is opening up for you in ways that will never be more exciting than they are right now, in this moment, forever and ever.

That said, I honestly wonder if the rise of grunge and alternative rock in the early ’90s will be the last time that a musical movement has that kind of impact on youth culture. With the Internet, we know about every promising

band seemingly from the time it records its first demos. By the time the album comes out, the backlash has already kicked in. Now the challenge is to not be informed; surprising people has gone the way of putting current events on newsprint. It’s almost like we don’t want to be surprised anymore, because that means we’re somehow out-of-the-loop, or not savvy enough to be there first, which seems to be of the utmost importance when it comes to music these days.

This is one instance where I’m glad I was just an ignorant kid stuck in a nowhere town where nothing cool seemed to happen. Because it made what happened next seem all the more exciting.

What Happened Next: Next: 1991 is remembered as the year of Nevermind, but at the time Guns N’ Roses’ wildly ambitious Use Your Illusion albums were supposed to set the world on fire. I’ll straddle the murky line between glam metal and alt-rock by delving into the epic feud between Kurt Cobain and Axl Rose, and explore how two men who perfectly personified their respective eras actually shared more common ground than either would’ve admitted.

Part 2: 1991: 1991: “What’s so civil about war anyway?”

By Steven Hyden Oct 19, 2010 12:00 AM “The Guns N’ Roses it’s okay to like.”—A headline about Nirvana from British music weekly New Musical Express “His role has been played for years. Ever since the beginning of rock and roll, there’s been an Axl Rose.

And it’s just boring. It’s totally boring to me. Why it’s such a fresh and new thing in his eyes is obviously because it’s happening to him personally and he’s such an egotistical person that he thinks that the whole world owes him something.”—Kurt Cobain on Axl Rose, as quoted by Michael Azerrad in Come As You Are: The Story Of Nirvana “You’re everything I could’ve been.”—Axl Rose to Kurt Cobain after a Nirvana show in October 1991, as related by Courtney Love in Mick Wall’s W.A.R.: The Unauthorized Biography Of William Axl Rose The trickiest part of writing history is putting styles, trends, and social movements in proper perspective. Not everybody spent the ’60s making babies in the mud at Woodstock, or the ’70s doing blow with Bianca Jagger at Studio 54. We dwell on these things because they’re easily recognizable signifiers of their respective eras, but a lot gets overlooked when you use the easy shorthand of Nehru jackets and Bee Gees songs. The spectrum of experiences in any era is simply too wide; it makes me wonder whether the so-called “monoculture” ever really existed, where “everybody agreed on” what was good on the radio and the three TV networks. Maybe we’ve just gotten better about recognizing that even really popular things are irrelevant to significant portions of the population. A band as seemingly all-encompassing as The Beatles were in the ’60s probably didn’t mean much to a black teenager living in inner-city Detroit, a truck driver from rural Texas, or the millions of decent, hardworking, square-as-hell middle Americans who impatiently waited for those tuneless long-hairs to finish their songs on Ed Sullivan so the jugglers and impressionists could come on.

There’s an oft-repeated anecdote about how Nevermind stormed to the top of the Billboard charts in the closing days of 1991 because kids returned their unwanted copies of Michael Jackson’s Dangerous for the Nirvana album they really wanted for Christmas. It’s a story rich with metaphorical significance, pitting the upstart punk-rock band against the gargantuan ’80s pop superstar, and ending with the new guys wresting away the cultural torch by bloody force. In the movie version, you’d see teenagers everywhere suddenly ditch their Day-Glo OP shirts and stone-washed jeans for flannel and Doc Martens, and hear them loudly pontificating about how parents, the school system, and the media were telling the younger generation what to care about, and how these things were complete and utter horseshit. It’s like we all decided to become Christian Slater in Pump Up The Volume, and it started with Nirvana dethroning the King Of Pop. In reality, Dangerous ended up being arguably more popular than Nevermind, selling more than 30 million copies worldwide and spawning nine singles over the course of two years. The sixth song from Dangerous released to radio, “Heal The World,” would likely be recognized today by more casual music fans than any Nirvana song save possibly “Smells Like Teen Spirit.” Dangerous only seems like a failure when compared with the three blockbusters—Off The Wall, Thriller, and Bad—Jackson released before it. But there were still a lot of people who loved Dangerous; he might have lost the battle to Nevermind in the eyes of rock historians, but Michael Jackson still did okay in the war.

Nevermind had already been mythologized by the time of Kurt Cobain’s suicide in 1994; afterward, it seemed Nevermind existed only as an historical turning point marking Cobain’s biggest triumph and his doom-laden introduction to the dark side of inescapable fame and adulation. It’s difficult to play Nevermind today without feeling the weight of history, or hearing the crash of foreboding thunder. But Nevermind’s entry into the canon of Important Rock Records did have some lag time. When it was released, it only got three stars and a genial review from Rolling Stone. According to Spin, Nirvana was good but not nearly as good as Teenage Fanclub, whose Bandwagonesque was named album of the year.

(Nevermind did top the Village Voice’s Pazz & Jop Critics Poll, ranking ahead of Public Enemy, R.E.M., U2, and P.M. Dawn. “Smells Like Teen Spirit” also took No. 1 on the singles list, ranking 19 spots above “Pop Goes The Weasel” by 3rd Bass, which, like Nirvana, was deadly serious about calling out “phony entertainers.”)

Like millions of other kids, I owned a copy of Nevermind by the end of 1991. But I didn’t rush out to buy it as soon as I heard “Smells Like Teen Spirit.” I did, however, browbeat my mother into driving me to the mall so I could buy two albums that came out the week before Nevermind. I had waited three years for these records— my whole life as a music-buying consumer. For months, I had been swallowing up the hype promising that this music just might end up being the greatest thing to ever punish my eardrums. Clearly, I had to possess it as soon as it was available.

You know where you are? You’re in the jungle with Guns N’ Roses’ Use Your Illusion I and Use Your Illusion II, baby! And by the end of 1991, something that was once vital about the baddest band on the planet was gonna diiie!

1991 might be remembered as the year of Nevermind, but no band was bigger at the time than GN-effin-R, and no rock star had more power than Axl Rose, a man that made wearing a bandana and spandex biker shorts in public credible by sheer force of personality. Guns N’ Roses’ 1987 debut, Appetite For Destruction, ranked among the best-selling rock albums of all time, and it was the soundtrack for countless coming-of-age moments for teenagers in the late ’80s and early ’90s. Kids everywhere were getting laid, drunk, and beat up for the first time to the sounds of “Welcome To The Jungle” and “Paradise City.” By 1991, Axl was so powerful that he was able to essentially coerce his record company, Geffen, into releasing two maniacally ambitious double-albums on the same day—Sept. 17, 1991—rather than a year or two apart, which is what the label wanted to do because it happened to make a lot more sense. The dual release of the Use Your Illusion albums was an act of hubris so brazen in its arrogance and yet strangely admirable in its artistic stubbornness that nobody had been fucking crazy enough to try anything like it before, or attempt to copy it in the nearly two decades since. (Yes, there was Bruce Springsteen’s little-loved Human Touch/Lucky Town experiment the following year, and Nelly’s

Sweat/Suit dual-release in 2004, but at least those weren’t double albums.) We can debate about the greatness and importance of Nevermind—I’d rather we didn’t, but go ahead if you want—but there’s no arguing against the Use Your Illusion saga being a unique and historical event in rock history; in terms of excess, it planted a flag at the end of the world.

Grandiose piano-based balladry, queasily personal prog-punk epics, STD-ridden blues laments, “joke” songs about bitches lying dead in ditches, sleazy folk numbers denouncing anonymous and not-so-anonymous exes, surprisingly trenchant anti-war songs, furious (and libelous) attacks on journalists, guest vocals from the Blind Melon guy—Use Your Illusion left it all in. All Geffen could do was hope that Rose didn’t decide to unload even more stifling paranoia and motor-mouthed psycho-babble into additional songs, further delaying the release of these overstuffed, twin wooly mammoths into the wild.

The first taste the world got of Use Your Illusion was “You Could Be Mine,” which was released as a single in June of 1991 in connection with Terminator 2: Judgment Day, which just so happened to be the other massively hyped piece of entertainment I was obsessed with that year. GNR was still months away from actually releasing the albums “You Could Be Mine” was intended to tease—it came from Use Your Illusion II, which was probably really confusing if you didn’t know about Use Your Illusion I—but the Arnold Schwarzenegger-assisted video did succeed in making the band a ubiquitous presence on MTV that summer as it toured the country. Not that GNR needed any help getting attention; during a St. Louis show in July, Rose reacted to what he perceived as “lameass security” by storming off the stage during a performance of “Rocket Queen,” the band’s 15th song of the night. The audience responded by trashing the place, causing $200,000 in damages; Rose was later arrested for inciting a riot. (He got his revenge by writing, “Fuck you, St. Louis!” in the liner notes of both Use Your Illusion albums.)

The riot suggested that GNR’s image was still gritty enough to convince fans that punching each other in the face was a reasonable response to the band playing for “only” 90-or-so minutes. But Use Your Illusion was the work of a band moving beyond its humble beginnings as heroin-scamming street scamps; soon the world would discover that “You Could Be Mine”—a lean, mean, and roaring rattlesnake shake in the vein of Appetite—had created a set of hard-rockin’ expectations that the albums, whatever their other merits, wouldn’t come close to living up to.

The defining single of GNR’s UYI period instead ended up being “November Rain,” which hit MTV one year after “You Could Be Mine.” Needlessly expensive, fatally overblown, and a clear product of self-destructive tunnelvision, the video for “November Rain” already seemed laughably dated the first time MTV played it. It was as if Axl was dutifully following a checklist of things you didn’t want to see GNR involved with: opulent weddings, humungous orchestras, heavy-handed symbolism, Stephanie Seymour, and so on. Just five years earlier, GNR presented a much different image in the video for “Welcome To The Jungle,” which for me is the single most powerful thing the band ever did, even more powerful than Appetite as a whole. To this day, Guns N’ Roses as seen in the “Welcome To The Jungle” video is the only rock band to ever truly frighten me. Yes, it helped that I was only 10 at the time, but GNR was unnerving in a way that even the scariest of scary metal bands couldn’t touch. Metal bands were like slasher movies; GNR was like prison rape.

Nirvana is credited with making ’80s hair-metal bands look silly with Nevermind, but GNR had already done that with the “Welcome To The Jungle” video several years earlier. But even if Rose had grander ambitions by ’91, the young turks from Seattle threatening to make him a dinosaur before his time apparently didn’t threaten him. In fact, he was among the first rock stars to hop aboard the Nevermind bandwagon. In September 1991, GNR released the video for the relatively restrained power ballad “Don’t Cry,” which included clips of Rose wearing a Nirvana baseball cap. Rose wore the same cap in the making-of documentary, and apparently was an enthusiastic fan of his Geffen labelmates away from the cameras as well. In October, he dragged Slash to see Nirvana perform in Los Angeles and, according to Mick Wall’s W.A.R.: The Unauthorized Biography of William Axl Rose, he even did his little Axl dance while the band played. (Why oh why didn’t iPhones exist in 1991?)

Rose longed to hear Nirvana cover “Welcome To The Jungle”—he wanted it done “their way, however it is”— and put out a request for the band to play his 30th birthday party. Publicly, he reached out for Nirvana to join GNR and Metallica on their massive stadium tour, which would’ve been an incredible boon for any band trying to establish an audience at the time. (When Nirvana said no, Rose instead asked Soundgarden, another Seattle band he praised in the media before most mainstream rock fans had heard of the group.)

Say what you want about Axl Rose, but you can’t accuse him of not putting out the welcome mat for new pledges in the rock-star fraternity. More than anything, the guy just sounds like a fan; I know I would have asked Nirvana to play my birthday party in 1991 if I had the means. Unfortunately, Axl Rose embracing Nirvana seemed to confirm Kurt Cobain’s worst fears about signing with a major label. For Cobain, Axl Rose represented everything horrible about corporate rock. On a personal level, he found Rose to be a despicable human being,

the epitome of racist, sexist, homophobic, proudly redneck and macho assholes that his music was intended to irritate and destroy.

That Rose was actually more complicated than that—he was just as much of a misfit as Cobain was growing up, and a fairly sensitive guy considering he once called his mother a “cunt” in the song “Bad Obsession”—was beside the issue. Rose signified old-guard, cock-rock superstardom, and Cobain was never more deliberate in his desire to dismantle that institution than in his outspoken criticism of Guns N’ Roses. Cobain’s aversion to turning into Axl Rose bordered on obsession; he claimed to the press that out of the $1 million he made when he was first flush with Nirvana’s success, a relatively modest $300,000 went toward a house, and only $80,000 was spent on other personal expenses. “That’s definitely not what Axl spends in a year,” Cobain said. (A seemingly contradictory story is found in Charles R. Cross’ Heavier Than Heaven: A Biography Of Kurt Cobain, where Cobain and Courtney Love spent two months in Fall 1992 at the fancy Four Seasons Olympic Hotel in Seattle, ringing up an extravagant $36,000 bill before being kicked out. The name they were staying under was Bill Bailey, also known as the original moniker of one Axl Rose.)

The irony of the Kurt/Axl rivalry is that Cobain—the wimpy feminist who took to wearing layers of sweaters in order to look less scrawny—was the clear aggressor while Rose, who demanded that any and all critics “suck his fucking dick” in “Get In The Ring” and once threatened to fight Vince Neil of Motley Crüe outside of Tower Records in L.A., seemed to shrink away from a man he seemed to have genuinely admired. It’s sort of sad, really, though Rose was not above insulting Cobain; when Nirvana turned down the GNR/Metallica “Get In The Ring” tour, Rose crabbed to Metallix magazine, “They would rather sit at home and shoot heroin with their bitch wives than tour with us.” (Artless wording aside, Rose wasn’t completely wrong.)

Things finally came to a head backstage at the 1992 MTV Video Music Awards, where Cobain and Rose had a mythic encounter on par with some of the most iconic pop-star tête-à-têtes ever. It was like Bob Dylan smoking pot with The Beatles, or David Bowie singing “Little Drummer Boy” with Bing Crosby, only this time the participants unequivocally hated each other. You could liken it to that scene in Heat where bank robber Robert De Niro has a cup of coffee with rival cop Al Pacino, but Axl and Kurt couldn’t even work up some grudging mutual respect. The details of the meeting are already well known to fans of Nirvana, GNR, and celebrity pissing matches: It started when Courtney Love, who was sitting with Cobain and their baby daughter Frances Bean, called out to Rose and his girlfriend Stephanie Seymour and snarkily asked if Axl would be the godfather of their child. Rather than acknowledge Courtney, Axl instead strode up to Kurt.

“You shut your bitch up, or I’m taking you down to the pavement,” he growled, sounding more menacing in that one moment than at any point over the 150 minutes of the Use Your Illusion albums. (At least that’s how I imagine it.)

Without missing a beat, Cobain turned to his wife, and said sarcastically, “Okay, bitch. Shut up.” Not wanting to miss out on the insult-trading couples competition, Seymour disingenuously asked Love, “Are you a model?”

“No,” she replied. “Are you a brain surgeon?” Game, set, victory for Team Grunge.

If an analogy comes close to describing this hostile summit, it would be the first Ali-Frazier fight in 1971 at New York’s Madison Square Garden, where Muhammad Ali was commonly seen as representing anti-war liberalism, and Joe Frazier was associated with the conservative establishment. Like Ali and Frazier, Kurt and Axl were bonded by their ability to turn their feelings of aggression, anger, alienation, and hatred into a highly lucrative vocation. But they came from fundamentally different worlds, and bringing them together offered a fascinating case study in what happens when two men who perfectly represent opposing sensibilities act out philosophical differences in the physical world.

Sounds pretty heady for an evening presided over by Dana Carvey, I know. But the way the “Kurt made Axl look dumb at the VMAs” story was gleefully reported and subsequently exaggerated by Cobain and the media says a lot about how Use Your Illusion (even more than Nevermind) had made GNR’s outlaw cool look like empty

posturing in the space of a single year. That Nirvana proceeded to pull a memorable “fuck you” rock ’n’ roll move onstage by playing a few bars of “Rape Me” before launching into a perfectly sloppy version of “Lithium”—a devastating contrast with Rose dueting with Elton John on the highly choreographed “November Rain”—apparently wasn’t enough for Cobain, who shared his juicy behind-the-scenes Axl story on MTV, playing up Rose’s pomposity in what was depicted as a classic David and Goliath tale. In the clip below, which appears to have been recorded the day after the confrontation at a benefit show in Portland, Ore., Cobain talks about the “20 bodyguards” that were guarding Rose and how Axl was threatening him when he had “a little helpless child in his arms.” Nirvana bassist Krist Novoselic also chimes in about Guns N’ Roses being “the establishment rock ’n’ roll,” and how “they want you to buy their packaged rebellion of sitting on a Harley-Davidson while you play a piano with a 41-piece orchestra, just like Emerson, Lake & Palmer did in 1978.” Nirvana clearly had been reading its own press clippings.

An interesting tangent to this story is Novoselic’s claim that he was threatened later that night by GNR bassist Duff McKagan. Apparently this actually happened; McKagan even made a belated public apology to Novoselic earlier this year. But even if he did challenge Novoselic to a celebrity bassist death match in the midst of a drink and drug-induced fury, McKagan might’ve deserved a little more slack than Nirvana gave him publicly. Before he moved to L.A. to join Guns N’ Roses, McKagan was an active member of the Seattle punk scene, playing in the Fartz, Fastbacks, and numerous other bands. After he hit it big, McKagan maintained ties with the local music community, hosting the members of Pearl Jam at his L.A. home on one of the band’s early tours, and even hanging out with Cobain on a plane ride to Seattle after Kurt fled rehab one last time in the final weeks of his life.

Obviously I don’t know Duff McKagan personally, but based on this clip and what I’ve read about him in various grunge-related books, I’ve got to say he seems like a solid-enough guy. And his anti-Nirvana rancor was apparently short-lived, given the empathy he felt for Cobain as he was circling the drain. But after 1991, the mere mention of the words “Duff McKagan” or anything else associated with Guns N’ Roses would inspire laughter and scorn among those who believed that the world wasn’t big enough for Axl Rose and Kurt Cobain to both be rock stars.

It’s convenient shorthand to paint Axl Rose as the meathead rock cliché and Kurt Cobain as the genuine artist, but what gets left out? Looking back, I see the crucial difference between Axl and Kurt being how they chose to act out their darkest, ugliest sides. Both men had troubled childhoods that led to adult lives distinguished by intense mood swings and a compulsive need to control their surroundings. Both men hated the press for spreading “lies” that often turned out to be true, and both were drawn to complicated women who created as much misery as ecstasy in their lives. Both men saw fame as a double-edged sword; it gave them the attention they craved after a lifetime of being ignored, and yet it also seemed to intensify their feelings of self-loathing.

They were, to use medical terminology, a couple of fucked-up individuals, which both men expressed eloquently in their music.

But even in the saddest, most depressing Nirvana songs, Cobain always seemed like a sensitive, thoughtful man.

Rose, on the other hand, wrote a lot of songs about being a bad person and not seeming all that sorry about it.

Is this dichotomy merely a reflection of who these guys were? Maybe, but I find it hard to believe that Rose was clueless about the monstrous picture he often painted of himself in his music. He’d have to be a complete sociopath not to notice it—though even Patrick Bateman from American Psycho knew to hide his true self behind his love of Huey Lewis and Phil Collins-era Genesis tunes.

If Cobain’s songs dealt in surrealism and playful nonsense, Rose was all about directness and outrage. A song like “Dumb” seemed to touch on Cobain’s chemical romance with love (“My heart is broke, but I have some glue / Let me inhale, and mend it with you”), but he also claimed his lyrics didn’t mean anything; Rose made the connection between “Sweet Child O’ Mine” and his then-girlfriend Erin Everly unavoidable by putting her in the video. But if Rose loved Everly enough to write the best power ballad of all time about her (with an assist from Slash and Izzy Stradlin), there were also days that he hated her with equal passion—and he believed that was worth writing about as well. Cobain’s relationship with Love was far from healthy, but he never wrote the sick and twisted sequel to “Heart Shaped Box,” like Rose wrote many toxic retorts to “Sweet Child.”

I’m not saying one approach is preferable, just that Axl Rose should be recognized for the role he played in creating his own public image, including the parts that people like Kurt Cobain despised. Perhaps he was too honest; as laughable as the Use Your Illusion video trilogy of “Don’t Cry,” “November Rain,” and “Estranged” ultimately is, it shows Rose self-consciously grappling with his suicidal impulses, childhood traumas, and proclivity toward domestic violence on a large and public canvas. Not only was he open about the demons that had stalked him from Indiana to the Sunset Strip, he freely admitted that sometimes he enjoyed them, or at least was unwilling to sacrifice them at the altar of political correctness, no matter what effect they had on how he was perceived.

The best example of this is the most controversial song Rose ever wrote, the radioactive “One In A Million” from 1988’s GN’R Lies. An account of Rose’s first days in Los Angeles, “One In A Million” is an uncomfortably frank but bracingly honest depiction of how a “small town white boy” reacts to being confronted by a number of offending parties, including police, “niggers,” immigrants, and “faggots.” Rose just wants them to get out of his way, so he can make a living in the big city. Sympathetic critics (of which there weren’t many when it came to “One In A Million”) could interpret the song as a comment on bigotry, but Rose derailed such efforts whenever he tried to defend it, saying in interviews that he was “pro-heterosexual” and that the “niggers” comment referred specifically to black people that hassle you at the Greyhound station. Other times he simply claimed “One In A Million” was a joke, which only made the song more offensive.

The power of “One In A Million” lies in it being an intolerant song that doesn’t endorse intolerance. Only a complete fucking idiot listens to “One In A Million” and nods in agreement. It’s not a persuasive song in the least, and it doesn’t seem that the protagonist is intended to be likeable in any way. “One In A Million” is a song nobody would ever admit relating to. What makes it so disturbing is that Rose doesn’t tip his hand; there’s no catharsis pointing toward a change of heart by the end, which is why Cobain and millions of others concluded the worst about Rose when “One In A Million” was released. But if Rose really was just a cardboard-cutout racist, homophobic bad guy, why would he have bothered to expose himself as such by releasing this song?

Rose would’ve had to be the least self-aware pop star ever to not anticipate the shit-storm “One In A Million” caused; you have to assume that he either didn’t care, or saw value in shining a light on the dimmest regions of his psyche. Was he trying to shame himself into being a better person? If so, did it work?

Cobain was right; Rose felt that the world owed him something, and that was the fulfillment of his dreams in exchange for a painfully detailed account of his nightmares. In “One In A Million,” Rose sings, “It’s been such a long time since I knew right from wrong / It’s all a means to an end, I keep it movin’ along.” By the end of 1991, I chose Kurt Cobain over Axl Rose because I wanted someone who did know the difference between right and wrong. But even if Cobain’s music changed lives, Nevermind failed in saving the man who created it. It also couldn’t touch Axl; he’s the one who is still movin’ along.

What Happened Next? Nirvana was the first grunge band to achieve superstar status, but Pearl Jam quickly became the defining group of the label. Next week will look at Pearl Jam’s ascendancy during the grunge summer of love in ’92, when the band toured with Lollapalooza and dominated MTV, and how Pearl Jam’s subsequent legacy has shaped mainstream rock music, for better or worse.

Part 3: 1992: 1992: Pearl Jam, the perils of fame, and the trouble with avoiding it

By Steven Hyden Nov 2, 2010 12:01 AM

“There’s a lot of bands that get to a certain level, and it just stops. They scrap it. Compare this to, say, The Rolling Stones or The Who, where they just continued on forever and are still playing, or they quit after 20 years. But Talking Heads, or Jane’s Addiction, or The Police, or even Nirvana you could say, got to a point and then that was just it. I was wondering what the difference was between the early bands and these bands…”—Eddie Vedder, in an interview with Craig Marks for Spin, December 1994.

“Show me any guy who ever said he didn’t want to be popular, and I’ll show you a scared guy.”—Jason Lee as Stillwater singer Jeff Bebe in Almost Famous If you’ve ever spent time around a local music scene, you’re probably familiar with the plot points of Doug Pray’s 1996 documentary Hype! even if you’ve never seen the movie. Hype! ostensibly chronicles how Seattle was affected by the media attention heaped upon the grunge phenomenon in the wake of the world-beating early ’90s success of Nirvana, Pearl Jam, Soundgarden, and Alice In Chains. But while the specifics of this story involve flannel and coffee shops, the general outline applies to any mid-sized American city that’s ever had three or four bands gain a measure of national notoriety while lots of other groups were left behind to gripe endlessly about why the world ended up caring more about them than us.

While few people outside of Seattle would’ve cared about a movie like Hype! had it not been for the very same media attention the film rails against, Pray steadfastly focuses his attention on the dimmer lights in the city’s musical galaxy—bands like Mono Men, Seaweed, Zipgun, Love Battery, Hovercraft, and Gas Huffer—instead of its big stars. The point of Pray’s film seems pretty obvious: The popularity of grunge didn’t put Seattle music on the map; it ruined Seattle music, because the emphasis suddenly shifted from having fun and creating

idiosyncratic records to scoring contracts and making loads of money. Hype! spends a lot of time exploring how the media reduced Seattle to a set of simpleminded stereotypes—lumberjack clothes! dumb-guy guitar riffage!—that didn’t do justice to the city’s spirit of adventurous, non-trendy individuality.

Unlike other “it” cities in rock history like Liverpool and San Francisco, Seattle never really had a honeymoon period in the spotlight. As Hype! shows, Seattle scenesters weren’t exactly inviting outsiders to come to their land of omnipresent rain and widespread heroin addiction with some flowers in their hair. Grunge seemed to arrive concurrently with grunge’s backlash; even stranger, the bands that stood to benefit the most from being associated with grunge were the ones fueling the backlash. Unlike punk and metal bands, which have typically been proud to declare themselves as such, grunge bands wore their tag with disdain.

None of the Seattle musicians interviewed in Hype! come across as outwardly bitter, but there is an overall sense of resentment about grunge that sometimes seems justified (a lot of the mainstream media coverage of Seattle was stupid and reductive), but sometimes not, though that comes across in ways that Pray probably didn’t intend. While Hype! is an entertaining movie, it’s hardly revelatory; the bands you’ve never heard of don’t exactly seem unfairly ignored. They sound “local” in a bad way, with lots of scrappy punk-rock energy trying in vain to compensate for shouty, so-so singers and leaden songwriting. Hype! subtly suggests that the right bands were handed tickets to international fame and fortune.

Among Pray’s most eloquent interview subjects was an Evanston, Illinois native who had only lived in Seattle for a few years, having moved up north in 1990 after working as a musician and a part-time night attendant at a gas station in San Diego for six years. But Eddie Vedder’s limited history in Seattle didn’t make him sound any less regretful about his band Pearl Jam reaping the rewards of rock stardom that so many of the city’s musicians missed out on. “They made a big mistake,” Vedder says ruefully at the movie’s 43-minute mark. “They didn’t go further and find more of the bands that were already here, and had been here even before many of the bands that exploded were. That’s what makes me feel guilty about the success of our band, because it should’ve been spread out to a number of bands.”

When it came to rock stardom, Eddie Vedder was a socialist. But like so many celebrities before and after him, he blamed the media for his problem—which, presumably, was Pearl Jam selling more records than Gas Huffer—when he really should have blamed himself. Pearl Jam broke bigger than anybody else in Seattle because the band’s 1991 debut, Ten, satisfied a social need: It was spectacularly good at making alienated teenagers (i.e. all teenagers) feel less alone whenever they felt misunderstood by the rest of the world (i.e. every waking hour of the day).

Bursting with intensely personal songs that sound universal by virtue of their oversized, near-operatic emotionalism, Ten was neither subtle nor particularly cool, which helped it communicate better and more profoundly with more people than any other rock record of its time. Along with Metallica’s Black Album and Radiohead’s OK Computer, Pearl Jam’s Ten is easily one of the most influential mainstream rock records of the last 20 years. The power of Ten was so great that it eventually stood apart from Pearl Jam; as Vedder and his increasingly marginalized supporting cast distanced themselves from the record’s gauche chest-thumping by churning out progressively restrained, more “mature,” and less expressive music, Ten was dusted off by other bands and recycled again and again. Today, Pearl Jam is a popular touring band and intermittently successful on the charts; Ten, meanwhile, is still all over modern-rock radio, though only a handful of the songs are actually by Pearl Jam. The story of Ten has since passed into rock legend: After the drug-related death of Mother Love Bone singer Andrew Wood, guitarist Stone Gossard and bassist Jeff Ament were set adrift in a sea of limited career options.

Having cast their lot with the highly commercial and solidly career-minded MLB after departing the seminal Seattle band Green River—which also included Mudhoney’s Mark Arm and Steve Turner, who would make the Nirvanas and Pearl Jams of the world envious for their ability to stay eternally cool and hopelessly broke—

Ament and Gossard had every right to think that their best shot at stardom had just taken a lethal dose of smack and nodded off forever.

As he tried to figure out what to do next, Gossard began writing songs and jamming with Seattle guitarist and Stevie Ray Vaughan fan Mike McCready. Soon, Gossard and McCready were in the studio with Ament and a revolving cast of drummers to record five tracks, which were labeled Stone Gossard Demos ’91. The guys needed a full-time singer and a drummer; they approached Red Hot Chili Peppers drummer Jack Irons, but Irons instead passed the tape on to his friend Eddie Vedder.

Vedder listened to the tape, went out to surf, and then quickly returned to scribble down some lyrics and record vocals over the instrumental tracks. Eventually these demos would become some of Pearl Jam’s bestknown songs, including “Alive” and “Once.” When Vedder ventured up to Seattle in October 1990 to officially audition to be the band’s singer, he ended up writing several more songs with his prospective bandmates over the course of a week. Five months later, the newly christened Mookie Blaylock was in the studio recording Ten; four months after that, on Aug. 27, 1991, Ten was released. By May 1992, Ten was a top 10 record, eventually peaking at No. 2 on the Billboard charts and selling nearly 10 million copies. Pearl Jam had become one of the biggest rock groups in the world before the band members had even spent 24 months together.

I remember hearing the first single from Ten, the vaguely Skynyrd-esque lighter-waving anthem “Alive,” between Bad Company and Styx songs on my town’s top AOR station, “The Rockin’ Apple” WAPL. Vedder later revealed in a Rolling Stone interview that the lyrics to “Alive” were practically straight autobiography, recounting the day his mother told him that the man he thought was his father was, in fact, not his biological parent, and that his real dad had recently passed away.

To me, the message of “Alive” boiled down to two sounds and three words: “Oh-ahh, uhhh, I’m still alive.” It was a simple yet stirring rallying cry that rang true for a kid stuck living the worst years of his life in the dregs of junior high school. The guy singing this song had obviously endured something nearly as traumatic as the eighth grade, and yet he somehow survived to bellow about how he made it through to the other side more or less intact. You had to be inspired by that.

In the video, which the band insisted be culled from a not-especially-polished live performance, Pearl Jam looks like a glam band in dress-down mode; in other words, just like Tesla. (Except McCready, who’s decked out in full cowboy-and-blouse Stevie Ray gear.) Like many of the songs on Ten, “Alive” starts out mired in a relatively mellow wallow and gradually builds to a satisfying rage—in this case, a blazing McCready guitar solo that sends “Alive” off in majestic classic-rock fashion.

“Alive” is one of Pearl Jam’s most famous songs, but it didn’t come close to making the kind of atomic impression that “Smells Like Teen Spirit” did. Ten was more of a slow burn; if memory serves, the next single, “Even Flow,” was played on MTV 57 times an hour during the first half of ’92, an impressive feat considering “Even Flow” was a pretty lousy song that made no fucking sense whatsoever. Supposedly “Even Flow” is about homelessness—see the lines about “a pillow made of concrete” and “ceilings few and far between”—but I hated that the chorus didn’t tell you what “even flow” was supposed to be, and the line about thoughts arriving like butterflies sounded like a bad Natalie Merchant lyric. Still, the video for “Even Flow” succeeded in doing for Pearl Jam what the “Pour Some Sugar On Me” video had done for Def Leppard four summers earlier: It made you wish really hard that Pearl Jam would come somewhere near your town very soon.

Ten was already in the upper reaches of the Billboard chart by the time Pearl Jam’s third video, “Jeremy,” went into heavy rotation on MTV in August ’92. Watching it now, the “Jeremy” video has lots of cringingly obvious imagery, not the least of which is sad lil’ Jeremy wrapped in the American flag while surrounded by flames. (I’m

going to go out a limb and suggest that director Mark Pellington was trying to make a larger point about the tenuous state of American youth in the early ’90s.) But at the time, “Jeremy” was probably the most emotionally overpowering video I’d ever seen. The song itself had also been juiced up for MTV; the most moving part of “Jeremy” is the outro, where Vedder lets out the same epic “whoa!” that Bruce Springsteen should’ve trademarked in 1978 after he released Darkness On The Edge Of Town. The single version of “Jeremy” was remixed to extend Vedder’s climactic “whoa!” for several extra beats, a slight but important change that amped up the song’s dramatic impact. (Vedder’s greatest vocal performances tend to be practically wordless; see Ten’s mush-mouthed closer, “Release,” and the essential “Jeremy” B-side “Yellow Ledbetter,” which fans have been trying to decipher for 18 years.)

Following the familiar wallow-to-sweeping-crescendo template, “Jeremy” is sung from the perspective of Jeremy’s classmates, a clever songwriting device for a singer who typically identified with the victims in his songs. By siding with the kids who thought Jeremy was a “harmless little fuck,” Vedder made “Jeremy” the ultimate revenge tale for the self-pity set, a classic “you’ll be sorry when I’m dead” song that allowed listeners to feel the vicarious thrill of seeing awful people shamed for bullying Jeremy/you/me.

“Jeremy” was the capper on 1992’s grunge summer of love, when Pearl Jam crisscrossed the country with Soundgarden and the Red Hot Chili Peppers and spread the alt-rock gospel as Lollapalooza headliners. By late August, Pearl Jam would appear on three albums in the Billboard top 20: the ascendant Ten, hitting the full stride of its popularity a year after it was released; the Chris Cornell-led Andrew Wood tribute Temple Of The Dog, which got new life from the Vedder-assisted “Hunger Strike”; and the era’s very own version of Saturday Night Fever, the Singles soundtrack, a first-rate grunge primer featuring two essential Pearl Jam songs (“State Of Love And Trust” and “Breath”), the best Alice In Chains’ song ever (“Would?”), and excellent contributions from Smashing Pumpkins, Screaming Trees, and Cornell.

Against director Cameron Crowe’s wishes, Warner Bros. made grunge the promotional hook to sell Singles.

While it wasn’t a movie about Seattle music—I’ve never seen it, but I understand that it’s about relationships and how they complete you while showing you the money—Singles was filthy with cameos from local musicians, including Vedder, Ament, and Gossard, who appeared as members of Matt Dillon’s Pearl Jam-esque band Citizen Dick. Vedder melodramatically declared to the Los Angeles Times that he “would go buy a gun” if the studio made too much of the Seattle scene, but he eventually agreed to appear in an MTV special to promote the movie, because Crowe told him Singles wouldn’t be released otherwise.

Vedder typically wasn’t so accommodating, especially once his status as Pearl Jam’s figurehead gave him the freedom to tell people no. He fought the push from Epic, Pearl Jam’s label, to release Ten’s big romantic ballad, “Black,” as a single because it appeared poised to become the band’s biggest hit yet. (“Black” became one of Pearl Jam’s most popular songs regardless.) “We didn’t write to make hits. But those fragile songs get crushed by the business,” Vedder told Crowe in Rolling Stone; Vedder thought “Black” was so fragile that, in a weird anecdote related by Crowe, he once chastised a group of Pearl Jam fans for singing it when he overheard them on a hiking trip.

As tempted as I am to roll my eyes at Vedder’s overexposed media rants about media overexposure, he did have reason to worry about Pearl Jam-mania. When school reconvened that fall, Pearl Jam was everywhere; using T-shirts and locker posters as a barometer, they were way more popular than Nirvana. Since I was a Nevermind guy and only lukewarm on Ten—I like it a lot more now, because I’m much younger in spirit at 33 than I was at 14—this offended my sensibilities to the core. On this point I’ll quote an article that appeared on the teen-oriented “Get With It!” page of the Appleton Post-Crescent on Oct. 22, 1993: If there was ever a band I got sick of, it was Pearl Jam. I got sick of hearing about how “awesome” they were supposed to be. I got sick of seeing Pearl Jam shirts on the backs of every other kid at my school.

And I swore that if MTV played that “Jeremy” one more time, I would grab a gun of my own and point it at the television.

I know what you’re thinking: Why was Robert Christgau writing for teenagers in the middle of Wisconsin?

Actually, that was written by me, Steve Hyden, intrepid 16-year-old music scribe. I was reviewing Pearl Jam’s second album, Vs.—a record Pearl Jam solemnly promised not to release any videos for—and attempting to make a contrast between what I saw at the time as the band’s inferior debut and the much better sophomore release. I described Vs. as “amazing” and “electrifying,” with a “delightfully raw and funky” sound and “simply no filler.” I gave the album an A+, which I now know as an A.V. Club writer is a grade that does not exist.

The grade isn’t the only area where I was wrong when it came to Vs.; listening to it now, there’s “simply” a whole lot of filler, including the eminently skippable likes of “Dissident,” “Blood,” “Rats,” and “Indifference.”

Elsewhere, Vedder awkwardly strains for Important Statements on “Glorified G,” which satirizes gun owners so simplistically it makes the NRA seem sympathetic, and the “experimental” funk song “W.M.A.,” a takedown of the white male Americans that composed most of Pearl Jam’s fan base.

Ten is a record that anyone who’s ever felt young and disaffected can relate to; on Vs., Vedder’s lyrical perspective had broadened, and yet his songs feel narrower. But even if his stabs at saying something meaningful usually fall short, there’s still something admirable about his attempts to leaven bro-friendly rock with bite-sized morsels of social consciousness. Most impressive is Vedder’s empathy with women; on the single “Daughter,” he sings in the first-person about a young girl struggling with child abuse. Vedder does it in a manly baritone so as not to alienate his core audience, but still—a song like “Daughter” would have never come from a meat-and-potatoes rock band of Pearl Jam’s stature a few years earlier. Along with the similarly folkie “Elderly Woman Behind The Counter In A Small Town,” Vedder turned feminine character studies into groupfriendly sing-alongs for millions of young men who were otherwise blissfully clueless about the female experience.

With Vs., Pearl Jam sidestepped the aggressive media push that helped make Ten a success; at that point the band didn’t have to go on Headbangers’ Ball and press the flesh with Riki Rachtman like it did when MTV was just starting to play “Alive.” Vs. sold nearly a million copies in its first week and eventually hit the 7-million mark.

Pearl Jam’s third album, 1994’s Vitalogy, was another smash, selling nearly 900,0000 copies during the first week of its release and going on to move 5 million units. But just when Pearl Jam should have been basking in the reflected glow of its incredible popularity, the band seemed precariously perched on the brink of ruin.

Two things happened between the release of Vs. and Vitalogy that changed Pearl Jam forever. The first was the firing of drummer Dave Abbruzzese, who joined the band right before the release of Ten and played on Vs. and Vitalogy. The commonly cited reason for Abbruzzese’s dismissal was his comfort with being a rock star, which apparently put him in direct conflict with Vedder. This point is central to Kim Neely’s Five Against One: The Pearl Jam Story, the band’s definitive biography by default, which uses Abbruzzese as a primary interview subject.

My favorite Abbruzzese ax-grinding story from Five Against One involves Pearl Jam’s schoolmarmish reaction to his purchase of a brand-new black Infiniti, which plays out like a low-rent grunge-rock redux of This Is Spinal Tap: “Check it out,” he said, beaming. “What do you think?”

The others stood in a huddle, silent.

“Huh,” Jeff said finally.

“Well,” said Stone. “That’s rock.”

Nobody got in, nobody wanted to see the interior or peek under the hood. Eddie, who’d parted with some of his Ten royalties to pay off the same beat-up truck he’d been driving when he first arrived in Seattle, stood with his arms crossed, eyes flickering distastefully over the Infiniti’s shiny black paint job and chrome wheels.

Whatever, Dave thought. He sat in his new car as they walked away, absent-mindedly juggling the keys that hung from the ignition with one aimless finger. He sat there for a long time after the others had gone home.

Isn’t that just the saddest story involving a brand-new black Infiniti that you’ve ever heard? Abbruzzese might’ve gotten a raw deal, but his firing appears to have kept Pearl Jam intact, because it more or less put his nemesis in full control of the band. Vedder at the time was an uneasy collection of contradictions bumping into each other under the same furrowed brow. On the one hand, he was a dedicated student of classic rock, participating in tribute concerts to Bob Dylan and Pete Townshend, filling in for Jim Morrison when The Doors were inducted into the Rock And Roll Hall Of Fame, and initiating a public partnership with Neil Young that began when Pearl Jam invited him to play “Rockin’ In The Free World” at the 1993 MTV Video Music Awards.

Vedder could always be called on to wax rhapsodic about musical heroes like the Ramones and R.E.M.; along with Bono, he’s been the Rock And Roll Hall Of Fame’s most reliable induction speechifier. As much as he was a rock singer, Eddie Vedder was a rock fan, and he clearly believed that the artists that had moved him were important and deserved to be celebrated.

And yet when it came to his own band and the intense connection Pearl Jam’s fans had to his public persona, Vedder’s discomfort frequently boiled over into hostility. And it would only get worse after April 8, 1994, when Kurt Cobain was found dead at his Seattle home with a gaping shotgun wound in his head. Vedder and Cobain weren’t close socially; their relationship appears to have been one-sided, with Vedder playing the adoring admirer and Cobain the ambivalent would-be rival. Cobain openly hated Pearl Jam’s music, but he thought Vedder was a good person, and the two reconciled backstage at the 1992 MTV Video Music Awards, the same night as Cobain’s infamous confrontation with Axl Rose.

When Vedder learned of Cobain’s death while on tour in Fairfax, Virginia, he reacted as a fan, launching into a violent emotional outburst and tearing apart his hotel room. That night he told the audience gathered for Pearl Jam’s show, “I don’t think any of us would be in this room if it weren’t for Kurt Cobain.” But in subsequent interviews, rather than focus on all the good that came out of Nirvana’s stardom—namely, that it allowed millions of people to discover Cobain’s music, and use it as a skeleton key to discover loads of other artists— Vedder instead pontificated about the burden of being beloved. It didn’t matter that Cobain had been an unhappy person for a long time before he was famous, or that he died while in the grips of a harrowing, seemingly unbeatable heroin addiction. Nope, it was the fame that killed him, pure and simple; Cobain’s demise had made him a martyr for sensitive, camera-shy artists, and Vedder rushed to pound the nails in.

“You know, all these people… lining up to say that his death was so fucking inevitable… well, if it was inevitable for him, it’s gonna be inevitable for me, too,” Vedder thundered to writer Allan Jones a month after Cobain’s death under the headline “I’m Not Your Fuckin’ Messiah” in Melody Maker. “See, people like him and me, we can’t be real. It’s a contradiction. We can’t be these people who just write these songs. We have to live up to the expectations of a million people.”

Vedder’s classic-rock worship, and his professed disdain of the cult of personality perpetuated by many of the classic-rock artists he loved, formed the twin poles of Vitalogy, Pearl Jam’s messiest, most self-indulgent, and, in many ways, most fascinating album. Many of the songs explicitly critiqued the concept of rock stardom; incongruously, this made Vitalogy Pearl Jam’s most self-absorbed, rock-star-ish album to date. While it was easy for teenagers to imagine that Vedder was singing directly to them on Ten, it was all about Eddie on Vitalogy.

The lyrics spell this out with thudding regularity: •

From “Immortality”: “As privileged as a whore / victims in demand for public show.”

•

From “Corduroy”: “All the things that others want for me / Can’t buy what I want because it’s free.”

•

From “Pry, To”: “P-r-i-v-a-c-y is priceless to me.”

•

From the album-closing seven-minute sound collage “Stupidmop”: “Do you ever think that you actually would kill yourself? Well, if I thought about it real deep, I believe I would.”

The central song of Vitalogy is the Crazy Horse-aping dirge “Not For You”; as a low, out-of-tune rumble slowly picks up steam, Vedder sings: “Small my table, sits just two / Got so crowded, I can’t make room / Oh, where did they come from, stormed my room / And you dare say it belongs to you / This is not for you.” How you interpret “Not For You” depends on how you define “this” and “you.” In interviews, Vedder claimed “this” was youth and “you” was the media. But when “Not For You” had its national TV debut several months earlier on Saturday Night Live, just eight days after Cobain’s suicide, it was hard not to read the song as a forceful “fuck you” to Pearl Jam’s Johnny-come-lately fans. (For clarity’s sake, Vedder actually screams “fuck you” in the studio version.)

The message rang through loud and clear: For the millions of kids who had connected with Ten, the hit-or-miss experimentation and willful stand-offishness of Vitalogy would signal the end of Pearl Jam’s “golden period.”

While the band’s decline in popularity in the latter half of the ’90s is usually blamed on its long, wellintentioned, but ultimately fruitless battle with Ticketmaster, it was really the release of 1996’s bloodless No Code and its blandly commercial follow-up Yield that caused many fans, including me, to finally walk away from Vedder’s curiously small table.

Pearl Jam, of course, carried on, and still has an audience large enough to fill arenas all over the world. In 2009, Pearl Jam released its ninth record, Backspacer, via its own label, Monkeywrench Records, negotiating deals with Universal Music Group and various retailers, including Target, to distribute the album. Backspacer ended up being Pearl Jam’s first No. 1 record since No Code, though the first-week sales of 189,000 were far below the band’s (and music industry’s) prime.

Pearl Jam’s ability to sustain a career for nearly two decades on its own terms is admirable. But this is still a band that hasn’t engaged with mainstream pop culture in many years. In a Rolling Stone poll connected to the release of Backspacer, five of the first 10 songs that readers picked as their favorite Pearl Jam tracks were from Ten. (Two others, “Yellow Ledbetter” and “State Of Love And Trust,” date from the same period.) No song in the top 10 comes from an album released in the last 10 years.

Pearl Jam isn’t the first veteran rock band to see a decrease in fans as it got older. But it’s the best example of a band deliberately expediting the process. Pearl Jam helped to set a template that all too many alt-rock bands would follow in the ’90s: success, and then retreat. Make people love you, and then disengage. Get to a certain level, and just stop.

That was Pearl Jam’s right, and the band might not be here today had it not made that choice. Still, the mainstream rock audience could’ve benefited more from the empathy and earnest intentions of Eddie Vedder, just as he had benefited from readily accessible heroes like Pete Townshend when he was a kid. For all his hamfistedness, Vedder offered up valuable lessons about the greatness of Rust Never Sleeps, the wisdom of Howard Zinn, and the concept of male feminism to anyone with access to MTV or a local rock radio station. For three years, Vedder occupied a unique and important place in mainstream rock; that he allowed it to be taken over by people like Scott Stapp isn’t unforgivable, just unfortunate.

What Happened Next: Next: The rise of alternative might’ve changed the look and feel of rock stardom, but it didn't keep bands from chasing the ever-elusive brass ring. I’ll look at three Chicago acts—Urge Overkill, Smashing Pumpkins, and Liz Phair— and the varying approaches they took to gaining an audience in 1993 and beyond.

Part 4: 1993: 1993: Smashing Pumpkins, Liz Phair, and Urge Overkill forsake the underground

By Steven Hyden Nov 16, 2010 12:00 AM

“Each artist had to grapple with what’s supposed to be a dichotomy between being popular and being ‘alternative.’ Once it became apparent that the fine line between the two was blurring, the rear guard from the underground—which I would define as deliberately non-pop, whereas I guess alternative would be relatively personal music that doesn’t necessarily exclude pop—tried not only to keep them clear, but to make a big deal out of which side of the line you were on. This, of course, is bullshit, and these artists took a stand and the resulting heat to prove it.”—Bill Wyman of the Chicago Reader, “Not From The Underground: 1993 In Review,” Jan. 6, 1994 “Clip your year-end column and put it away for 10 years. See if you don’t feel like an idiot when you reread it.”—Steve Albini, “Three Pandering Sluts And Their Music-Press Stooge,” letters section of the Chicago Reader, Jan. 27, 1994 After one of the headiest years in Chicago rock history—a time when the city usurped Seattle as the new altrock hotspot, thanks to Smashing Pumpkins going platinum with the colossal guitar symphony Siamese Dream, and Liz Phair and Urge Overkill releasing the critically acclaimed and demonstrably cool Exile In Guyville and Saturation—local music critic Bill Wyman stated an opinion that seems obvious now, but ended up being quite the shit-stirrer when he wrote it. For Wyman, the common thread connecting the city’s best-known but otherwise disparate rock acts was their “explicit rejection of much of the insularity that increasingly characterizes underground music and the fringes of underground music in America.” In other words, Smashing Pumpkins, Liz Phair, and Urge Overkill actively pursued a mass audience: They made pop-friendly records, engaged with the record-industry hype machine, and did it all with enough ironic detachment so as to not appear overly craven. They appeared, to quote Saturation’s “Positive Bleeding,” to be remote-controllin’ their destinies.

I was still too young and clueless in 1993 to feel the push and pull between the increasingly popular alternative scene and the “rear guard of the underground” that Wyman writes about. To me, Siamese Dream was an underground record, insofar that it wasn’t The Bodyguard soundtrack. If it was “relatively personal” to Wyman, I suppose that means it just seemed “personal” to me. I had a vague awareness that there was a strata of bands beyond the new alt-rock establishment, mostly pop-punk groups like Bad Religion and NOFX, which my snowboarding-obsessed pals played all the goddamn time while we drove around town during lunch hour, along with stuff like Fugazi’s 13 Songs and the self-titled Operation Ivy compilation. I was still gleaning most of my music knowledge from Rolling Stone, which at least partially explains why I liked The Rolling Stones and Led Zeppelin as much as any contemporary band at the time.

But in a place like Chicago—the home of Screeching Weasel and Styx, The Jesus Lizard and “Eye Of The Tiger,” Ministry and, well, Chicago—the separation between the underground and pop audiences couldn’t be more obvious, and there was no clearer statement of disreputable intent (if not out-and-out shittiness) in the underground than wanton commerciality. When Wyman stepped forward and called “bullshit” on all the huffy finger-pointing being directed at the local scene’s biggest stars, he was practically begging for a smackdown.

Enter preeminent smackdown artist Steve Albini. Incredibly smart, engagingly articulate, openly judgmental, and intimidating to anyone with even a modicum of self-confidence issues, Albini not only once inspired Chunklet to ask “Is This Guy The Biggest Asshole In Rock?” in 40-plus-point cover type, he seemed to lust mightily for the distinction. Albini was a musician and studio engineer celebrated in underground circles for fronting the seminal indie outfits Big Black and Shellac, and he became a celebrity of sorts after recording classic albums like Superchunk’s No Pocky For Kitty, Pixies’ Surfer Rosa, and, in 1993 alone, PJ Harvey’s Rid Of Me and Nirvana’s In Utero. Albini famously refused producer credit on records he worked on; in fact, he preferred not to be credited at all, particularly for albums he often saw as falling below his high standards. To the contrary, Albini didn’t hesitate to publicly discredit bands after they paid for his services. In “Eyewitness Record Reviews” from the zine Forced Exposure #17, Albini called Surfer Rosa “a patchwork pinch loaf from a band who at their top-dollar best are blandly entertaining college rock.” (He also wrote about an unsuccessful sexual encounter with a friend of the band who was “lounging around making little fuck me noises” that ended with him having to “run a batch off by hand.” Who on earth would ever turn down the pleasure of having sex with this man?)

On top of everything else on his impressive résumé, Albini was a prolific and important rock writer, contributing profane, Arsenic-laced prose to zines like Forced Exposure and Matter, where his well-thought-out arguments against submitting to the destructive conventions of the music industry were spiked with lame stabs at “provocative” political incorrectness. (“I don’t give two splats of an old Negro junkie’s vomit for your politcophilosophical treatises, kiddies,” goes a typical line.) To Albini, indie-ness was both a science and an evangelical religion; he could be persuasively pragmatic about how bands were better off personally and creatively treating music as a pastime rather than a job, and then land patently insulting roundhouse blows against anyone dumb, silly, or unlucky enough to disagree with his fiercely held views.

In the letters section of the Reader, Albini was in born-again indie zealot mode. Not only did he hate the artists that Wyman was trumpeting—Exile and Saturation took the top two places on his best-of list—Albini objected to the Reader’s casual dismissal of underground dogma. “In your rush to pat these three pandering sluts on the heinie, you miss what has been obvious to the ‘bullshit’ crowd all along: These are not ‘alternative’ artists any more than their historical precursors. They are by, of and for the mainstream,” Albini wrote. “Watching the three artists you moo about prostrate themselves before the altar of publicity these last 12 months has been a source of unrivaled hilarity here in the ‘bullshit’ camp, and seeing them sink into the obscurity they have earned by blowing their promo wads will be equally satisfying.”

Albini had missed the point somewhat; Wyman wasn’t arguing that these artists weren’t mainstream, he was saying that it didn’t matter that they were mainstream, at least when it came to judging the quality of their music. But looking back 17 years later, it seems that Albini was right about the Chicago alt-rock class of ’93 on

one count: Each of the artists mentioned in Wyman’s story have been significantly diminished, none more so than Urge Overkill.

Certainly this must have pleased Albini to no end, since Urge Overkill was undoubtedly the one band out of the three for which he had a special spot in the deepest, darkest region of his pinched, pitch-black heart. When Urge Overkill formed in the mid-’80s, the band released its first EP on Albini’s own Ruthless label; after moving to storied Chicago indie Touch And Go, the band continued to use Albini as an engineer. But then Urge Overkill decided to sign with Geffen before the release of Saturation, which to people like Albini and Touch And Go founder Corey Rusk was an unethical, if not unforgivable, transgression.

It didn’t help that Urge Overkill had adopted a winking, swinging dandy persona on Saturation that reveled in passé rock clichés with far less irony that it might’ve initially appeared. The medallions and leisure suits that guitarist Nash Kato, bassist Eddie “King” Roeser, and drummer Blackie Onassis donned as everyday casual-wear fit with the thrift-store sensibility of Saturation, which created good-time Gen-X party jams out of the discarded pieces of unfashionable ’70s arena-rock like Ted Nugent and Aerosmith. The end result set Saturation apart from the alternative pack: This was a record that could actually be described as fun.

By the time Saturation was ready to be released in early June—a perfect time for the best beach-friendly rock record of the year—the members of Urge Overkill were already acting like rock stars. When Jim DeRogatis of the Chicago Sun-Times profiled the band, he visited its secret lair, a converted bank on Chicago’s northwest side that had been transformed into “a grunge-rock version of the Playboy Mansion,” a veritable theme park of hip trashiness decorated in tiki lamps, campy best-selling novels, and oversized bongs. (Never one to turn down an opportunity to tear into any Chicago music writer praising Urge Overkill, Albini responded to DeRogatis’ proUrge coverage by penning a letter addressed to “Jim DeRogatis, Music Pimp,” where he called the critic “a useless fuck I should ignore.” He then refused to speak to DeRogatis ever again.) While Urge Overkill was squarely opposed to the righteous indignation that was de rigueur for alt-rock bands at the time, the band members were just as serious about maintaining an authentic image, which for them meant pumping up the outlandishness of their everyday lives to sync up with their publicity photos. For Urge Overkill, life really was a cartoonish Urge Overkill video.

Even if the glamour of Urge Overkill was constructed, it was still a form of glamour, and it drew in local fans like Wicker Park musician Liz Phair. After failing to make it as an artist in San Francisco, Phair returned to Chicago and began writing and recording songs at home. These tapes, which Phair released under the moniker Girly Sound, made her a star among aficionados of lo-fi recordings, including Gerard Cosloy of Matador Records, who decided to sign Phair after she called him out of the blue one day and asked if he’d like to put out her record.

Phair’s Matador debut, Exile In Guyville, was partly inspired by her unrequited infatuation with Nash Kato; the title referred to Urge Overkill’s “Goodbye To Guyville” and the boy’s-club atmosphere of Chicago’s underground music scene. (Kato had also convinced Phair to pose topless on the album’s cover.) The other, more famous inspiration for Exile In Guyville was The Rolling Stones’ Exile On Main Street, which Phair told interviewers provided the answers to questions her record was posing, song by song, two decades after the Stones’ album’s release. It was an inspired hook for selling Phair’s Exile to male rock critics not normally predisposed to giving female singer-songwriters a fair shake; while some detractors claimed the Guyville-Main Street connection was only marketing, Phair insisted she consciously crafted her record as a response to the best album ever made by rock’s foremost misogynists.

The Stones’ influence on Guyville is plain in the record’s gut-level, stripped-down drive, with Phair beating out lean Keith Richards-style rhythm guitar parts over Brad Wood’s subtly swinging, Charlie Watts-like drumming.

Then there was Phair’s voice, which came out in a flat, seen-it-all, waveringly tuneful sing-speak that critic Rob Sheffield memorably described as sounding like “Peppermint Patty on a bad caffeine jag.”

The most interesting parallel for me between Guyville and Main Street is Phair’s “Fuck And Run” and The Stones’ “Happy.” As sung by Richards, “Happy” is the epitome of rock ’n’ roll self-mythology, a song about a ne’er-do-well with a heart of gold who “never kept a dollar past sunset” and just needs a love to keep him happy, baby. “Fuck And Run” similarly is about the pursuit of a romantic ideal—the “letters and sodas” and all “that stupid old shit” that’s supposed to come with having a boyfriend. The difference is that “Happy” takes place the night before, with the promise of kicks just over the horizon, while “Fuck And Run” happens the morning after, when the promise becomes betrayal, and Phair is stuck with yet another dickhead in yet another room she doesn’t recognize.

“Fuck And Run” isn’t angry; it’s weary and disturbingly nonchalant about the emptiness of modern relationships. But it feels angry as it soberly explores how women are treated as fun-time non-entities on the level of whiskey shots and lines of cocaine in songs like “Happy.” Phair was saying things that women weren’t supposed to say on a rock record; really, she wasn’t supposed to say anything at all. “I was so angry about being taken advantage of sexually, being overlooked intellectually,” Phair said about Guyville in a Rolling Stone interview earlier this year. “Even when I was young at dinner tables with the extended family, listening to the men argue and the women sort of sit there—that’s just the way it was back then.” By merely existing, Guyville stood out as a statement undermining a male-dominated alt-rock scene that didn’t always practice the gender equality that it preached.

For Guyville’s female fans, listening to the record was like being allowed to speak after a lifetime of sitting silently with their hands folded on their laps. “What Phair and the rest of the world didn’t expect was just how many women would hear Guyville and think, hey, I live in a man’s world too, and it’s a problem,” L.A. Times music critic Ann Powers wrote 15 years after the album’s release. “In situations where equality is assumed but men still dominate, women occupy a strange space between the center and the margins. They can express opinions, but they’re not dictating the terms of the conversation.”

I wish I could say that I fully grasped the gender politics that Phair was exploring on Guyville when I first heard the record. But I’d be lying if I said that as a deeply awkward, profoundly confused, and sexually inexperienced 16-year-old boy that I didn’t take Phair’s blunt talk about blowjob queens and fucking until your dick turns blue at face value. (Phair didn’t exactly discourage this when promoting the record, posing in cheesecake photos that played up her bohemian sex appeal.) I found Guyville titillating and unnerving, which is essentially how I felt at the time about every girl I had ever met. In my world, women had all of the power, which created a notquite-healthy mix of worship and resentment of femininity that’s common to a lot of boys that age. Listening to Guyville tracks like “Girls! Girls! Girls!”—“I get away, almost every day/with what the girls call, what the girls call, what the girls call/the girls call murder”—was like hearing what they really thought of you, and it was not the least bit reassuring. On Guyville, sex was war—and I was Guam.

My 16-year-old self had a lot more luck connecting with the comfortable self-absorption of Smashing Pumpkins and Siamese Dream, which easily out-sold the other big records coming out of Chicago that year. Probably not coincidentally, Smashing Pumpkins were also the city’s most hated band, both in Chicago and everywhere else.

Bob Mould called them “the grunge Monkees.” Stephen Malkmus of Pavement dubbed them “nature kids” that “don’t have no function” in the song “Range Life.”

Smashing Pumpkins drew detractors like health inspectors to Chinese buffets for reasons both musical and personal. Musically, the band’s grandiose 1991 debut, Gish, had not one iota punk rock on it; even worse, at a time when bands that owed more to Black Sabbath than Black Flag still took pains to recite the standard pieties about the sanctity of the underground, Smashing Pumpkins didn’t pretend that their influences extended beyond Judas Priest and The Cure. But even if Billy Corgan had gone out and gotten a Dead Kennedys tattoo on his neck, there was no getting around the fact that the band’s preciously boyish, prodigiously talented, and stridently controlling frontman was what many people—including the other band members—really hated about Smashing Pumpkins.

To his credit, Corgan seemed to recognize this. When DeRogatis asked Corgan about the army of Pumpkins haters that was already growing before Siamese Dream made him one of alt-rock’s biggest personalities, he admitted that “the way that I carry myself” fueled much of the animosity. That Billy Corgan was arrogant and annoyingly messianic did not make him special among rock stars, particularly in the early ’90s. But his singing voice—which ranged from a whimpering whisper to an agonizingly forceful and petulant whine—was the manifestation of an endlessly needy personality, the kind of guy who makes a list with the names of everyone who’s ever wronged him and keeps it under his pillow at night. Whether Corgan obsessively pursued rock stardom to spite those people or finally win them over, it seemed even he didn’t know. But in the underground rock scene, a place where all kinds of freaks and geeks were supposedly welcome, Corgan was on the outside looking in. “I wish from Day 1 people would have looked at me and said, ‘You’re all right, come on, join the team,’ but it’s never been that way with me,” Corgan told Rolling Stone. “I don’t know why. Maybe I’m a dick, it shows. I don’t know.”

In a way, bashing the Pumpkins only strengthened Corgan and the “tortured genius” image he fronted in interviews. But if Corgan made a big deal out of being tortured, you also couldn’t deny him the genius part.

Corgan wasn’t only the architect of the widescreen Smashing Pumpkins sound, he was also the construction crew, handling virtually all of the guitar and bass parts on the band’s early albums. For Siamese Dream, that was

a lot of parts, with some songs having more than 50 different guitar tracks. It took three months and a quarter of a million dollars to finish Siamese Dream, and the arduous process of making the record nearly ended the Smashing Pumpkins right then and there. But, like Klaus Kinski in Werner Herzog’s masterpiece of megalomania, Aguirre, The Wrath Of God, Corgan kept the band together to satisfy his maniacal pursuit of endless power and riches. In Aguirre, Kinski ends up adrift on a lonely stretch of the Amazon with a raft full of corpses and wild monkeys; Corgan had better transportation, riding the stainless steel perfection of Siamese Dream’s impeccably conceived guitar-rock hymns straight to the promised land. And he did it his way, declaring his independence from the cool kids that scorned him on the album-opening “Cherub Rock,” which sounded like Bob Dylan rewriting “Positively Fourth Street” after gorging on Boston’s first album for an entire summer.

An even bigger hit from Siamese Dream was “Today,” which ranks among the grunge era’s best singles. In typically melodramatic fashion, Corgan revealed that “Today” expressed his suicidal thoughts while grappling with writer’s block during the making of Siamese Dream. Corgan was wise to score his manic-depressive confessional with a gorgeously simple melody that took grunge’s standard quiet verse/loud chorus formula to new heights of gloomy grandeur.

Soon, writer’s block would be a distant memory for Corgan. Emboldened by the acceptance he found with the mainstream rock audience that had eluded him every place else, Corgan became a one-man factory of angsty alterna-pop. With 1995’s Mellon Collie And The Infinite Sadness and the accompanying singles collection The Aeroplane Flies High, the Pumpkins amazingly offered up five albums’ worth of material over the course of a year. It was tough not to be impressed by the superhuman efforts of Corgan, who wrote nearly all of the songs and surrendered no quarter of attention to his bandmates. The guy had even stopped looking human, taking on a pale, bald-headed, rock ’n’ roll alien look that was as repellent as his songs were catchy. Compared with reluctant grunge-rock pin-ups like Eddie Vedder and Chris Cornell, who didn’t court sex-symbol status but undoubtedly benefited from it, Corgan didn’t exude traditional rock-star charisma. If those guys were Don Draper, Corgan was more like Pete Campbell—not exactly a people person, but a real scrapper with ambition to burn.

Corgan’s hard work was paying off big time: Singles like “Bullet With Butterfly Wings,” “Tonight, Tonight,” and “1979” made Smashing Pumpkins the most inescapable alt-rock band of the mid-’90s, a time when the competition had either already taken itself out of commission (Nirvana) or was in the process of doing so (Pearl Jam and Soundgarden). The sheer quality and quantity of Smashing Pumpkins’ work at the time integrated Corgan’s larger-than-life odes to his own sadness into the very fabric of popular ’90s rock, making Siamese Dream and Mellon Collie essential documents of their time.

Unfortunately, the Pumpkins’ greatest hits suffered greatly from being tethered so inextricably to alt-rock’s prime once the ship started to go down at the end of the decade. By 1998, the epic emoting of Siamese Dream already seemed irreparably dated even to Corgan, who pulled Smashing Pumpkins in a radically different direction on Adore, playing around with trendy electro-pop and sullen balladry. But by then his band was falling apart. First, drummer Jimmy Chamberlin was fired in 1996 for his involvement in the drug-related death of touring keyboardist Jonathan Melvoin. (Chamberlain re-joined in 1998, and then quit in 2009.) Then bassist D’Arcy Wretsky left in 1999, and guitarist James Iha decided not to re-join Corgan when he revived Smashing Pumpkins after the band’s 2000 breakup. Today, Corgan keeps Smashing Pumpkins technically afloat like one of those barely-there, barely-remembered classic-rock institutions that tour county fairs every summer with one original member and four or five guys in Hawaiian shirts. But he’s still a songwriting machine—over at smashingpumpkins.com, the curious can download selections from Corgan’s ongoing Teargarden By Kaleidyscope project, where he is gradually releasing tracks from a massive 44-song would-be masterpiece-inprogress. By the time that’s finished, Corgan will surely have another 44 songs ready to go for whoever is available to play them.

Liz Phair took longer than Billy Corgan to fall from grace, though that was mostly due to not being as prolific.

After Guyville, she released two other ’90s albums, 1994’s Whip-Smart and 1998’s Whitechocolatespaceegg, that were respected by fans and critics but not particularly loved. Only Phair’s self-titled fourth record inspired as much passion as her debut when it was released in 2003, though this time people were rushing to take back all the nice things they had said about her 10 years earlier. Working with the sought-after production team The Matrix, which was most famous for making hits with shopping mall punk Avril Lavigne, Phair attempted the same career makeover that Weezer pulled off far more successfully a few years later, deliberately setting aside the dark idiosyncrasies that her cult following loved in order to create an exceedingly cynical version of modern pop music for the masses. Guyville is the work of a woman wise beyond her years; Liz Phair, meanwhile, was sort of embarrassing coming from a 36-year-old divorced mother who was slouching toward middle age by singing about playing Xbox with hot twentysomething-year-old boys in “Rock Me” and using semen as a beauty aid in “HWC.” “When it comes to rock, we’re used to wincing at stars dressed up in packaging that masks a lack of talent,” Meghan O’Rourke wrote in a famously scathing New York Times review of Liz Phair. “Here, the wince comes instead from watching a genuine talent dressed in bland packaging.” For people who felt Guyville had been an honest reflection of their own experiences, it was as if Phair had gone back to being the girl that fetches the beer and talks about how bitchin’ her boyfriend’s band is.

Corgan and Phair have both disappointed their followers over the years, but Urge Overkill seemed not have any followers, save for those of us that still like to break out Saturation on sunny summer afternoons. When Saturation failed to set the world on fire—even after the band scored a hit with the Neil Diamond cover “Girl, You’ll Be A Woman Soon” on the Pulp Fiction soundtrack—Urge Overkill strangely kept on pretending to be rock stars, falling victim to assorted drug problems and ego clashes that made 1995’s Exit The Dragon as joyless as Saturation had been breezily exuberant. When that album also flopped, Urge broke up.

But now Nash Kato and “King” Roeser are back together, having recently put out the first song from Urge Overkill in 15 years. The rumbling “Effigy” is a deliberate departure from the glossy sugar rush of Saturation, recalling the days when Urge Overkill was still pals with Albini and Rusk. “We went and rehearsed it for a couple of days then banged it out like we used to, Touch And Go style,” Roeser told Spin. “Effigy” sounds understandably shaky, like a band trying to go home again even if it knows home no longer exists. Here’s hoping they end up someplace better.

What Happened Next? Kurt Cobain’s suicide knocked the wind out of alternative rock, but not before Soundgarden released the defining grunge masterpiece Superunknown. But by then, the old alt-rock guard was being upstaged by Stone Temple Pilots, Bush, and the new wave of “bubble-grunge” bands.

Part 5: 1994: 1994: Kurt Cobain is dead! Long live Soundgarden!

By Steven Hyden Nov 30, 2010 12:00 AM

“You can’t fire me because I quit.”—Nirvana, “Scentless Apprentice” “I just wish I knew whether he won or lost,”—Soundgarden guitarist Kim Thayil, the day after Kurt Cobain’s suicide, as quoted by Kim Neely in Rolling Stone, June 16, 1994 For a momentous occasion to advance to “generation-defining cultural touchstone” status, it has to pass the “Where were you when?” test. It’s not an easy test; only the big three of modern American history—the bombing of Pearl Harbor, the assassination of John F. Kennedy, and Sept. 11—get passing grades. (Though only in an ethnocentric sense.) If you were alive when these events occurred, you’re supposed to be able to instantly recall with photographic detail what you were doing at the exact moment you first heard about them. Even a distant or mundane personal encounter with a universally felt experience tends to come back shrouded in thick layers of tragic-heavy significance whenever it’s conjured up. On the morning of 9/11, I woke up on my living room couch with a wicked hangover and still dressed in my clothes from the night before. It was like every other morning of my early 20s, and yet this was meaningful. I wasn’t just sleeping off a long work night of drinking. I was yawning and dry heaving through one of the darkest days in my nation’s history.

By the “Where were you when?” standard, Kurt Cobain’s suicide either doesn’t qualify or my memory is truly fucked. I know I remember finding out about it on a Saturday morning at school while waiting to get on the bus for a forensics tournament. (Extemporaneous speaking—yeah, I was pretty good.) Cobain’s body was actually found the day before, along with a can of Barq’s root beer, some towels, the shotgun with which he killed himself, and half of his $100 supply of Mexican black tar heroin. (He injected the other half before pulling the trigger.) I must not have watched any television the night of Friday, April 8; if I had, I would’ve known where he

shot himself (in the greenhouse behind his home), who found his body (an electrician hired to install security lighting), and which CD was playing on the stereo when he died (R.E.M.’s Automatic For The People).

A fellow forensicator whose name was Josh or perhaps Trevor told me about the suicide. I don’t remember what he said exactly; I just recall thinking that he had to be joking. People were always kidding around about Kurt Cobain killing himself. Even Kurt Cobain cracked wise about his image as a shoulder-slumping, wristslashing depressive; he once wrote a Nirvana song called “I Hate Myself And Want To Die,” and released it on 1993’s The Beavis And Butt-head Experience. In hindsight, this seems important; at the time, it was just goofy.

In a way, my initial reaction to Cobain’s death was appropriate, because I had thought Nirvana was joking the first time I heard “Smells Like Teen Spirit” two and a half years earlier. My life with Kurt Cobain was bookended by instances where I didn’t get what he was trying to say. But soon after I realized that the news was true, that Kurt Cobain really was dead, I became the poster child in my town for young Nirvana fans trying to come to grips with the tragedy.

At the beginning of my sophomore year, I started writing a regular column for the teen-oriented “Get With It!” page of my hometown newspaper, the Appleton Post-Crescent. I was the de facto spokesman for Northeastern Wisconsin teenagers, and I felt it was my duty to address the untimely death of the spokesman for the grunge generation. Unfortunately, just like every grown-up pundit yapping on the subject in the media, I had nothing profound to offer. So, I did what newspaper columnists have done since The Boston News-Letter: I went maudlin, likening Cobain to rock stars of old that had died at any early age, and imagined them “sitting up there in rock ’n’ roll heaven”: I’m sure Morrison is up there, as is Hendrix. Cobain ought to fit right in with those guys. After all, they have a lot in common. They all became big stars very quickly, creating music that would help define their times. They all created headlines and controversy with their reckless actions and their “to hell with it” attitudes. They were all killed before they got done saying what they had to say, and doing all the things they had to do. And, tragically, they were killed through actions of their own while they were still in their prime.

Admiration for Cobain’s “to hell with it” attitude aside, the thrust of my post-mortem was reassuring parents that kids were not going to be lining up to blow their heads off en masse in response to his death, a major (and overblown) concern in the press at the time. “Anyone thinking of doing this must realize something: Kurt Cobain’s death is perhaps the strongest argument against suicide imaginable,” I wrote with all the gravity that accompanies the heavy-handed prose of Appleton’s most respected 16-year-old columnist. The day my story ran, one of the local TV news channels came over to my house and interviewed me for that evening’s telecast.

My mother was very proud; I just obsessed over how my complexion looked.

In my defense, it was a tall order for anybody to make sense of Cobain’s suicide. Cobain never seemed like a guy built to go the distance, but his suicide still seemed incredibly senseless and shocking. He had obviously wasted his talent and vitality as an artist, and yet his death undeniably made Nirvana’s criminally small body of work seem all the more singular and towering. His career seems oddly perfect—all killer and no filler, all because he murdered it.

In the aftermath of Cobain’s death, the world was left with three unanswerable questions: 1) Why did Kurt Cobain kill himself? 2) Was his suicide preventable? 3) How would things be different if he hadn’t killed himself?

These are the questions I still come back to, 16 years later, while trying to figure out what, if anything, Kurt Cobain’s death is supposed to mean. Let’s tackle them one at a time.

Unanswerable No. 1: Why did Kurt Cobain kill himself?

Kurt Cobain did leave a suicide note, of course, which was conveniently emblazoned on T-shirts worn by the world’s dopiest Nirvana fans in the months after his death. (He also left a private note for his wife Courtney Love and child Frances Bean.) After sorting through the misspellings and knowing Freddie Mercury and Neil

Young references, Cobain’s note seems frustratingly (though perhaps inevitably) muddled. Addressed to his childhood imaginary friend Boddah, Cobain’s final words read like the first draft of a press release. (Love called it a “letter to the fucking editor.”) When Cobain writes about the lack of joy he felt in his stardom, he’s clearly addressing Nirvana fans more than his loved ones. (“I can’t fool you, any one of you.”) Even at the absolute lowest point of his soon-to-be-terminated life, Cobain was still image-conscious enough to anticipate how his suicide would be perceived in the media. “The sad little, sensitive, unappreciative, Pisces, Jesus man!” he writes derisively, more about his public persona than himself. “Why don’t you just enjoy it? I don’t know.”

Two things strike me while reading Cobain’s suicide note. The first is his reluctance to truly open himself up; he doesn’t touch on the drug addiction or troubled home life that must’ve contributed in some way to his decimated mental state. Instead, he begins by writing about how “all the warnings from the punk rock 101 courses” have “proven to be very true,” because “sometimes I feel as if I should have a punch-in time clock before I walk out on stage.” These were stock public statements coming from Cobain; he could’ve just cut and pasted one of the many interviews he gave about his distaste for the spotlight (or directed readers to side two of In Utero) to save himself the trouble of writing it out one last time in hastily scribbled longhand.

Later, he implies that lifelong depression and alienation, more than his disenchantment with fame, drove him to this desperate act: “I have it good, very good, and I’m grateful, but since the age of seven, I’ve become hateful towards all humans in general.” It makes me wonder if Cobain’s problem with success is that it didn’t change his life enough. If you’re given everything you could ever want—a wife, a daughter, a home, financial stability, mass acceptance for your art—and you’re still unhappy, well, that just about sinks any possibility for redemption, doesn’t it?

The other thing I’m left with is how young Cobain seems. He had turned 27 just about a month and a half before his suicide; he was 11 years older than me when he died, which made him old enough for me to look up to but also young enough that his worldview still seemed applicable to mine. Now that I’m six years older than Cobain, he’s no longer a person with whom I feel much kinship. He’s just a confused and immature guy in his mid-20s that hasn’t given up the pleasurable misery of parsing his childhood traumas. He reminds me of the person I used to be, before I grew up a little and gained some perspective on life. Among the many things Kurt Cobain threw away was the opportunity to cringe over how stupid he could be when he was young.

Unanswerable No. 2: Was his suicide preventable?

The fact that Cobain did kill himself probably means that the answer is no, especially considering that he appeared suicidal on at least two occasions in the weeks leading up to his death—on March 3, when he overdosed on champagne and Rohypnol while on tour in Rome, and again on March 18, when Courtney Love called Seattle police after Cobain holed up in his house with a gun and a bottle of pills. Still, I’d like to believe that Kurt Cobain could’ve been saved by using an old basketball strategy, where the loser extends the game by committing fouls and calling timeouts, allowing for every last resort to play itself out. If anybody could’ve used an extra timeout, it was Kurt Cobain.

On March 30, Cobain checked into the Exodus Recovery Center in Los Angeles. The staff at the rehab facility wasn’t aware of Cobain’s prior suicide attempts; had administrators known this, they might’ve kept a closer eye on him. But they didn’t, which allowed Cobain to sneak over Exodus’ 6-foot-tall fence and hop a plane back to Seattle. In the end, it was far too easy for one of the world’s most famous rock stars to disappear for a long enough period of time to permanently erase himself from the world. If somebody could’ve just kept him alive long enough to make him see that he could walk away from Nirvana and all the baggage that came with it without destroying himself, things might’ve been different.

It’s a nice thought, but it seems painfully facile as I listen to MTV Unplugged In New York. Nirvana recorded the live album at Sony Studios on November 18, 1993, less than four months before Cobain’s first suicide attempt.

When Nirvana’s Unplugged episode aired in December 1993, it seemed weird that so many of the songs were covers. But after Cobain died, it made a lot more sense: Funerals often feature favorite songs of the deceased.

In light of Cobain’s suicide, MTV Unplugged In New York was commonly heard as the work of a man committed to the idea of being dead as soon as possible. I know I’m not the only one that hears Kurt Cobain performing his own burial rites whenever the record plays. It’s not just a matter of the music’s close proximity to Cobain’s death; the suicide simply brought what was already there into greater focus. According to Charles R. Cross’ Heavier Than Heaven: A Biography Of Kurt Cobain, the Unplugged stage was decorated in lilies, black candles, and a crystal chandelier at Cobain’s suggestion. “You mean like a funeral?” Unplugged producer Alex Coletti asked. Exactly.

Cobain begins MTV Unplugged In New York with two Nirvana classics, “About A Girl” and “Come As You Are”—a very tasteful, if predictable tribute to the man’s life and legacy. Then there’s a hymn, The Vaselines’ “Jesus Doesn’t Want Me For A Sunbeam,” that’s irreverent and yet also appropriately churchy-sounding, followed by a eulogy in the form of David Bowie’s “The Man Who Sold The World,” where Kurt casually explains that he’s actually already been dead for a long time. Then he plays that long, droning guitar solo; listen closely and you can almost hear his spirit rising from the body.

After that there’s a series of famous (but not too famous) Nirvana deep cuts—“Pennyroyal Tea,” “Dumb,” “Polly,” and “Something In The Way.” (Playing one of Nirvana’s big hits would dishonor Kurt’s final wishes.)

Then the Meat Puppets arrive to play pallbearers on “Plateau,” “Oh Me,” and “Lake Of Fire,” ushering the dearly departed to a dark place that sounds like the opposite of heaven but still oddly comforting, like a home away from home. Kurt addresses all those that have gathered one last time on “All Apologies”; he assures everybody that he takes full blame for what’s about to happen. When he finally gets to Leadbelly's “Where Did You Sleep Last Night,” you hear him starting to dissipate. At the end, Kurt screams about shivering the whole night through. Suddenly there’s a lump in my throat; I’ve heard this song at least 600 times, and yet the lump always reappears in time for this part. My cheeks are hot, my eyes sting. I feel like I could throw up. Kurt gets to the final line, takes a shallow breath, and bellows “—night throuuuuugh!” A few banged-out guitar-strums later, he’s in the ground, lost forever.

Unaswerable No. 3: How would things be different if he hadn’t killed himself?

Chuck Klosterman wrote a funny piece in 2004 for Spin titled “What If Kurt Cobain Didn’t Die?” that contemplated the path Cobain’s life would’ve taken in an alternate universe where he didn’t blow a hole through his head. In Klosterman’s version of history, Cobain divorces Love, puts Nirvana on extended hiatus, releases an indifferently received solo record, and battles depression and drug problems with varying degrees

of success. I have no idea how accurate this fictional scenario is, but I suspect that it’s strangely spot-on. It sounds like the slowly descending career arc followed by many aging rock legends who have lived long enough to be taken for granted. Even if Cobain had made it to middle age, it’s fair to speculate that the most important work of his life had already been created. If we believe Klosterman, the world didn’t miss much.

Because Cobain was given larger-than-life immortality in part because of his tragic demise, there was an almost immediate impulse to demystify him. A few years after Cobain died, I was talking to a friend about Nirvana and how Cobain’s death had affected me. “Oh, you’re one of the mourners,” she said with just the right amount of scorn to make me feel like an enormous tool. It’s not like I knew Kurt Cobain personally or something; he was just some famous guy, so what was I so upset about?

When Cobain entered the pop arena, he represented the possibility for fury, truth, weirdness—anything!—at the center of culture. At least that’s what I believed. But when he killed himself, people like me just looked like suckers. If “Smells Like Teen Spirit” invading my hometown Top 40 radio station felt like an unimaginable sea change in the way That Things Are Supposed To Work, his suicide confirmed that nothing had really changed at all, and I was sort of a nitwit for believing that it did. Getting scolded for having the gall to actually be mournful about this just added insult to injury.

The perception is that Cobain’s suicide represents the momentum-shifting Billy Batts moment in the history of popular ’90s alternative rock. In Goodfellas, the murder of Billy Batts (played by well-traveled ass-kicker Frank Vincent) by Ray Liotta, Joe Pesci, and Robert De Niro signals a tonal shift from the swinging times of ’60s mafiadom to the pitch-black and cocaine-fueled hell of crime life in the ’70s. Exhilaration turns to apathy, and honor becomes a cheap joke. Similarly, Nirvana’s abrupt demise seemed to point toward darker times ahead. In reality, the emergence of bubble-grunge bands like Stone Temple Pilots and Candlebox already suggested that ’90s alt-rock was rapidly becoming a closed circuit; where a record like Nevermind had once been an instrument of personal awakening to underground culture, which opened a whole other can of worms about what was and wasn’t valid in the media’s tidy representation of society, STP’s Purple (its own merits aside) merely pointed back to all the CDs you had purchased in the past few years. The word “alternative” had the idea of otherness hardwired into its definition, but by 1994, “alternative” had been codified into its own set of sounds, attitudes, and clothing styles. Searching beyond the borders was discouraged. It was the beginning of the end, if not the end.

It would’ve likely played out that way even if Cobain had lived. But that doesn’t negate the perception that the excitement that came with grunge’s takeover of mainstream rock died along with him. Cobain’s suicide symbolized the crippling and devastating malaise that was starting to set in—not just in the mainstream rock audience, but among the bands as well. In all the grunge-related books and magazine articles that I’ve read, Soundgarden’s Kim Thayil has provided some of the most insightful and heartfelt commentary on this. A towering hulk of a man whose dark-hued features are covered with an awesomely Satanic beard, Thayil proves the old truism about the scariest-looking guy in the band also being the most soulful and sensitive. He felt Cobain’s loss as much as anybody.

“When Kurt did that, it just permanently changed my perception about everything we’ve done for the past few years,” Thayil told Rolling Stone’s Kim Neely in 1994. “And I don’t mean just me. I mean our band, and all of the bands from here that play with each other and support each other and watch each other’s shows. It just seemed to metaphorically put an end to everything.”

For Soundgarden, 1994 should’ve been a new beginning. Exactly one month before Cobain’s body was found, on March 8, Soundgarden released Superunknown. It was the album of the band’s career: It debuted at No. 1 on the Billboard chart, went platinum five times over, and finally established Soundgarden as a commercial force on par with the other big Seattle bands. More than that, Superunknown was a monumental hard-rock record, a psych-metal masterpiece that expertly applied gonad-rattling heaviness to pop hooks that were cryogenically engineered to pluck your pleasure centers while drawing a little blood in the process. Jack Endino

once described grunge as having “all the ingredients of classic ’70s rock, with maybe a little bit of ’80s punk rock attitude thrown into the recipe,” and nothing exemplifies this better than Superunknown. It’s the genre’s defining album. If grunge has any aspirations to musical greatness, Superunknown should be Exhibit A.

While the band’s music has aged exceptionally well, Soundgarden is remembered today for appealing mainly to knuckle-dragging mooks. I think there are two reasons for this. The first is Audioslave. Chris Cornell’s postSoundgarden band sounds superficially like Soundgarden—mostly because of Cornell’s distinctive King Shit Of Fuck Mountain vocals—only Audioslave is far more bombastic and totally sucks. We might as well lump Cornell’s undistinguished solo career in here as well, though I’d rather not say much else about it. While it should be noted that making a terrible album with Timbaland that literally nobody in the galaxy enjoyed will tarnish your musical legacy, and that committing unholy acts on the carcass of Michael Jackson’s “Billie Jean” will make even staunch Soundgarden fans embarrassed for you, I’d prefer to spend my time talking about how Cornell, at his best in the ’90s, was a powerhouse singer and the most underrated songwriter of his generation.

I am here to praise Chris Cornell, not to bury him.

To explain the other reason why Soundgarden doesn’t get the respect it deserves, let’s talk for a moment in the parlance of contemporary indie rock. In the ’00s, no indie-rock band put out material as consistently strong as Spoon. Britt Daniel steadfastly refused to write even one clunker on Spoon’s records, which were released every two or three years to an audience that was impressed, then amazed, and then slightly bored by how Spoon never made an artistic misstep. This consistency proved to be a double-edged sword. Spoon was both highly respected and yet not passionately adored. Almost everybody that followed indie rock seemed to like Spoon, but never as much as bands not necessarily expected to be brilliant. It was only when you looked back over the course of several years that you realized that, holy shit, Spoon was one of the best bands of its era.

The same was essentially true of Soundgarden. It was just such a solid band that it was easy to overlook how good it was pretty much any time it stepped up to the plate. By the time of Superunknown, Soundgarden had been together for 10 years and had already made classic albums with 1989’s Louder Than Love and 1991’s Badmotorfinger. It handled career hurdles that Cobain could never reconcile with relative ease, leaving legendary indie label SST for A&M Records and then touring the world with Guns N’ Roses. Soundgarden was a band in a true sense—Cornell was the singer and chief songwriter, but everybody made important creative contributions. (And Thayil, the stoic guitar player, was arguably the most recognizable band member.)

With Superunknown, Soundgarden showed it could push its music forward while being more pop-friendly than ever. From 1994 to 1997, Soundgarden successfully transitioned from the supersonic slime of its early records to being a crafty and highly productive radio band, turning out a series of unbeatable singles—my favorites are “My Wave,” “Fell On Black Days,” “Blow Up The Outside World,” and “Burden In My Hand”—that were instantly catchy while remaining focused on eternally belching riffs.

More than any other Seattle band, Soundgarden seemed best equipped for a long career of multi-platinum records and balls-out stadium shows. And yet, three years and one day after Cobain’s dead body was discovered, Soundgarden followed suit and did itself in, releasing this terse statement to the press on April 9, 1997: After 12 years, the members of Soundgarden have amicably and mutually decided to disband to pursue other interests. There is no word at this time on any of the members’ future plans. They’d like to thank their fans for all of their support over the years.

Apparently, in-fighting over the creative direction of the band during the making of 1996’s underappreciated Down On The Upside was to blame; Cornell and drummer Matt Cameron wanted to push beyond Soundgarden’s usual molten molasses, while Thayil argued for staying true to the band’s roots. Anybody who’s ever heard a Soundgarden record will tell you that this dichotomy defined the band’s winning formula— experimentation and melody grounded in the muddy waters of the River Styx. That Soundgarden turned its core strength into a destructive creative disagreement suggests that this was a band looking to be smashed to smithereens once it hit the big time.

After steadily rising through the ranks, Soundgarden lacked the drive to maintain the rock-star status it had achieved. By the time Soundgarden reached the mountaintop, the view had already been ruined. Soundgarden returned to Lollapalooza in 1996, four years after doing the festival with pals Pearl Jam and the Red Hot Chili Peppers; this time the band ended up squabbling with co-headliner Metallica over tour payments. At the final Soundgarden show in early ’97 in Hawaii, the excitable Ben Shepherd threw his bass down and stormed offstage while Cornell chanted, “We’re better without you.” The thrill wasn’t only gone, it had moved to an undisclosed location under an assumed name. Soundgarden had become the kings of grunge at the precise moment that grunge had burned itself out. “You barely had time to sit there in the afterglow,” Thayil told Rolling Stone’s Neely. “It was like, boom, the light was out.”

I don’t want to put all the sins of ’90s rock on Kurt Cobain’s corpse. Soundgarden had a good run, staying together for a dozen years. (Not counting the recent reunion, though it’s unclear whether it will stick.)

Soundgarden probably would’ve broken up regardless, and alternative rock most certainly was on the road to being diluted well before Cobain died. Kurt Cobain was not a martyr, and I’m not going to dehumanize him by turning his life and death into a crushed velvet painting.

But I’m also not going to let Nirvana be reduced to a load of hype signifying nothing. Yes, I was one of the mourners. Kurt Cobain's music made my life better, opening me up to new worlds that enriched my existence immensely. I’m extremely grateful that Nevermind came into my life when it did, because I was a lonely kid that really needed something to connect with. Just because I’m fortunate enough to no longer be 13 years old doesn’t mean I’ll ever set aside my gratitude for what Cobain once gave me, or my grief for where he ended up.

I can only speak for myself (and possibly Kim Thayil) here; maybe you didn’t give a shit. But to me, you’re goddamn right Kurt Cobain fucking mattered.

What Happened Next? The originators of grunge were in decline in 1995, but grunge music was alive and well thanks to a new crop of bands that attempted to make up for their lack of roots with lots of hooks and angsty attitude. I’ll look at the rise of bubble-grunge—also known as post-grunge or “scrunge”—and how it paved the way for the popular modern rock of today.

Part 6: 1995: 1995: Live, Bush, and Alanis Morissette take the pop path

By Steven Hyden Dec 14, 2010 12:00 AM

“Experiments will be left to a small avant garde, way out on the left, very solemn and romantic, and the bubblegum business in general will regard this avant garde with benevolence, will steal its best ideas and talents, but will otherwise ignore it.”—Nik Cohn, “The Monkees,” Awopbopaloobop Alopbamboom: The Golden Age Of Rock “It’s an idealization—a level of despair to aspire toward rather than shared pain requiring collective catharsis. In other words, things could get worse.”— Robert Christgau, review of Bush’s Sixteen Stone When my journey through the past of popular ’90s alternative rock began two months ago, I had a not-sosimple goal: I wanted to reconnect with my long-lost teenaged self, and in the process rekindle the passion I once had for the music of my youth. Pure, unadulterated myopia aside, I hoped that readers would relate to my experience of looking back and realizing that sizeable swaths of my adolescence didn’t feel like they belonged to me anymore. I wanted to recover that history by playing old, dated albums and trying really hard to hear them as I did back then, no matter how poorly some of my former alt-rock heroes had aged. Because while opinions might change, the past doesn’t. The record is set—I liked what I liked in the ’90s, and I wanted to remember why.

So far, it’s been surprisingly easy to re-introduce Ten, Siamese Dream, and Superunknown to my CD shelves after years of storing them away in boxes in the basement. But now that we’re a little further down the ’90s altrock trough, we have to deal with the likes of Throwing Copper, the breakthrough record from the oppressively serious, frustratingly-difficult-to-Google-search messiah-rock outfit Live. I know I bought Throwing Copper, and

there’s a good chance you did, too—it sold more than 8 million copies in the U.S. alone. If you did buy it, you probably also sold it off by the end of the ’90s; Throwing Copper is to used CD stores what Mantovani records are to rummage sales. Discarded copies haunt the shelves like balding, middle-aged men in leather-sleeve jackets.

I’m watching the video for “I Alone,” the second of Throwing Copper’s five singles, and it’s not helping me recover whatever affection I once felt for this record. The video begins with an uncomfortably tight shot on thoroughly ridiculous Live frontman Ed Kowalczyk, who is rubbing and distorting his painfully pale face with his hands while pretending to sing the song’s opening line, “It’s easier not to be wise.” I should take Kowalczyk’s words as a warning to turn back, and not watch the remaining three minutes and 49 seconds of “I Alone,” but I don’t listen. Instead, I stick around and see the other members of Live standing in the middle of what’s clearly a soundstage that’s been made to resemble a burned-out, post-apocalyptic wasteland; it looks precisely like the kind of godforsaken place where a record like Throwing Copper could sell 8 million copies.

Now Kowalczyk is shirtless, baring a modestly built torso that positively screams to be covered by several layers of clothing. His spastic mannerisms are reminiscent of a hacky nightclub comedian hoofing it through a lame David Byrne impression. “It’s easier not to be great,” he sings as a long, braided rattail rests over his right shoulder. Suddenly I’m full of rage: Jesus Christ, this is supposed to be a commercial for Throwing Copper, and all I want to do is kick the shit out of my computer screen.

The popularity of Throwing Copper—which was released on April 26, 1994, and hit No. 1 on the Billboard albums chart 52 weeks later—says a lot about the state of alternative rock in 1995. Similar to the exploitation and marginalization of the serious-minded avant garde by the pop-music industry that rock critic Nik Cohn wrote about in the late ’60s, 1995 was a time when the superficial aesthetics of alternative music—down-tuned guitars, downbeat melodies, frowny-faced (but still telegenic) stars—had been fully absorbed by corporate starmakers, who set about flooding the market with highly commercial bubble-grunge bands that took everything that seemed fresh just three years earlier out of context and straight into the meat grinder.

A record like Throwing Copper must make cash-strapped modern-day record executives wish that time travel actually existed, so they could venture back to a glorious period in history when music consumers would gladly buy anything so long as the proper palms were greased to get it on the radio and MTV. Throwing Copper was the follow-up to Live’s 1991 debut, Mental Jewelry, a clumsy attempt at applying U2-style grandiosity to

regular-dude college rock. A band like Live was supposed to be a remedy to the proudly contrived and silly music that was dominant on the charts before Nevermind pushed mainstream rock in a different direction. But Mental Jewelry is plenty contrived and silly on its own; song titles that already seem wincingly pretentious (“The Beauty Of Gray,” “Tired Of ‘Me’”) are given a little extra oomph by even more doltish, you’ve-got-to-be-fuckingkidding-me parenthetical asides, like the achingly, stupidly profound “Operation Spirit (The Tyranny Of Tradition).”

Apparently this was obvious even to the members of Live, who were in their late teens when they made Mental Jewelry. For Throwing Copper, they tightened up the songwriting and made the songs louder and more anthemic, pumping up the muscularity of the music by adding chunky distortion to the leaden jangle and fumbling funk of their instrumental attack. Along the way, Kowalczyk locked his inner Bono in the same room with his insufferable Eddie Vedder impression, got them drunk, and nine months later gave birth to an artistic persona that was nearly as aggressively self-aggrandizing as it was hopelessly self-pitying.

Live is best remembered today for the song “Lightning Crashes,” a melodramatic ballad about death that made modern rock radio safe for gratuitous mentions of the word “placenta.” The popularity of “Lightning Crashes” in April 1995 coincided with the Oklahoma City bombing, and a remixed version of the song created by one of the city’s local radio stations—which incorporated sound bites from Bill Clinton and Tom Brokaw, as well as fireengine and ambulance sirens—was played throughout the country as Americans mourned the tragic deaths of 168 people. Two weeks after the bombing, on May 6, Throwing Copper was the nation’s top-selling album. Live would go on to be named 1995’s Artist Of The Year by the readers of Rolling Stone and the Billboard Music Awards. Live’s status was such that when a strikingly beautiful girl named Jen moved to my town and started hanging out with my group of friends, she seemed all the more exotic because she hailed from York, Pennsylvania, which we all knew was Live’s hometown.

That summer, right before the start of my senior year, my friends and I drove down to Milwaukee to see Live at the Marcus Amphitheater. I was 17, and driving four hours roundtrip for a concert was still a big deal. I had sweet-talked my mother into allowing me to see R.E.M. on the Monster tour at Marcus just three months earlier, which succeeded in part because she confused R.E.M. with REO Speedwagon, whose Hi Infidelity was one of two non-Christian music tapes she still owned. (The other being the Dirty Dancing soundtrack.)

We arrived late and missed the opening act, a no-name blip on the pop-culture radar named PJ Harvey. I liked Live enough at the time to purchase the single ugliest tour T-shirt that’s even taken up space in my dresser, a

brownish green monstrosity showing off Throwing Copper’s grotesque cover art. But my favorite part of the concert actually had nothing to do with Live at all. It happened when Kowalczyk dismissed the band and announced that he was about to play a song by a group from Dayton, Ohio that he recently discovered. The band was Guided By Voices, and the song was “Dusted,” from 1993’s Vampire On Titus.

Now is a good time to finally address an issue that’s been hovering in the background of this series from the beginning: the distinction between “cool” ’90s rock and “uncool” ’90s rock. I’ve made an effort to focus on some of the era’s biggest names and most commercially successful rock bands because 1) those are the bands I liked at the time; 2) those are the bands that millions of other people liked at the time; and 3) I find it strange that many people, including myself, don’t seem to remember it that way.

When I look back to my music-listening habits in 1995, I tend to overlook all the time I spent listening to Throwing Copper and instead think only about how I obsessed over GBV’s Alien Lanes, which I bought after reading a glowing four-star review in Rolling Stone. That summer, I tried to make heads or tails of a record that boasted 28 absentmindedly recorded songs in just 41 minutes. I was lost until I realized that the whole record was basically like the second side of The Beatles’ Abbey Road, which stitched a series of melodic fragments into an extended suite. Just like that, Alien Lanes made sense, and GBV quickly became one of my favorite bands. In hindsight, Live seems likes a footnote, despite selling millions of records and playing 25,000-seat amphitheaters in its heyday, while Guided By Voices appears a lot bigger and more important today even if it reached only a fraction of Live’s audience in the ’90s.

That has something to do with Alien Lanes possibly being the best rock album of the last 20 years, and Throwing Copper without question not being the best rock album of the last 20 years. But I also think there’s an element of self-flattery in how we remember our pasts. People who care about rock history have collectively decided to focus on “real” ’90s alternative rock—Pavement, Yo La Tengo, Sonic Youth, Fugazi, Built To Spill, insert your favorite aging indie band here—at the expense of bands most commonly identified with the nebulous genre tag at the time. As critics are inclined to do, they’ve written ’90s rock history based on their personal preferences rather than what people were actually listening to. I happen to share many of those preferences, but that’s not the point: Our memories seem distorted by what we’ve retroactively decided is worthwhile.

Last month, Billy Corgan was soundly mocked after he took to Twitter and ripped Pavement for reuniting for a cash-in tour without making any new music, and declared that indie rock’s premier slacker icons represented “the death of the alternative dream.” It sounded like the sort of absurdly delusional statement that you’d expect from a faded egomaniac like Corgan. But if people had taken a minute to think about the content of what Corgan said before rushing to make fun of him, they might’ve noticed that he was actually sort of right, albeit not in the way that he intended.

For mainstream rock fans like myself, the popular alternative music of the early ’90s really did seem like a legitimate insurgence from the underground. But when Pavement’s Stephen Malkmus indifferently mocked Smashing Pumpkins and Stone Temple Pilots in the lyrics to “Range Life,” one of the breakout songs from 1994’s Crooked Rain Crooked Rain, it was an early sign that this was no longer true—or, worse, had never been true in the first place. Unwittingly or not, “Range Life” taught me that the alternative rock bands I liked were overblown frauds; it was like the day you showed up at school and noticed that nobody cuffed their jeans anymore. You couldn’t un-ring the bell.

The difference between “uncool” ’90s alternative and “cool” ’90s indie boils down to demographics: grunge and post-grunge bands were geared mainly toward angsty, immature teenagers, while indie groups were targeted at cynical, over-educated college kids and post-graduate twentysomethings. Bands like Pavement and Guided

By Voices seemed older, just like coffee-drinking and watching Northern Exposure seemed older. If there was one thing I wanted to be when I was in high school, it was older. And in order to be older, you had to set aside music that expressed the tortured range of erratic emotions felt by 14-year-old misfits in favor of music that informed the calm, cool detachment affected by 21-year-old know-it-alls.

Alien Lanes ended up being just as important to me in many ways as Nevermind, only I couldn’t share the experience with anyone I knew. My friends just weren’t into this kind of music yet, and they definitely didn’t understand why I was so excited to hear Ed Kowalczyk play an unplugged version of a song that’s barely known even by GBV standards.

On that late August night in Milwaukee, two paths briefly intersected at the heart of my experience with ’90s music, and then passed each other as they headed in increasingly divergent directions. I wound up staying on the road with GBV and indie rock; fading in to the distance was Live and the rapidly disintegrating husk that was once known as alternative rock. It now seems strange that GBV and Live could’ve ever existed on the same stage. Live went on to tour with Nickelback, serve as a primary inspiration for popular American Idol alumnus Chris Daughtry, and break up in 2009. In 2010, Kowalczyk released a solo record called Alive while the other band members formed a new group called The Gracious Few with two guys from Candlebox. Even when they’re apart, the members of Live have still found it very easy not to be great.

I was on my way to being done with mainstream alternative music in 1995, but mainstream alternative music wasn’t done with me. What else explains this copy of Bush’s Sixteen Stone, an album I actively avoided owning until just a few weeks ago, sitting on my living room stereo?

I didn’t need Stephen Malkmus to tap me on the shoulder and point out that Bush really sucked as Sixteen Stone came to dominate alt-rock radio in 1995. Bush epitomized the rankest form of grunge-rock shuck-andjive, cynically regurgitating the sonic and visual hallmarks of infinitely superior bands as hollow, shamefully shameless shtick. Released on Dec. 6, 1994, Sixteen Stone seemed like blatant profiteering in the wake of Nirvana’s end, when demand for a dumber, more pop-friendly follow-up to In Utero was sky-high and supply was non-existent. Even better, Bush’s lead singer and guitarist, Gavin Rossdale, was a grade-A piece of pretty-

boy rock-star man-meat; he looked like Jared Leto’s Jordan Catalano period crossed with Jared Leto’s yet-to-beseen 30 Seconds To Mars period. After several years of rock stars who didn’t look or act like rock stars, Rossdale was a swift return to the mercilessly hunky status quo.

Sixteen Stone had all the trappings of a pre-fab alt-rock confection, but Bush wasn’t exactly conceived as a can’t-miss proposition. Birthed during the glory days of grunge in 1992, Bush stumbled around its native Great Britain in search for a record deal as the Brits went crazy over the latest wave of American bands. Rossdale had previously crapped out as music-business careerist, failing to garner any attention during two unsuccessful stints under the tutelage of English labels. (In a 1997 interview, he admitted that labels in his native country saw him as “damaged goods.”) Bush didn’t fit in with the emerging Britpop scene, but Rossdale found favor on the other side of the pond, where Bush was finally able to land a U.S. record deal.

Sixteen Stone was produced by Clive Langer and Alan Winstanley, two British music-industry pros who had overseen glossy pop hits like Elvis Costello’s “Everyday I Write The Book.” For Sixteen Stone, Langer and Winstanley showed a deft touch at replicating the blown-out sound of Steve Albini’s production work on In Utero, all the while taking pains to preserve the simple but brutally effective hooks on the album’s catchiest songs. It wasn’t great art, but Sixteen Stone was decent product, overseen by clever craftsmen who understood what the contemporary pop audience wanted and knew how to deliver a convincing-enough facsimile of it. Still, Bush’s label, Trauma Records, considered not releasing Sixteen Stone; not on artistic grounds, but because it didn’t think the low-budget, no-buzz project had any commercial potential. Trauma ended up being rewarded for its near-incompetence to the tune of 6 million-plus albums sold.

Listening to Sixteen Stone, there’s a part of me that wants to find something to defend. Co-opting cutting-edge sounds for pop purposes isn’t an automatic artistic disqualifier in my book; The Monkees might have been a ripoff of the Hard Day’s Night Beatles, but they also made a lot of timeless pop-rock records. Larceny in pop music can be forgiven with a good beat and a memorable melody. But Sixteen Stone just sounds junky and witless outside of its well-known singles. Of course, that still leaves nearly half the record, which anyone who paid attention to alt-rock radio in the mid-’90s will recognize—songs like the caterwauling “Everything Zen,” the somewhat less caterwauling “Little Things,” and the caterwauling-est “Machinehead.” There’s also the awful ballad “Glycerine,” a song I’ve always hated and occasionally slow-danced to.

My favorite song on Sixteen Stone is “Little Things,” which, not coincidentally, is the album’s baldest Nirvana ripoff. It kicks off with a stock “Smells Like Teen Spirit”/”Rape Me”/”More Than A Feeling” guitar riff before settling into a distinctively rumbling Krist Novoselic bassline. Then the chorus explodes a la “In Bloom,” with maybe a dash of “Lithium,” and I’m totally rocking out to my memories of a band I love a hell of a lot more than Bush. In another time, Gavin Rossdale might have been praised as a passable mash-up artist. Instead, he used this patchwork sonic canvas to paint a story that’s possibly about werewolves, starving frontiersmen, and/or a guy sucking his own dick. I’m just spit-ballin’ here; see if you can make better sense of the following lyrics: I touch your mouth My willy is food Addicted to love I’m addicted to fools I kill you once I kill you again We’re starving and crude Welcome my friends to The little things that kill Rossdale made the highly questionable decision to print the lyrics of Sixteen Stone in the album’s liner notes, which is sort of like Jason Friedberg and Aaron Seltzer—the doofuses behind Date Movie, Epic Movie, Vampires Suck and other crimes against cinematic comedy—handing out leather-bound copies of their screenplays to

dissatisfied customers as they exit the theater. The lyrics sheet to Sixteen Stone reads like it was written an hour before an English midterm by an especially dim Kurt Cobain acolyte. Rossdale’s lyrics demand an orgy of redpen marks, not preservation inside a multi-platinum record.

Picking on dopey lyrics is a loser’s game when it comes to discussing the big pop-rock albums of 1995, since even the most patently pukey songwriting ended up being praised for its “confessional” qualities. Such was the case with Alanis Morissette’s staggeringly popular Jagged Little Pill, which spawned six hit singles—”You Oughta Know,” “Ironic,” “You Learn,” “Hand In My Pocket,” “Head Over Feet,” and “All I Really Want”—and went on to sell an amazing 33 million copies worldwide. In terms of sales, Jagged Little Pill belongs in the same company as Led Zeppelin IV and Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band.

Even more than Sixteen Stone, Jagged Little Pill demonstrated that mainstream pop had assimilated the sound and feel of alt-rock and could now turn out artists that fit the mold without all that troublesome baggage of BS punk-rock credibility. Jagged Little Pill made edgy gestures—lead single “You Oughta Know” thrust an aggressive finger in the chest of the tired Carly Simon-style singer-songwriter template just enough to make it feel alive again—while turning out a steady stream of ear-pleasing pop tunes that toed the line with trends that were now firmly in place. Listeners were so wrapped up in the “controversy” over who exactly Alanis was supposed to be blowing in a movie theater in “You Oughta Know” that they never stopped to ask, “You know, who really gives a shit?”

Like Gavin Rossdale, Alanis Morissette spent years before her big break finding the right look and sound that would make her a star. In the early ’90s, when Morissette was still in high school, she recorded two dance-pop albums, 1991’s Alanis and 1992’s Now Is The Time, for the Canadian division of MCA Records. The first record was a success in her home country, going platinum thanks to the hit “Too Hot” and Morissette’s tour dates with Vanilla Ice at the height of his short-lived success. But Now Is The Time was considered a commercial failure, and she was not offered a new record contract. The setback proved to be a turning point for Morissette, who graduated high school and moved from her hometown of Ottawa to the more metropolitan Toronto. Soon, she began venturing to Nashville and Los Angeles in search of collaborators. Eventually, she hooked up with record producer-songwriter Glen Ballard, whom she met through their mutual publishing company ties.

Who is Glen Ballard? Here’s a more pertinent question: Who the fuck are you? According to his official online bio, records with Ballard’s name on them have sold more than 150 million copies. He’s written songs for Barbra Streisand, Aerosmith, Shakira, Sheena Easton, and Chaka Khan. He co-wrote “Man In The Mirror” for Michael Jackson. He oversaw Wilson Phillips’ 10-million selling 1990 debut. He composed the song score for Robert Zemeckis’ The Polar Express. He’s as punk-rock as Burl Ives, but no matter—Glen Ballard is a fucking music fucking professional through and through.

In the aftermath of Pill’s incredible success, Morissette and Ballard both spoke of having an instant creative connection, writing their first song together within minutes of meeting each other. “It was as simple as me picking up my guitar and hitting a couple of chords, and she would go, ‘I like that,’ and she would hit a melody and I would hit it back to her,” Ballard recalled in an interview. Morissette and Ballard worked quickly throughout the sessions for the record, spending no more than a day writing each track.

“You Oughta Know” ended up being Morissette’s signature song, but it was “Ironic”—a song that very much sounds like it was written in a day—that really pushed Pill into the stratosphere. A lot of people loved the accessible quirkiness of “Ironic,” but what made the song a defining hit of its time is that people seemed to love hating it even more. Alanis haters relished pointing out how many of the examples of irony in the lyrics to “Ironic” were, in fact, not really ironic. On this point I’m going to defend Morissette, if only because these are the same awful people that circle typos in newspapers and mail the clippings anonymously to editors with smug putdowns such as, “Maybe you should consider hiring copy editors,” or some equally non-clever bullshit. I’m right next to you flipping the bird at those a-holes, Alanis.

Neither Bush nor Alanis Morissette could ever match the success of their monstrously successful albums from 1995. Bush cinched its status as the world’s most popular Nirvana tribute band by hiring Steve Albini to record the follow-up to Sixteen Stone, 1996’s Razorblade Suitcase. Just like Nirvana with its Albini record In Utero, Bush saw its commercial viability shrink with Suitcase. After 2001’s Golden State, which actively emulated the sound of Sixteen Stone, Bush disbanded. Rossdale spent the ’00s fronting a new band, Institute, and trying to get a solo career off the ground, all the while hinting to reporters that his new music would likely be better received if it were released as Bush. Inevitably, he re-formed the band in 2010 with two new members, and an album is expected in 2011.

After reaching the absolute pinnacle of pop success, Morissette conducted the rest of her career like an artist playing with house money, putting out albums with mind-numbing titles like 1998’s Supposed Former Infatuation Junkie, 2002’s Under Rug Swept, and 2008’s Flavors Of Entanglement. These days, she’s self-aware enough to acknowledge that Jagged Little Pill will always be her greatest calling card, releasing an acoustic version of the album on its 10th anniversary in 2005 and joking about “You Oughta Know” on an episode of Curb Your Enthusiasm. She seems to have accepted being a living, breathing signifier of a bygone era.

Whenever Alanis Morissette makes a cameo appearance in contemporary pop culture, she’s a reminder of the 1995 that some of us would just as soon forget, just as Bush will surely be when its next record comes out. They remain preserved just as we left them, impervious to any and all efforts to disavow their impact on ’90s rock.

They get older, but their music will forever remain tied to the same age.

What Happened Next? A story about two very different heroin addicts—Bradley Nowell of Sublime and Layne Staley of Alice In Chains—who died in ways both literal and figurative in 1996, and how the bands they spearheaded decided to carry on anyway.

Part 7: 1996: 1996: Layne Staley and Bradley Nowell are the living dead

By Steven Hyden Jan 11, 2011 12:00 AM

“Who doesn’t want to go to a concert to hear their favorite songs, regardless of who’s singing or who’s playing it? Listening to music you love to hear is fun, period.”—Rome Ramirez, on replacing Bradley Nowell as the new singer of Sublime “So sing just like him, fuckers/It won’t offend him/Just me/Because he’s dead.”—Pearl Jam, “4/20/02,” written for Layne Staley According to The Book Of Rock Lists by Dave Marsh and Kevin Stein (1981 ed.), the No. 1 most spectacular death in rock history ended the life of singer Johnny Ace, whose biggest hit, “Pledging My Love,” surged to the top of the Billboard rhythm and blues chart about two months after his untimely demise on Christmas day 1954. The Book Of Rock Lists gave Ace’s death “most spectacular” distinction based on a piece of mistaken information, repeating the legend that the shadowy balladeer killed himself during a game of Russian roulette played backstage at the City Auditorium in Houston between holiday shows with Big Mama Thornton. An eyewitness account from Thornton’s bassist Curtis Tillman contradicts this story. Tillman claimed that Ace had been drinking heavily and goofing around when he picked up the pistol. “It’s okay! Gun’s not loaded, see?’”

Tillman recalled Ace saying as he pointed it at his head and, with a smile, pulled the trigger.

Does taking Russian roulette out of the equation make Ace’s death any less “spectacular”? It certainly rejiggers the list: Guitarist Terry Kath of MOR jazz-rock band Chicago (as well as the city of Chicago) died under similar circumstances in 1978, holding a gun he thought was unloaded to his head and mistakenly offing himself in front of his wife and one of his stage crew members. Kath’s death was good for only No. 5 on Marsh and Stein’s list. An updated version of The Book Of Rock Lists would probably be topped by “Dimebag” Darrell Abbott, the

former Pantera guitarist who was gunned down onstage by a crazed fan during a performance with his band Damageplan on Dec. 8, 2004 at the Alrosa Villa in Columbus, Ohio. It was later reported that the shooter believed that Pantera was reading his mind, which suggests that the famously affable Abbott was perhaps too good at connecting with fans.

Much farther down on the most spectacular rock deaths list is Layne Staley of Alice In Chains. It might be the least spectacular rock death of all time, in the sense that it surprised absolutely no one, including Staley himself.

Alice In Chains drummer Sean Kinney told Greg Prato in the book Grunge Is Dead: The Oral History Of Seattle Rock Music that Staley had long resigned himself to an early grave: “Layne told me straight up, ‘I’m never coming back. I’m not going to quit doing drugs. I’m going to die like this—this is it.’” For years, Kinney had tried reaching out to Staley three times a week, either by phone or, when he was in town, yelling at the window of his nondescript Seattle condo. But Staley wouldn’t see or talk to his bandmate. At the time of his death in 2002, neither Kinney nor AIC guitarist Jerry Cantrell had spoken to Staley for more than two years.

As recounted by Rick Anderson of Seattle Weekly, Staley’s body was found sitting upright on the couch, his remains illuminated by a flickering television in an otherwise darkened room. He’d been dead for two weeks; the tip-off that something was amiss came not from concerned family members or friends but from Staley’s accountants, who noticed that he hadn’t spent any money in several days. The day of his death was estimated to be April 5, exactly eight years after Cobain’s suicide. Staley’s method of killing himself was slower and more painful, but ultimately no less effective. A stiff cocktail of drugs composed of cocaine, codeine, and morphine was rattling around his ravaged, 86-pound frame. A syringe loaded with a fresh supply of heroin sat in his hand; a used needle lay at his feet. Two crack pipes were waiting on his coffee table, and several more used needles were uncovered when his body was moved. Staley wasn’t the sort to hedge his bets when it came to calling his own drug-related death.

To anyone with a passing knowledge of Staley’s life and music, his downfall played out like the worst kind of ending—distasteful, depressing, and all too predictable. If it had been a novel, a good editor would have cut out all the monotonous material about Staley holing up for years in his apartment, so sick that he made his busy corps of dealers bring drugs to his front door, and finished the story closer to 1996, the year he unofficially limped away from the world and Alice In Chains, then one of the biggest hard-rock bands in the land.

Those that knew Staley personally seem to agree that he more or less died in spirit when his long-time girlfriend, Demri Parrott, succumbed to bacterial endocarditis stemming from her own drug use in October 1996. Staley and Parrott were no longer together when she died; because she lacked Staley’s rock-star bank account, Parrott was reduced to living out a conventional junkie death, finally prostituting herself in order to score drug money. But the loss still crushed him. That same year, Alice In Chains played its final shows with Staley, performing on MTV Unplugged in April—the band’s first concert in three years—and several dates with the newly reunited Kiss, ending with a gig in Kansas City on July 3, 1996.

Two years later, Alice In Chains briefly reunited to record the songs “Get Born Again” and “Died” for a boxed set. But as far as the public was concerned, Staley lived out the rest of his doomed existence as the ghost of grunge’s skeezy past. Rumors began circulating that he had lost an arm to gangrene. On the rare occasions that he ventured out of his home, where he gorged on videogames whenever he wasn’t gorging on drugs, Staley cut a hard figure: Abscesses covered his arms, and he’d lost most of his teeth. “He looked like an 80-year-old version of himself,” Seattle music journalist Jeff Gilbert told Prato. “His skin was grey, dark circles under his eyes. He had already lost a finger or two from his veins collapsing and not getting enough circulation to his hands … I remember seeing him from a distance, and I thought, ‘That’s the oldest punk rocker I’ve ever seen.’”

Flash back about 15 years, and Staley is a dramatically different, happier, and more spandex-friendly person.

Cantrell recalled to Charles R. Cross of Rolling Stone how he met his lead singer: It’s a Seattle party, and Staley is standing in the middle of it all, his hair dyed a bright glam-rock pink and teased with a hair clip atop his tiny frame. At his side are two beautiful women, looking at him adoringly. It’s 1987, and Staley knows how to walk the walk of the day, strutting onstage in baby blue satin suits and exuding big-cock charisma. Pearl Jam guitarist

Mike McCready remembered this version of Staley being “funny and lucid, and without a doubt he was not reluctant to be a star.”

By the time Staley actually was a star, he traded in the poufy-haired bravado of glam for the vein-popping gutter grime of Alice In Chains. The band’s 1990 debut, Facelift, went platinum thanks in large part to the popular single “Man In The Box,” which succinctly laid out the themes of future Alice In Chains records in the very first line—Staley was a man trapped, buried in his own shit, and while he was self-aware enough to acknowledge it, he was powerless to lift himself out.

This idea was explored to an almost nauseating degree on 1992’s Dirt, an unrelentingly grim collection of songs about how people should never, ever shoot heroin. Part of what makes Dirt an impressive artistic achievement is that much of the album was written or co-written by Cantrell, who performed a sort of “method” songwriting by infusing a junkie’s hopelessness and guttural desperation even into songs that didn’t directly address addiction. The single “Down In A Hole” is a pained expression of romantic loss that became a metaphor for chemical longing in Staley’s hands. “Rooster” is a spooky character study about Cantrell’s father fighting off demons from the Vietnam War, but it also applied to Staley’s own drawn-out, unwinnable conflict. Throughout, Cantrell’s off-kilter, shotgun-blast-to-the-intestines guitar work acts as a queasy counterpoint to Staley’s deadman-walking howling. This marriage of sound and fury unites Dirt as a justifiably unpleasant concept record of immense (and immensely sickening) power. From the start of Dirt, you’re trapped in Staley’s skin, and for the next 50 minutes there will be no escape. The album-opening “Them Bones” welcomes you with the screams of a man being burned alive, and it just gets more brutal from there.

The most disturbing song on Dirt is “Junkhead,” co-written by Staley and Cantrell. Over a torturously slow metal-blues riff, Staley denounces “the hypocrite norm, running their boring drills,” and commits himself to consuming whatever drugs are available to him. “Money, status, nothing to me,” Staley sings, though that’s not completely true—it’s the money and status that “allow” him to live this way. In the soaring chorus, Staley harmonizes with Cantrell on lines that spell out the catch-22 that defined his final years: “What’s my drug of choice? Well, what have you got? I don’t go broke, and I do it a lot.” Even as his habit kept Alice In Chains off the road and out of the studio, Staley still had more than enough money to ensure that he’d always have a steady supply of the substances he craved. He was down in a hole so deep he couldn’t hope to hit bottom. Less sympathetic listeners might dismiss “Junkhead” as the empty lamentation of a rock-star addict, but Staley wasn’t looking for pity. He was reporting on his own ongoing dissolution, giving the play-by-play on his soul

being ripped away from him. As an act of first-person journalism from the depths of hell, Dirt has few equals in rock history.

The specificity of Dirt is what makes the album so moving, and it’s the most obvious attribute separating Alice In Chains from the legion of bands that emerged to take its place after Staley slipped into permanent heroin hibernation. Along with Pearl Jam, Alice In Chains was a primary grunge-era influence on the post-grunge bands that ruled modern-rock radio from the late ’90s onward. Dirt, in particular, became an important touchstone.

“When [Dirt] came out, the thing did not leave my CD player,” Godsmack singer Sully Erna told Cross in Rolling Stone. “I’ve never heard someone’s voice hit the tape like that. He’s the reason I started singing.”

Dirt plugs you into the day-to-day slog of one addict’s life; even if you don't connect with the record, you still can’t help but feel a dull ache in your bones and the sting of rancid sickness in your nostrils. You don’t get the same singular experience listening to Godsmack (which took its name from a Dirt track), Staind, or Creed, who adopted the superficialities of Alice In Chains’ sonic and thematic signposts and reconfigured them into interchangeably angsty and thuddingly poppy plop-metal. To quote a Staind album title, the legacy of Dirt is colored by 14 shades of gray. Nevertheless, Alice In Chains has lived on like few bands of its time, and even in death Staley is still among the most vital singers you’re likely to hear on the local modern-rock station.

Staley sound-alikes became so common in the years after his public retreat and death that it was perhaps inevitable that one of them ended up replacing him in his own band. In 2009, Alice In Chains released Black Gives Way To Blue, its first album of original material in 14 years. In the Staley slot was William DuVall, who sang in Cantrell’s post-AIC band and sat in with Alice when the band first reunited in 2006 for a benefit concert. Alice In Chains 2.0 became a band with two lead singers, with Cantrell frequently dueting with DuVall or taking lead vocals on his own. This actually isn’t much of a departure from the sound of Alice In Chains 1.0, which was steeped in the undead Southern-rock harmonies of Staley and Cantrell. The difference on Black Gives Way To Blue was, as the title suggested, a shift in perspective. “I think there’s always been a little bit of death trip element [and a] survivor element,” DuVall told Rolling Stone. “I think maybe the percentage has been a bit inverted [on the new album]. Where some of the records might have been more Scarface, this one is more Shawshank Redemption.”

Given the loss of Staley and lag time between records, Black Gives Way To Blue had no right being any good.

But it’s a surprisingly decent addition to the Alice In Chains canon. It’s not AC/DC roaring back to life with Brian

Johnson on Back In Black, but it’s not the embarrassment it seemed destined to be either. Though DuVall obviously apes Staley whenever his voice meshes with Cantrell on one of those ominous, crypt-keeper choruses, at least Black Gives Way To Blue doesn’t ignore the track-mark-covered elephant in the room. Staley’s horse-addicted ghost is still Cantrell’s muse, only this time Staley is actually dead. But this version of AIC is an appreciably different band; many things can be said of Layne Staley, but “Morgan Freeman-esque” is not one of them.

Still, it’s the brand name that puts butts in the seats, and Alice In Chains has drawing power; Black Gives Way To Blue sold 126,000 copies its first week, good for a Billboard debut at No. 5.

The lesson of Black Gives Way To Blue, at least as it applies to the SoCal pot-rock band Sublime, is that there really is life after death in ’90s rock, provided you can retain enough of your old sound to convince people to move forward with you. But while the surviving members of Alice In Chains made sure to present their band as a newly evolved entity, Sublime’s Bud Gaugh and Eric Wilson are trying to pick up where they were forced to leave off in 1996, when their lead singer, Bradley Nowell, died of a heroin overdose at age 28. Now touring as Sublime With Rome, Gaugh and Wilson are playing their old songs with Rome Ramirez, a singer born the same year that Sublime played its first show. Ramirez grew up on Sublime records, and based on this clip of Sublime With Rome performing the hit “Wrong Way” in 2010 on Jimmy Kimmel Live!, he was hired for his ability to make Nowell’s demise seem like a mere inconvenience that temporarily kept the band off the road.

The story of Sublime is one of the strangest and most tragic tales in all of ’90s rock. Formed in 1988, Sublime made its name by playing surf towns up and down the California coast, honing a feel-good blend of punk, hiphop, and ska informed by Nowell’s multicultural upbringing in Long Beach. Nowell was musically precocious as a child, able pick out a tune on his guitar after only hearing it once. He didn’t have a great voice, but he sang like he did, using the power of his personality to give his vocals the sunny brassiness that made Sublime songs so irresistible on the radio once 1996’s Sublime brought the band’s music to the masses.

Search for Bradley Nowell videos on YouTube and you’ll find a smattering of interview clips recorded a year or so before he died. Here he is backstage on the Warped Tour looking like one of the many shirtless, deeply tanned, and blond bros lurking in the audience. He’s wearing gold Elvis sunglasses and talking about partying with the other bands on tour and hanging with champion skateboarder Remy Stratton. He reminds me of my friends from high school, who returned home from the first year of college in the summer of 1997 blasting nothing but the Sublime record. I didn’t own the album because I didn’t have to; if you spent time in a dorm in 1996 and ’97, all you heard was Sublime, Odelay, and Dave Matthews Band. The memories alone give me a contact high.

There was more to Nowell than living life like the world was one big smoke-filled Chevy van. He was also a serious heroin addict, a habit inspired in part by wanting to mimic his heroes. “He thought it was very rock ’n’ roll, you know,” Nowell’s widow Troy Dendekker said. “Perry Farrell and Kurt Cobain and all those guys did drugs, and Brad wanted to see what it was like.” By the time Sublime was in the studio recording its self-titled third record, Nowell was in such rough shape that producer Paul Leary—no stranger to substance abuse as a founding member of Butthole Surfers—sent him home before the record was completed. “There were times where someone had to go into the bathroom to see if Brad was still alive,” Leary told Rolling Stone.

When Nowell finally pushed his luck with heroin too far in a San Francisco hotel room on May 25, 1996, his band wasn’t yet famous enough to warrant much media attention for the tragedy. (Rolling Stone later noted that the heroin-related death of touring Smashing Pumpkins keyboardist Jonathan Melvoin that July garnered more coverage than Nowell’s death.) Ten weeks after Nowell’s funeral, Sublime’s label, Geffen, went forward with plans to release the band’s new record, though the original title, Killin’ It, was understandably ditched.

Befitting a band that preferred to work spontaneously and under the influence of strong substances, Sublime is a spotty, erratic record, with more dead ends and half-formed ideas than successes. But those successes, which include singles like “What I Got” and “Santeria” frontloaded in the first half of the record, made Sublime a

leftfield and shockingly prescient smash, predicting and capitalizing on musical trends that were just taking hold when Nowell died.

Sublime proved to be an ideal band for a generation that approached rock music with an irreverent, hip-hopinspired sensibility. Nowell’s music was divorced from the deadly serious alternative music that had been the norm for the early part of the ’90s; Sublime pointed the way to a new kind of mainstream rock that had the aggression and energy of punk and none of the underground pretension or anti-corporate ideology. Equally important for Sublime’s success was the element of man’s-man machismo, which was spelled out on the album cover depicting a hulking and shirtless Nowell standing with his back to the camera and exposing his large Sublime tattoo. Tough-guy posturing linked hip-hop with hard rock, and it would come to define the rap-rock hybrid that dominated mainstream rock radio in the late ’90s. Soon, even bands directly inspired by early-’90s bands would conveniently set aside the feminist idealism those groups were known for in favor of an unapologetically assertive masculinity that was both reactionary to recent rock history and restorative of the old status quo.

Nowell might have ended up being another heroin casualty of the era, but he didn’t sound like a guy that needed a spike in the arm in order to get out of the bed in the morning. Sublime was a band for working-class people who could reconcile the casual bleakness of the lyrics of a song like “Wrong Way”—a cheery ditty about an underage hooker—with the dance-happy music. For Nowell, being dealt a shitty hand was a fact of life, but so was the pleasure of smoking killer bud, and acknowledging the former didn’t necessarily negate the latter.

“Fuck it, fight it, it’s all the same,” Nowell sang on “What I Got,” and it was a message that resonated with millions of people that had no idea that they were bobbing their heads to a happy-go-lucky dead guy. In April 1997, Sublime entered the Billboard Top 20. After a year in stores, it was selling 50,000 copies a week, eventually going on to sell 6 million. Gaugh and Wilson tried as best as they could to capitalize on Sublime’s unexpected and poorly timed success, signing a deal to release a series of archival records collecting early songs, outtakes, and remixes, starting with 1997’s Second Hand Smoke. They also were on hand that year to accept an MTV Video Music Award for best alternative video, an appearance punctuated by drunken shoutouts to Happy Gilmore and Lynyrd Skynyrd and an awkwardly slurred tribute to Nowell.

Other than that, there was no promotional concert tour for Sublime, or any new music to follow it up. Gaugh and Wilson said they had no plans to revive Sublime until they met Ramirez in 2008 and, as they later told Billboard, had “instantaneous” chemistry with the 20-year-old Fremont, Calif. native. Ramirez had been playing Sublime songs for much of his life when he hooked up with Gaugh and Wilson, learning them shortly after picking up the guitar at age 11. If he felt any misgivings about essentially pretending to be Bradley Nowell so his old bandmates could tour again under a lucrative moniker, he didn’t show it when he made his debut as Sublime’s new lead singer in February 2009 at a surprise show in Nevada. An appearance at Cypress Hill’s Smokeout Festival followed in October, and the band’s first tour commenced in April 2010.

As for fans that object to another man heading up Sublime, Ramirez seems content to play the “haters gonna hate” card. “There will always be haters,” he said in an interview with budZtv in 2010. “But when there’s 20,000 people out there, just loving everything, and just dancing around with smiles, nothing can stop that.”

The most vocal haters of the new Sublime were from Bradley Nowell’s family, which issued a statement in 2009 chastising Gaugh and Wilson for carrying on the band name without their original singer and friend. “It was Brad’s expressed intention that no one use the name Sublime in any group that did not include him,” the family said, “and Brad even registered the trademark ‘Sublime’ under his own name.” A subsequent lawsuit forced Gaugh and Wilson to tour as “Sublime With Rome,” but in the end they won out over Nowell’s family where it mattered, finally having the ability to play for the millions of people who bought Sublime records in the years after Nowell’s death.

Most people who love Sublime today are fans of a band that Nowell hasn’t been a living member of for 15 years. He’s always been dead as far as most people are concerned. But just as Layne Staley is present any time someone plays an Alice In Chains song—even an Alice In Chains song that he’s not actually singing on—Nowell is the living dead, his spirit regenerated both by music he played a conscious part in creating and those who emulate what he left behind. In a very real way, both men remain the most important members of their respective bands. The show goes on, but Layne Staley and Bradley Nowell are still in the spotlight.

What Happened Next?

Next? At the beginning of 1997, the biggest British rock band in the world was Oasis. By the end of the year, that title would belong to Radiohead. I’ll look at the coke-fueled disaster of Oasis’ misbegotten epic Be Here Now, and the unlikely triumph of Radiohead’s dystopian prog-rock masterpiece OK Computer.

Part 8: 1997: 1997: The ballad of Oasis and Radiohead

By Steven Hyden Jan 25, 2011 12:00 AM

“It’s the sound of a bunch of guys on coke, in the studio, not giving a fuck.”—Noel Gallagher on Oasis’ Be Here Now, in the documentary Live Forever: The Rise And Fall Of Britpop “A Nirvana wannabe from hell.”—Mark Kemp in Rolling Stone, on Radiohead’s debut single “Creep,” from the review of OK Computer You might’ve already noticed this during our journey through the past of ’90s alternative rock, but I’ll state it for the record: I’m not a reliable narrator. I’m drawing on my own memories as much as books and documentaries for information, and my recollections are by far the least reliable sources. It’s impossible for me to say with absolute certainty if Nirvana really meant that much to me back then, or why exactly I liked Throwing Copper so much, or if my friend Marc actually preferred playing Sepultura to Sublime whenever he invited people to smoke weed in his garage in 1996. (Actually, I’d bet several hundred dollars that it was Sepultura, if only because those particular memories seem hazy and foreboding.)

In Christopher Nolan’s 2000 thriller Memento, anterograde amnesiac Leonard Shelby talks about how “memory can change the shape of a room; it can change the color of a car. And memories can be distorted. They’re just an interpretation, they’re not a record.” Shelby is self-aware enough to realize his cognitive limitations, but if you’ve seen the movie, you know he’s not nearly as self-aware as he should be. I’m not either. I didn’t even have the foresight to tattoo my impressions of ’90s rock all over my body for future reference.

With this in mind, I’m now going to share my first memory of hearing Oasis—my favorite band of the mid-’90s, without question—even though I know it couldn’t have possibly happened this way.

It’s September 1993, and I’m in my mother’s pistol-gray Buick Century. I’m 16, and I’ve just been handed my first driver’s license. A feeling of triumph bounds through my body like an overexcited Jack Russell terrier. Is

there a more momentous occasion in a young person’s life than being granted control of rapid forward motion, a gift that explodes your world far past the boundaries of your adolescence, provided your mother gives you the keys to the family Buick for the night? I was convinced that my life up to this point had been prologue, and I was finally getting to the main story, with plenty of crazy adventures and foxy love interests ahead of me.

The DMV in my hometown was situated in the same strip mall as The Exclusive Co., the city’s only cool record store, so I decide to reward myself by purchasing a cassette of Oasis’ debut album, Definitely Maybe, a record I had read about but hadn’t yet heard. All I knew about Oasis was that the band was supposed to sound like The Beatles (which turned out not to be true, at least not yet) and carry on like the biggest assholes on the planet (which was right on the money, at least until Limp Bizkit came along). Magazine articles talked about how Oasis had the gall to openly lust for stardom and all the money and blowjobs that came with it, which seemed refreshing after several years of comparably monastic grunge bands. Now that I was a man of means and mobility, I felt like I could get behind this kind of revolutionary hedonism.

I insert the tape in the player, and a few moments later, a wildly swinging guitar solo is tearing out of the Buick’s surprisingly kicking stereo system over a simple, pounding rhythm section. I check the tape case to get the name of the song: “Rock ’N’ Roll Star.” The singer has a flat and whiny voice, but it works for him, because you can tell that he’s being annoying on purpose, and it’s his way of telling the world to stick it up its ass (or “arse,” since these guys are English). The actual words are pure gibberish, although the lyric “when they said I should feed my head, that to me was just a day in bed” might in fact be so abstruse that human comprehension is still centuries away from catching up with it.

The only part that matters to me are the lines right before the chorus, which make me pump the gas pedal far harder than my driving instructor would’ve ever allowed: I’ll take my car and drive real far To where they’re not concerned about the way we are In my mind my dreams are real Are you concerned about the way I feel Tonight I’m a rock ’n’ roll star

Here’s the part where I have to call bullshit on myself. Definitely Maybe was actually released almost a full year after I got my license, in August 1994, when it became the fastest-selling debut record in British rock history.

This is a fact, and yet my memory of hearing it a year earlier still seems right to me. Sure, it’s probably because I bought Definitely Maybe at that same store by the DMV, and I was driving the same pistol-gray Buick while blasting “Rock ’N’ Roll Star,” making sure to take the long way home so I could also make it through “Shakermaker,” “Live Forever,” and the first half of “Up In The Sky.” But I don’t think I mix up these anecdotes just because they have similar details. Definitely Maybe fits with my first drive because I associate both things with my life starting to not completely suck.

Transcending suckiness is the very essence of Definitely Maybe. Given what Oasis became, “Rock ’N’ Roll Star” might smack of the same old self-aggrandizing chest-thumping that people eventually tired of. But Noel Gallagher was a failed criminal and ex-roadie from Manchester when he wrote “Rock ’N’ Roll Star.” It’s a song about the dream of being famous by a guy seeking the freedom that great wealth has always represented to poor people locked into generations of boredom and decay. I didn’t grow up on the hardscrabble streets of Manchester, where dyslexic Noel struck out as an attempted house burglar at 18 and ended up carrying amps for forgotten Brit-rockers Inspiral Carpets, and his brother Liam eked out the equivalent of $100 a week painting fences after getting kicked out of school at 15 for fighting. But with three years of junior-high-school hell in my rearview mirror, I was all about escaping my past. Oasis had seemingly willed itself into becoming rich and famous. I had a lot to learn from them.

Fortunately, there was a lot more music where Definitely Maybe came from. Every couple of months, a new import single would appear in the Oasis section at the Exclusive Co. Each single would have two or three nonalbum tracks, and after a while you had a whole new album’s worth of songs that were just as good as anything on Definitely Maybe. And by “just as good” I mean similarly dumb, funny, dumb, thrilling, and dumb. Great Oasis songs were like sharks—no brains, all teeth, and out for blood and naked girls.

Collecting Oasis singles and becoming a B-side connoisseur was an obsession for me. The “Cigarettes & Alcohol” single was a personal favorite, with three essential B-sides—“Listen Up,” “Fade Away,” and an extended psychedelic jam on “I Am The Walrus”—and an iconic cover showing the boys victoriously swigging champagne with a couple of groupies in a hotel room. It was a perfect visual representation of the single’s A-side, a song I appreciate even more now than I’ve lived through my early 20s, a time when I spent many nights staring at myself in barroom mirrors as I drank and smoked myself into oblivion. This is what a classic-rock fixation will get you, kids. All you need are cigarettes and alcohol, along with a misguided desire to live for a night like you’re Keith Richards in the south of France in 1971 (without the heroin, of course). You won’t rock, but you’ll sure look like you do.

I didn’t know anybody who had even heard of Oasis, much less loved them as much as I did, until 1995’s (What’s The Story) Morning Glory. Noel Gallagher later told Rolling Stone that “the first album is about dreaming of being a pop star in a band,” and that Morning Glory “is about actually being a pop star in a band.”

But it was Morning Glory that made him a pop star in the U.S., at the price of turning Oasis into a ballad group in the popular consciousness, thanks to “Wonderwall” and “Don’t Look Back In Anger.” I liked both songs, but they didn’t really represent the Oasis I fell in love with. My favorite song on Morning Glory was “Some Might Say,” a loud and proud T. Rex rip-off in the “Cigarettes & Alcohol” mold with screamingly atrocious lyrics (“The sink is full of fishes, ’cause she’s got dirty dishes on the brain/And my dog's been itchin’, itchin’ in the kitchen once again”) delivered with steely, incontrovertible snottiness.

At this point, being an Oasis fan meant being a full-time defender of the band, since the Gallagher brothers’ “We’re bigger than Jesus standing on John Lennon’s shoulders” act was rapidly alienating the band’s American audience and especially the media, which gleefully reported every obnoxious, bluntly vulgar quote that flowed

from their lips. “We like annoying people,” Noel Gallagher told Rolling Stone. “It’s a Manchester thing. It’s a trait. We just like pissing people off.” Later, Oasis guitarist Paul “Bonehead” Arthurs more eloquently reiterated Gallagher’s point by farting directly into writer Chris Mundy’s tape recorder.

In Oasis’ home country, the group hit the pinnacle of its success in August 1996, when it performed two concerts on the grounds of Knebworth House for 250,000 people. (Presumably, that’s not counting the guest list, which included 7,000 people, many of them celebrities.) The shows had all the trappings of a coronation: When Oasis took the stage, Caitlin Moran of The Sunday Times wrote that the band was “greeted by a roar so huge that flocks of birds took to the sky from Knebworth’s old oaks.” By any measure, Noel Gallagher had made the dream of “Rock ’N’ Roll Star” a reality just two years after the release of Definitely Maybe. But Oasis’ peak didn’t last long: Two months later, the band would set about permanently derailing itself as sessions for 1997’s Be Here Now—and the endless party that accompanied it—commenced at Abbey Road Studios in London.

When contemplating Be Here Now, a record that requires a dump-truck unloading a metric ton of cocaine directly into your nostrils in order to sound like a masterpiece, I’m reminded of something Greil Marcus once wrote about Rod Stewart: “If it was necessary to become a great artist in order to get the money to spend and the stars to fuck, well, Rod was willing.” So were Noel and Liam. Definitely Maybe and (What’s The Story) Morning Glory? are important, arguably flawless albums, but they were ultimately just a means to an end. Now that the Gallagher brothers had it all—not the least of which was a one-way ticket out of Manchester—what motivation did they have to ever make a decent record again? They’d won, and battling to merely maintain the victory proved to be a lot less inspiring.

So they fucked around instead. There are countless examples of needless, brainless excess during the Be Here Now sessions. The band was kicked out of Abbey Road after one week for playing too loud. Noel Gallagher overdubbed 30 guitar tracks playing practically the same part on the moronic “My Big Mouth.” He added strings, horns, and choirs to the silly (and expensive) 9-minute “Hey Jude”-style epic “All Around The World.” He invited Johnny Depp to play slide guitar for some reason. The artistic philosophy of Be Here Now boiled down to two words: fookin’ more. It was the inevitable byproduct of self-centered people inhaling substances designed to make them even more egomaniacal.

“I used to go to the studio, and there was so much cocaine getting done at the point,” Alan McGee of Creation Records recounted to John Harris in Britpop!: Cool Britannia And The Spectacular Demise Of English Rock.

“[Producer Owen Morris] was out of control, and he was the one in charge of it. The music was just fucking loud.” That’s what is most incredible about Be Here Now: It’s a record made by one of the biggest bands in the world and overseen by a trusted and respected producer, and yet nobody seemed to know what the fuck they were doing. A Rolling Stone story on Be Here Now is telling: Noel Gallagher is talking about his collaboration with The Chemical Brothers on the trippy single “Setting Sun,” and how the experience pushed him to make the drums impossibly loud on his own record. But why? Gallagher doesn’t appear to have a clue. “It’s all about compressors and EQs, stuff I don’t really understand,” Gallagher says. “I just sit in the back drinking, pointing and shouting, ‘It’s not loud enough, turn it up!’”

Even more than the blizzard of coke that blanketed the studio where Be Here Now was being made, it was this overall lack of thought and care that really did the album in. “I’m proud of the songs, but I think me and Owen got a bit lazy in the studio,” Noel Gallagher told Harris. “The production is a bit bland.” Actually, the production is the opposite of bland—it’s a garish wall of sound utterly lacking in character and definition, and it’s made even more unlistenable by Gallagher’s wan songs being stretched past the breaking point. With 12 tracks running at a laughably bloated 72 minutes, Be Here Now is at least twice as long as it should be, with several songs falling below even the standard of Definitely Maybe’s B-sides.

But when Be Here Now was released at the end of August 1997, it was lavished with superlatives, particularly in the U.K., where it was widely hailed as a landmark, solidifying Oasis in the pole position of British rock bands.

Anyone that dismisses rock criticism as the empty braying of easily influenced, hype-hungry monkeys will find a lot of support for their cause while reading the initial reviews of Be Here Now. It’s not completely outside the realm of all logic and reason to write nice things about Be Here Now, but it seems like people were reviewing what they were told the album was going to be rather than what it actually was, which is the worst Oasis album in the history of Oasis albums. Even supporters of Be Here Now—and I’ll cop to enjoying a few songs on the record, particularly the hard-charging title track and “It’s Gettin’ Better (Man!!)”—had to concede that it was far from being the defining statement it was supposed to be. By the end of 1997, Be Here Now was well on its way to becoming a punchline, a Britpop version of Heaven’s Gate. As music critic Rob Sheffield later wrote, Be Here Now is now known as “a concept record about how long all the songs were.”

Around the same time that Oasis was snorting away its moment at the center of the British-rock zeitgeist, a group from Oxford that had been playing together since the mid-’80s was quietly at work on its third album, OK Computer. Unlike Oasis, Radiohead approached record-making with the studiousness of committed college

students. Four out of the five band members were products of British universities—Thom Yorke attended Exeter, Colin Greenwood went to Cambridge, Ed O’Brien matriculated at Manchester, and Phil Selway studied at Liverpool. On weekends and holidays, they faithfully returned home to Oxford to write and record songs with Jonny Greenwood, who was only 13 when Radiohead played its first shows under the name On A Friday.

As Oasis wiled away days and weeks browbeating poor studio engineers into making Be Here Now even more bombastic, Radiohead recorded basic tracks for OK Computer at St. Catherine’s Court, an opulent country house owned by actress Jane Seymour and located in a tranquil valley near Bath in England. OK Computer came to be heralded for its epic sound and prog-rock leanings, but much of it was actually recorded live with minimal overdubs. Yorke was particularly efficient, often nailing his heart-rending, operatic vocals in one take.

In the wake of OK Computer, which was released a few months before Be Here Now in June ’97, Radiohead looked like Gallant to Oasis’ Goofus. Oasis was in hock to the past, relying on the stature of the British rock heroes they were stealing from to give weight to oversized gestures not even the Gallagher brothers could pretend to be enthusiastic about anymore. Radiohead appeared to be ahead of the curve, forecasting the paranoia, media-driven insanity, and omnipresent sense of impending doom that’s subsequently come to characterize everyday life in the 21st century. Lofty thematic chit-chat aside, OK Computer delivered the goods for a monumental rock record: It sounded miles-deep and ocean-wide, it blew out your brain and re-invigorated your ears, and made lying on your bed with headphones on seem like a profound activity. OK Computer was precisely what Be Here Now wanted to be and wasn’t: the best British rock record of its time.

The standard-bearer torch was not passed willingly or peacefully between the two bands. Oasis and Radiohead have regarded each other with open disgust almost from the beginning of their careers. Back when (What’s The Story) Morning Glory was the rage in England, Yorke used to spit out the occasional piss-taking cover of “Wonderwall” in concert. He considered Oasis “a joke,” and “a bunch of guys who act stupid and write really primitive music.” Noel Gallagher similarly targeted his adversary’s aesthetic weak spots when bashing Radiohead in the press, laughing at what he saw as the band’s class-based pomposity. “No matter how much you sit there twiddling, going, ‘We’re all doomed,’ at the end of the day people will always want to hear you play ‘Creep,’” Gallagher told The Daily Telegraph in 2007. “Get over it."

Intentionally or not, Gallagher was drudging up an oft-overlooked aspect of Radiohead’s legacy with that reference to “Creep,” the band’s first single and a song that, for a couple of years at least, threatened to be the

only thing the group would ever be known for. Instead, “Creep” and the album it came from, 1993’s Pablo Honey, have become footnotes in the history of Radiohead, which many fans prefer to begin with the band’s second record, The Bends. While it’s true that The Bends is much better than Pablo Honey, and fits better with the advances made by OK Computer and beyond, forgetting about Pablo Honey means setting aside Radiohead’s status as the most popular and creatively enduring band to come out of grunge.

That’s right, Radiohead started out as a grunge band, or at least a “grunge-inspired” band. Though Radiohead isn’t commonly associated with the term these days, the “G” word pops up regularly in Radiohead record reviews and magazine profiles around the time of Pablo Honey. Part of this could possibly be chalked up to unimaginative music writers over-using a term that was in vogue. But “Creep” and many other songs from Pablo Honey definitely fit the grunge tag, with bass-driven verses building toward cathartic choruses—Pixies were a band favorite—and introspective lyrics identifying with misunderstood outsiders and ironically commenting on the popular and beautiful (or “special,” in the case of “Creep”) people of mainstream society. The success of “Creep” prompted some in the music press to dub Radiohead “Nirvana-lite,” though Pablo Honey also has songs like “Stop Whispering” that follow an example closer to Pearl Jam’s Ten, starting off as quiet, almost folky ballads and gradually escalating to big climaxes driven by Yorke’s dramatic vocals.

In the U.K., “Creep” was a flop; Radio One deemed the song too depressing and refused to play it. The British press was more supportive of groups like Suede, who, as Andrew Smith wrote in The Guardian in 2000, were perceived as “a home-grown rebuke to American grunge,” while Radiohead was seen as kowtowing to it. This will sound like sacrilege to hardcore fans, but Pablo Honey-era Radiohead can be likened to Bush, a fellow British band whose 1994 debut, Sixteen Stone, found favor with American audiences before connecting with British fans, in part because the record was more in line with trends in American rock music.

Unlike Oasis, Blur, and Pulp—bands that asserted their “British-ness” and seemed more concerned with being popular at home than in the U.S.—Radiohead sounded relatively American in the early ’90s. That changed somewhat on 1995’s The Bends, but not enough to impede Radiohead’s progress as one of the few British-rock bands of the era that Americans cared about in increasingly large numbers. Radiohead made the record with John Leckie, a producer known for his work with quintessentially British bands like XTC and The Stone Roses, whose self-titled debut was a primary influence on Britpop.

The Bends is a spacier, more psychedelic record than Pablo Honey, but it still has more than a few discernable traces of the old grunginess. The Bends is an all-time great wallowing record. For a while, it was my go-to music in high school for whenever I went on long walks to brood over girls I liked who didn’t like me back. I’d cue up “High And Dry,” and imagine myself repeating Thom Yorke’s words to all the girls I’d loved before: “The best thing that you’ve ever had”—potentially, anyway—“has gone away.” Sniffle.

It’s a testament to how influential The Bends ended up being on British and American bands that it now sounds like one of Radiohead’s more conventional records. When it was released, The Bends became the first in a long line of “difficult” Radiohead albums, purposely constructed to confound the expectations of those who enjoyed what the band had previously done. On OK Computer, Radiohead didn’t deconstruct The Bends—as it would later do with popular predecessor records whenever it re-entered the studio—so much as use it as a rough draft for achieving a grandly ambitious vision incorporating snatches of David Bowie, George Orwell, Pink Floyd, Stanley Kubrick, Queen, and DJ Shadow. Now aided by producer Nigel Godrich, the engineer on The Bends and Radiohead’s new “unofficial” sixth member, Radiohead expanded on the rich blend of acoustic and electric instrumentation that had distinguished The Bends, subtly incorporating electronics that conveyed OK Computer’s theme of technological dehumanization without detracting from the record’s overall warmth.

OK Computer might’ve had a futurist bent, but at heart it was as traditional as any classic-rock opus. It was an act of actualization by Thom Yorke, who decided when he was 8 that he wanted to be a rock star after seeing Queen guitarist Brian May on television. OK Computer’s stunningly twisty-turny mini-suite, “Paranoid Android,” prompted comparisons to May’s bandmate Freddie Mercury, as a choir of Thom Yorke vocal overdubs echoed with a uniquely spiritual beauty through canyons of guitars and mellotrons.

OK Computer might’ve helped lil’ 8-year-old Thomas Edward Yorke realize his rock-star ambitions, but Radiohead reacted to fame in a very grunge-like way, releasing a caustic anti-media tour documentary, 1998’s Meeting People Is Easy, that managed the strange feat of being simultaneously off-putting and sleep-inducing.

But what Radiohead had created in OK Computer had already grown much bigger than the band. The following year, Godrich helped Travis take the OK Computer sound straight to the top of the British charts with The Man Who, a record that also drew on the pint-hoisting ballads of Oasis’ (What’s The Story) Morning Glory? Travis acknowledged the debt by explicitly (and cheekily) referencing “Wonderwall” in the single “Writing To Reach You.”

Travis was among the first bands in a wave of British-rock balladeers that reached its zenith in the ’00s with Coldplay, whose sound can be traced back directly to the most popular albums that Oasis and Radiohead made in the ’90s. Neither parent had much use for their musical progeny: Radiohead violently rebelled against its imitators with Kid A and Amnesiac, while the Gallagher brothers were content to simply mock them in the

press—along with Radiohead, of course. “I don’t hate them, I don’t wish they had accidents,” Liam Gallagher told The Guardian in 2008. “I think their fans are boring and ugly and don't look like they're having a good time.”

The pretty, deeply sensitive, and heartfelt balladry of Chris Martin and his peers was born of an unhappy marriage between two very different British rock bands, neither of which mellowed much after the ’90s. Noel Gallagher announced in 2009 that he was quitting Oasis, and while it wasn’t the first time he’d made such an announcement, it could very well be the last. Liam Gallagher, never one to get sentimental about missing his brother, formed a new band called Beady Eye with the other members of Oasis, and will release an album, Different Gear, Still Speeding, in February. Based on the first single “Bring The Light,” it might even be semirespectable.

As for Radiohead, well, you know all about Radiohead, right? Nobody gets more respect than Radiohead. Others artists look to Thom Yorke for musical guidance, and his band is the gold standard for how to conduct a rock ’n’ roll career with a measure of ethics and dignity. But let’s not allow our memories to pull a fast one on us. Once upon a time, Radiohead only wished it was special.

What Happened Next? I’ll survey the rise of aggressive, testosterone-heavy acts like Korn and Limp Bizkit and how they systematically wiped out what mainstream rock stood for just a few years earlier.

Part 9: 1998: 1998: You’re either with Korn and Limp Bizkit, or you’re against them

By Steven Hyden Feb 8, 2011 12:00 AM “Dude, I have no problem with being pop. Pop means pop-u-lar, which is cool with me.”—Fred Durst, from the August 1999 issue of Spin “You talk about stuff you don’t understand. If you never had feelings like rage or hate or something, why the hell do you go to a Korn concert?!?”—Anonymous Korn fan, in an e-mail written in response to a Korn concert review I wrote in 2002 This year, people born in the year 1985 will turn 26 years old. They will get married, have kids, buy houses, and do all the other roots-planting stuff that people do when their 20s are 60 percent over. (They might also go out drinking a lot.) They will find it strange that their 10-year high school reunions are only two years away. (Though only in a marking-time sense; they won’t actually attend their reunions, because Facebook has turned highschool reunions into conventions of old-timey 20th-century life.) They will feel a strong twinge of nostalgia for the early ’00s, and trade lines from Napoleon Dynamite and Anchorman like their bosses at work drop references to—excuse them if they get these titles wrong—Ghostbusters and Caddyshack.

They are all grown up, but I’ll never see them that way. To me, anyone born the year that Back To The Future came out will always be The People That Are Too Young. I’m not sure when I decided that Michael J. Fox’s entrée to movie stardom was my personal Mendoza line for parsing out the generations. I acknowledge the inherent unreasonableness of my “Back To The Future Rule,” but I’ve been following it too long to stop now. I’m constitutionally unable to take people raised on Stars Wars prequels, Degrassi: The Next Generation, and MTV reality shows seriously, seeing as how they’ve been deprived of the bedrock values and education that you get

from the original Star Wars films, the original Degrassi Junior High, and music videos—that’s right, music videos—on MTV. It makes sense that I felt divorced from mainstream rock in 1998; it was the year that the children of 1985 turned 13. The radio belonged to them now, and they quickly re-made it in their own, utterly foreign image. Not that they didn’t have help; the bands that came along when I was 13 and changed the radio in my image had exited the center stage of pop culture. Nirvana and Soundgarden were finished, Smashing Pumpkins and Alice In Chains were well on their way to being finished, and Pearl Jam no longer seemed interested in sounding young anymore.

Grunge wasn’t just dead; its body was being chopped up so close friends and relatives couldn’t identify it. For the next several years, a new wave of bands systematically wiped away the gains alternative rock had made in the early ’90s. Grunge was consumed by a new beast, and vomited back up with the most rank, least edible chunks of metal and hip-hop. Whether it was called nü-metal or rap-rock (or far worse epithets by those that couldn’t fathom the ugly blitzkrieg of belching fury suddenly coming at them from the fleet of bright yellow muscle cars rapidly taking over Main Street in every American town), this was music that took the sludge and the self-pity of early-’90s rock and turned it into something leaner, meaner, and nefariously empowering.

Nü-metal became the overture for what was about to come down in the ’00s, its inarticulate roar simulating the jet engines of George W. Bush’s America firing up and incinerating the grungy Clinton ’90s. Political correctness was the new establishment, and dismantling it became the first item on rock’s to-do list. Treating women like “bitches” and gays like “faggots” in song lyrics was now an acceptable form of rebellion, not to mention an easy way to get a rise out of bleeding-heart squares. Making money—and flaunting it—was okay again. Nü-metal beat grunge at its own game; you could feel sorry for yourself without worrying about other people. In fact, other people were the problem. It was the perfect state of mind for the American teenager bored with the comfort and affluence of the late ’90s, and resentful of bands pushing them to Rock The Vote and support Amnesty International. Soon, everybody wanted what nü-metal was selling, in all its various guises.

Grunge was just so weak and emotional; the new music, in contrast, was heavy and powerful. Grunge was “I feel your pain” music, siding with all the losers and rejects seeking protection from bullies real or imagined; the new music convinced the losers and rejects that they were the bullies, and it was high time they found somebody weaker to fuck up for a change. Grunge reminded us that, deep down, we’re all victims of a cruel and unjust world, and this vulnerability unites us; there was only one victim in the new music, and that was the listener, who was beset on all sides by abusive parents, mocking teachers, needy girlfriends, and all the uncaring and privileged kids at school, who never, ever had it as bad as you; even worse, those fucking bitches thought they were better than you. Fuck that shit, man! Give me something to break! How ’bout your fucking face?

In grunge, irony was used as a weapon by romantics who feared that nothing mattered anymore; the new music wasn’t ironic, it wasn’t romantic, it knew nothing mattered anymore, and it told you this over and over again until you no longer cared. Once that happened, you were master of your own universe.

The figurehead of nü-metal was Korn, a band from Bakersfield, California that formed in 1993 and ended up influencing scores of like-minded groups with its self-titled debut released the following year. In contrast with the grunge bands that were still in vogue at the time, Korn stood outside the continuum of classic-rock and punk tradition. “I’ve never owned a Beatles album. I’ve never even listened to one,” Korn bassist Fieldy later told Chuck Klosterman in Fargo Rock City. “The Rolling Stones, Led Zeppelin—those bands haven’t influenced us in any way. Nobody in this band ever listened to that stuff. Our musical history starts with the Red Hot Chili Peppers and early Faith No More. As a band, that’s where we begin.”

Korn songs eschewed guitar solos, discernable choruses, even melodies—instead they were built on syncopated hip-hop beats, atonal “riffs” that sounded like surly fax machines, and frontman Jonathan Davis’ half-rapped, have-bleated vocals. You didn’t have to be ignorant of rock history in order to appreciate it, but it definitely

helped to be free of preconceived notions of what “good” music was supposed to sound like if you wanted to be a Korn fan.

It took a long time for rock radio to accept Korn as grunge peaked in the mid-’90s and then started petering out over the next couple of years. But like the triumphant protagonists in all true grassroots success stories, Korn prevailed because it understood its audience better than the middlemen. The band’s second record, 1996’s Life Is Peachy, debuted at No. 3 on the Billboard chart, and went on to go double-platinum, in spite of nonexistent promotional support from mainstream outlets. The following year, Korn co-headlined Lollapalooza with Tool, its highest-profile tour yet. At this point, the fact that the traditional media was still mostly ignoring Korn actually played to the band’s advantage, since it caused fans—who similarly felt dismissed and despised by their peers— to relate to their heroes even more intensely.

When Korn began work on 1998’s Follow The Leader, it deftly set about ensuring that the record would be the band’s first No. 1 release by exhibiting the smarts and calculation of an experienced politician running for public office. Even the album title sounded like a campaign slogan—a real winner for a dystopian, totalitarian subculture run by thugs in Adidas tracksuits. Unlike the grunge bands that flamed out almost immediately after becoming famous, usually because they couldn’t figure out whether to embrace or eviscerate their newfound audiences, Korn understood that communicating effectively with your followers was the key to longevity. The band proceeded on two fronts, one technological and the other traditional. First, Korn gave fans regular behindthe-scenes glimpses at the making of Follow The Leader via its Korn TV website, a cutting-edge idea at the time.

Then, once the record was finished, the band chartered a jet and held fan conferences all over the U.S. to promote its upcoming opus, pressing the flesh and kissing all the horribly deformed babies in the Korn klan.

As Karl Rove proved a few years later on a grander scale, Korn showed that you didn’t need the media when you had the wherewithal to control your own message. Sure enough, when Follow The Leader was released on Aug. 18, 1998, it ended up selling about 268,000 copies in its first week. Korn was now the No. 1 band in the land. But what exactly was Korn’s message? In a Spin profile that November, Korn was depicted as a deeply schizophrenic unit. Its members enjoyed the spoils of success but bent over backward to show how miserable they still were. The latter mostly came courtesy of Davis, a battering ram of angst who had grown up from a frail and asthmatic child. (He claimed in Spin that he was hospitalized every month from ages 3 to 10.) The Spin story opens backstage at a Japanese music festival, where Davis rails about how “we get no fucking love at all” from the other bands on the bill, immediately establishing Korn’s “renegade” cred. Later, Davis takes Spin’s Neil Strauss back home to Bakersfield. “Everywhere I used to go is either torn down or destroyed,” he says. “No wonder I’m so messed up.” Part of me thinks this is a pretty weird thing to say; it’s not clear whether Davis is self-consciously trying to separate himself from his past or if he’s just needlessly reveling in it. The other part of me thinks Davis is a genius, because his worldview is exactly the same as the teenaged Korn fans who must’ve pored over this story like it was the (Wish I Was) Dead Sea Scrolls. I’m sure they all hated their hometowns, too.

For Davis and his followers, rock stardom was like big government—an institution worthy of scorn and suspicion, even hatred, but also the nexus of power; and, ultimately, who doesn’t want to be in power? As for the rest of Korn, Strauss observes a band meeting where four out of five members vote to edit out the noisy part in the middle of Korn’s next single “Freak On A Leash”—I mean the really noisy part—in order to make the song more palatable for radio. Davis is the lone holdout; Fieldy drowns out his protests by chanting, “I want a bigger house!” No wonder Davis is so messed up.

In some ways, Davis was very much a rock star in the grunge tradition. He told Strauss that the song “Reclaim My Place” was “about how I thought I’d become a rock star and not get picked on anymore. But my band still calls me a fag … And I kind of am—except for the dick part.” He wasn’t joking; Davis really was subjected to homophobic taunts as a teen. Another Korn song, “Faget,” reflected on Davis’ youth as a fan of groups like The Cure and Duran Duran, a period of his life when he used to hang out in gay bars.

Don’t worry, bro, Davis is totally not gay. And he made sure not to be overly empathetic toward gay people in Korn songs. One of the more controversial tracks on Follow The Leader was “All In The Family,” a collaboration with the singer of a band that closely mimicked Korn’s style and sound, Limp Bizkit. But in terms of personality and stage presence, Fred Durst was his own man, projecting a solidly jockish image with his backward baseball caps and perpetually vacant facial expressions. Durst brought out the asshole in Davis on “All In The Family,” a joke song where the singers took turns insulting each with escalating degrees of anger and general doltishness.

Durst called Davis a “little fairy” blowing on his “fag pipes”—Davis often played bagpipes on stage—Davis called Durst a “little faggot ho,” and they screamed “I hate you!” at each other in the chorus. “All In The Family” is so moronic that it’s almost not offensive; who would ever take these dopes seriously enough to get worked up over such obvious garbage?

Actually, lots of people did take Jonathan Davis and Fred Durst seriously, particularly young males, the one segment of the population that can always be counted on to toss around anti-gay language with impunity.

When Lorraine Ali of Rolling Stone pressed Durst on the “pretty homophobic” lyrics of “All In The Family,” he slipped the noose and turned the question around as another example of outsiders not getting what these bands were really about. “We were just poking fun at each other,” he told Ali. “We didn’t mean it in any homophobic way. But, of course, it’s another reason to not like this obnoxious band, this guy who starts riots at shows, stage dives, pulls chicks on stage, tells promoters to kiss his ass. You gotta hate this guy. Well, I hope it turns into the guy you love to hate.”

Durst was right. His audience got it. And what was “it”? Anything Durst said “it” was. He could use homophobic language by claiming he wasn’t being homophobic, and not only not apologize, but pass himself as the persecuted one. Korn and Limp Bizkit succeeded in making any criticism of their bands personal for their fans; if you fucked with Davis and Durst, you fucked with millions of kids with aggressive inferiority complexes. Limp Bizkit proved to be especially adept at having it both ways, with Durst playing the outlaw while working the system like a world-class con artist.

Durst was at his best in 2000, when Limp Bizkit’s third record, Chocolate Starfish And The Hot Dog Flavored Water, sold more than 1 million copies in its first week, shattering the previous opening week record held by Pearl Jam for 1993’s Vs. The album had been helped that summer by a free concert tour sponsored by Napster, where the band previewed many of Starfish’s tracks for a captive and appreciative audience. Just as Korn had gone to No. 1 with Follow The Leader thanks to some good old-fashioned populist promotional efforts, Limp Bizkit put itself in a position to sell boatloads of records by aligning itself with a company that was costing the music industry tens of millions of dollars in lost sales. “We couldn’t care less about the older generation’s need to keep doing business as usual,” Durst said in a press conference. “Who cares who’s suing who? We’re doing a free tour. That’s all that matters to me.”

Three years earlier, Durst had a much different attitude when it came to business as usual. In an attempt to break Limp Bizkit’s 1997 debut, Three Dollar Bill, Yall$, the band’s label, Flip/Interscope, paid a radio station in Portland, Oregon about $5,000 to play the song “Counterfeit” 50 times. The transaction was officially regarded as “advertising,” but it smelled like payola when it was reported on the front page of the New York Times in March ’98. Most bands would’ve been embarrassed to be associated with such stereotypically sleazy recordindustry shenanigans. But not Durst, who instead kept his eyes fixed on the big picture. “The name Limp Bizkit got on MTV; it got in the paper. Even after the [paid radio] time expired, we stayed at No. 1,” he told Rolling Stone.

Calling out Limp Bizkit for benefiting from payola would mean—to paraphrase something Columbia University School Of Journalism professor Dick Wald recently said about Fox News president Roger Ailes in Esquire— fighting them on territory they’d left behind. We’re not talking about Fugazi here. Of course Limp Bizkit’s career was goosed by a little dirty money under the table; let’s hope more serious laws weren’t also broken for the cause. Besides, “Counterfeit” didn’t end up being Limp Bizkit’s breakout song anyway.

Instead, Limp Bizkit introduced its ’tude-heavy, in-your-face style of aggro-rock to a mass audience via a smirky, decidedly non-badass cover of George Michael’s “Faith.” Far from being the first band to utilize the “goofy hard-rock remake of a pop song” formula as an easy shortcut to the charts, Limp Bizkit was among the most successful, even as Durst did his best to mangle his vocals with endless, “I’m not taking this gay shit seriously”style mugging. In the end, George Michael’s sturdy songcraft won out over Limp Bizkit’s aimless incompetence, and Durst had his first hit.

The video for “Faith” was released to MTV on Nov. 20, 1998, and pretty soon it was everywhere, confirming that nü-metal was finally flushing out the last remnants of dying alternative music out of mainstream rock. But by then I didn’t care. The late ’90s were a horrible time for rock music on the radio and MTV, but a veritable gold mine if you looked just a little left of center. This was a time of classic albums like Built To Spill’s Perfect From Now On, Elliott Smith’s Either/Or and XO, Air’s Moon Safari, Neutral Milk Hotel’s In The Aeroplane Over The Sea, Wilco’s Summerteeth, and Flaming Lips’ The Soft Bulletin, not to mention popular-ish stuff like Radiohead’s OK Computer and Beck’s Odelay and Mutations. Then there was classic rock, which I had loved ever since I was a little kid sitting in the backseat of my dad’s car, before I knew who any of the bands were.

Everybody else could have Fred Durst; I was too busy obsessing over The Who, The Beach Boys, The Kinks, and Bob Dylan. Oh my god, Bob Dylan—you were my rage against the machine, leading those furious Hawks on side two of the so-called “Royal Albert Hall” bootleg and serving up a perfectly stirred cocktail of anger, sorrow, humor, courage, and sensitivity. It was the same mix I loved in the rock ’n’ roll that had originally moved me, and that I was no longer hearing.

I wasn’t 13 anymore, and the world had changed a lot since 1990. I was no longer stuck with just one record store, MTV, and the radio when it came to seeking out new music. Finding stuff that I liked was easier, but also lonelier. Good music never stopped being made, but the belief that music could connect you to millions of strangers in a very tangible, even transformative way was gone and probably wasn’t coming back.

Over time, I came to think of grunge as being “very ’90s.” After a while, it was just this passé thing I made fun of in order to make people think I was never silly enough to treat it seriously. But deep down, I couldn't forgive Korn, Limp Bizkit, Creed, Godsmack, and all the rest for what they did to the Alternative Nation. Little did I know that I'd be handed the opportunity to get revenge on one of them. After all, I was from the grunge generation, so it was part of my makeup to expect bad things to happen, and accept it with a disinterested shrug and a semi-obscure pop-culture reference delivered with wry resignation. Revenge was something nü-metal kids cared about. That changed in 2002, when I was working as an arts and entertainment reporter for my hometown newspaper The Post-Crescent and was assigned a review of a Korn concert at Green Bay’s Brown County Arena.

Finally, a chance to climb into the belly of the beast and stick it with my all-powerful verbal swords. Sure, I went into the concert with the utmost journalistic ethics, prepared to act as an impartial chronicler of the evening’s events. (Did I mention Puddle Of Mudd was opening?) But no matter how hard I tried to give Korn a fair shake—

which, truth be told, probably wasn’t that hard—my personal grudge against the band had turned into an unstoppable Anton Chigurh rampaging across the terrain with nothing but bloody murder on its mind.

After a four-hour journey down a long, twisted path across the nü-metal wasteland, where I smelled the sweat of angry young warriors and heard the primal cry of their tribal “Show me your tits!” chants, I returned to the Post-Crescent’s office and proceeded to write the most vindictive and mean-spirited review of my life. It was my intent to do harm; every blow was low, every shot was cheap. I wanted my words to reduce Korn to a pile of smoldering rubble. (Hurting their feelings was fine, too.) An hour later, I turned in my review, and started anxiously awaiting the response.

NüNü-metal band Korn offers its listeners an earful of pain GREEN BAY—A concert broke out Friday night during a brawl hosted by Korn at the Brown County Arena.

The nü-metal band “treated” about 4,000 fans to 90 minutes of anti-anthems like “Freak on a Leash,” “Got the Life,” “Faget,” and “Dead Bodies Everywhere,” but the music was beside the point. Korn’s bludgeoning brand of rock is an all-out assault on an audience assaulting itself. It’s entertainment as pain, where you pay someone to make you feel crummy so you can take it out on your fellow audience members.

How do you describe a Korn concert experience? Imagine a fleet of 747s doing a fly-by a dozen feet over your head while a chainsaw buzzes slowly through your skull, and you have a decent approximation.

If success here is judged by the severity of your headache as you finally, mercifully, walk out alive, then this show is one for the ages. In fact, Korn could go down as one of the worst sounding shows in the history of the soon-to-be-semi-retired Brown County Arena. Congratulations, boys! And please, pass the Extra Strength Tylenol!

Korn has undeniably connected with a segment of today’s youth culture. Front man Jonathan Davis and his dreadlocked band mates held the audience in the palms of their hands as soon as they walked on stage.

If only the band could use that power for something other than encouraging a violent mob mentality (which contradicts the nonconformist rhetoric of Davis’ lyrics). Watching hordes of beefy young men insanely pound the testosterone out of each other on the arena floor (some to the point of physical collapse) was a disturbing sight, like a battle scene out of Braveheart re-imagined by Roger Waters.

Also disconcerting was the overwhelming level of stupid maleness that rippled through the crowd between Korn and opener Puddle of Mudd, when hundreds of overheated mooks aggressively implored their female counterparts to expose themselves. It’s hard to say what was more pathetic: That no guys stepped in to stop it, or that so many gals obliged.

There was a silver lining to Friday’s show: The turnout was about half of what Korn drew at the arena in 2000. Nü-metal is played out. People are starting to look elsewhere. When its day is done, and that day is hopefully coming soon, Korn will really have something to be angry about.

A couple of words about my review: Yeah, I know it sounds stilted. And maybe a little stodgy. (Okay, really stodgy. I’m not sure anybody under the age 75 should ever refer to women as “gals,” unless you’re trying to fit in at the VFW.) But, hey, how about that line about the 747s? I was pretty proud of that one. Hopefully, you were laughing so hard that you skipped the part about the Extra Strength Tylenol.

Questionable writing aside, the review did its job in spectacular fashion: Korn fans were pissed. The next day, expletive-filled screeds filled my e-mail inbox at the rate of one every 10 minutes. A local radio station made me a topic of very heated discussion on its message board. I stopped answering my phone, because I knew

clenched fists and F-bombs were waiting to pummel me. My editor considered calling the police after one reader said he was going to “slit ur fucking goddam face to peaces!!!!!!!” but I talked him out of it, since the guy said he was from California.

How bad was the response? Here’s just a small taste: OI U fucker!!!!u think koRn are so bad and crap rite. they caouse us so called troubled kids to hurt and kill well u know u r just another victim of society if u ever acctually listend to the lrycs u will understand. us koRn fans have trouble dealing with bullies and family shit and koRn are like an anti deprecent just when u think no one is listening to u u put on some koRn and u realise ur not alone. we dont kick the shit outa each other at gigs if u were acctually a person who listend there are un written ruls to a mosh so fuck ur judgement u r just as bad as the bullies that break my nose an shit u fucking preppy posh asshole fuck you!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

You must be gay. You’re threatened by women taking there tops off. I bet if they were guys, you would’ve applauded and drooled. Fuckin idiot You are nothing. And I don’t usually say this to people, but you should go in a dark hole and rot and die.

You don’t belong where humans are because you are just going to rip the shit out of some other band so that you can get more hate mail and get this shit all over again. personally i consider hip hop to be one of the biggest menaces for the society. it represents decadence. nü-metal will never die as long as there are people like you in this goddam world !!! stupid, horny little bastards like you make this youth angry, can’t you understand that?

(I don’t get that last one, either.)

In the end, I got 60 hate e-mails and about a dozen phone calls. I ended up compiling the messages in a book I gave to friends entitled Dear Faggot, the most common salutation I received from Korn fans. The book was a hit, and my friends still ask me from time to time to retell my Korn story. It is the “Free Bird” of my work-related anecdotes.

But here’s the thing: Over the years, I’ve stopped being the protagonist in this story. It’s clear to me now that I was the antagonist all along. I’m the bad guy that got his comeuppance. I was criticizing something I didn’t understand; this music didn’t communicate with me because it wasn’t supposed to communicate with me.

I’ll never get Korn and Limp Bizkit. I’ll always consider nü-metal a symptom of the nihilism, self-absorption, and arrogance percolating in American culture in the late ’90s, before it flowered into something really ugly a few years later. I find nothing inspiring about this music. I feel that I am right about this. But I suspect this opinion is meaningless, because I’m just playing the role nü-metal wanted me to play. I was the adult now. The '90s were almost over and they put me right back where I started, on the outside looking in.

What Happened Next? It’s the electrifying conclusion of Whatever Happened To Alternative Nation! Woodstock ’99 is remembered as the Altamont of the '90s; I'll wade through the detritus and try to figure out what one of rock's biggest disasters says about the decade that spawned it.

Part 10: 1999: By the time we got to Woodstock 99 …

By Steven Hyden Feb 22, 2011 12:00 AM “It’s worth noting throughout history, kids come around the corner to a multitude of casualties.”—The Hold Steady, “Multitude Of Casualties” In late July 1999, I found myself in the midst of a temporary civilization, a new land with its own laws and mores. It was formed by pilgrims seeking refuge from an outside world that couldn’t comprehend them. These people had traveled hundreds of miles to arrive at this place. For them, months of eager anticipation had finally culminated. It was my job to make sense of it all for curious onlookers, and it wasn’t going to be easy. I was now an outsider among outsiders.

Of course I’m referring to EAA AirVenture, the annual aviation convention presented by the Experimental Aircraft Association in Oshkosh, Wisconsin.

EAA AirVenture is one of the biggest tourist draws in northeastern Wisconsin; more than 700,000 people come every year to stare at airplanes and camp at EAA’s Camp Scholler for a week. In summer 1999, I was working as an intern for my hometown newspaper, The Post-Crescent, applying the skills I had learned in journalism school to get to the bottom of every county fair, strawberry festival, and drill team car-wash fundraiser in the tricounty area. If you were idly attending a community gathering in my town and expected to duck a thorough interrogation about whether you were enjoying your corn-on-the-cob, you had another think coming, mister. I considered myself a top-flight practitioner of sunburned-foot-and-sandal journalism.

As I prowled the grounds of the camp in search of the appropriate quotes to fill out 18 column inches in tomorrow’s afternoon edition, I introduced myself to a nice-looking middle-aged couple from Northern California. Let’s call them Jann and Janis. After a few stock questions about AirVenture, my conversation with

Jann and Janis veered toward another mass gathering that had wrapped up a few days earlier about 1,000 miles away in upstate New York.

Woodstock 99 ended up being a much bigger news story after it ended than in the days and weeks leading up to the second sequel to the iconic late-’60s rock festival. People were still talking about how the three-day event starring some of the biggest names in rock music at the time—including Korn, Limp Bizkit, Rage Against The Machine, and Kid Rock—had ended with fires, looting, and riots. The Washington Post wrote, “the festival site resembled a surreal war zone,” the result of unabated chaos where festival-goers ransacked vendor trucks, demolished ATMs, and knocked down any portable toilets that weren’t already falling over from an excess of human waste. It took an hour for around 700 New York state troopers outfitted in riot gear to finally descend on the melee and—according to at least one eyewitness account later disputed by authorities—start beating on kids with clubs for stealing CDs and other offenses. “Such images suggested a different time and a different place,” the Post observed. “It almost seemed that both sides were playing out roles that had been written by a previous generation.”

Jann and Janis were members of that previous generation, and they were absolutely disgusted by what had transpired at Woodstock 99. To them, Woodstock was a beacon of utopian idealism—a sacrosanct emblem of the good their generation had wrought so many years ago. They were dismayed that these kids had come along and ruined everything. As far as Jann and Janis were concerned, it was outrageous that the current crop of young people apparently couldn’t handle ingesting illegal drugs and swapping bodily fluids in substandard living conditions for three days without going a little nuts. After all, they had done it and it worked fine for them.

Clearly, times had changed for the worse. Still, there was no reason to return the receipt on the Woodstock myth just because it went horribly wrong this time.

The most commonly cited moment for when Woodstock 99 officially went off the rails came during the festivalclosing set Sunday night by the Red Hot Chili Peppers. It began when an anti-gun activist group passed out candles that were supposed to be lit once the band performed its biggest hit, “Under The Bridge.” People had already been setting fires amid the mountains of garbage that had accumulated on the grounds of Griffiss Air Force Base throughout the afternoon, so handing out objects intended to be flammable must’ve seemed like an invitation to really light the place up. Then the Chili Peppers played a cover of Jimi Hendrix’s “Fire,” and the rest, as they say, is history.

The guy in the video trying to talk 200,000 people out of burning Woodstock 99 to the ground is one of the festival’s promoters, John Scher. If you think he looks uncomfortable in this clip, you should’ve seen Scher in Woodstock’s ashen aftermath, when he and the other organizers were intensely scrutinized for their perceived greed and callousness.

After losing money on the first Woodstock sequel in 1994, Scher told reporters at Woodstock 99 that he was determined “to try and make a profit on this one.” Organizers were later criticized for charging $150 a ticket ($180 at the gate) and $5 for beer, though those prices now seem comparable to festivals of similar size and stature. Less excusable was how decisions vital to the functionality of Woodstock 99 were made according to the tightest of tightwad standards. According to an exhaustive on-site report by Spin, Scher and his partners dutifully cut every corner to save money. Vendors weren’t provided with proper plumbing, so they were forced to create their own makeshift set-ups. Teenagers hired to pick up the garbage quit after the first day when they weren’t given water; the detritus rapidly overflowed out of trash bins when nobody was hired to replace them.

Worst of all was the site itself, a former toxic waste dump located about 200 miles from the original Woodstock site. Griffiss was a stark, treeless, triangle-shaped terrain composed mostly of concrete and formed by two runway strips lined with junk-food stands and corporate hawkers of youth-oriented crapola.

Beyond the cheapskate charges, the people behind Woodstock 99 were accused of negligence when it came to addressing instances of sexual assault. Among the festival’s most shameful statistics—which included 44 arrests and a staggering 10,000 people receiving medical treatment—were reports that eight women had been raped, often by multiple people in the middle of mosh pits that raged as bands performed. Two weeks after Woodstock 99, the National Organization For Women staged a protest outside of Scher’s New York office, asserting that he and fellow promoter Michael Lang intended to “deny the rapes occurred, to dismiss their importance, and to blame the victims.” Spin reported that a Woodstock employee had told NOW that “security, production staff, and promoters knew about the rapes” as they occurred during the festival and “refused to alert law enforcement because of the ubiquity of drugs on site.” x Scher denied the claims, insisting instead that the ugliness of Woodstock 99 reflected a larger moral chasm in the souls of the attendees. “I think, in some respects, the generation was irresponsible and they gave me and themselves the finger,” Scher told Spin. He wasn’t the only one who felt that Woodstock 99 amounted to a big “fuck you!” from legions of incorrigible kids. More than one writer likened Woodstock 99 to The Day Of The Locust, the 1939 Nathanael West novel about wanton sin and alienation in Los Angeles that ends with mob violence.

Others rushed to blame the bands for pushing the audience to commit random acts of depravity. “What caused this powder-keg to blow, unlike its sister festival 30 years ago?” asked the San Francisco Examiner’s Jane Ganahl, nudging heavily in the direction of “the worst perpetrator,” Limp Bizkit, who was widely pilloried in the press for playing songs like “Break Stuff” as fans were dismantling the 12-foot security fence circling the grounds and crowd-surfing on the plywood pieces. “Irresponsible: There’s no other word for Limp Bizkit frontman Fred Durst” Salon.com’s Jeff Stark wrote. “He’s goading the crowd, pumping them up, higher and higher. It’s beyond working them into enjoying the show. He’s encouraging the pit, working them into a frenzy.”

In all of the criticism that came down on Woodstock 99, what never seemed to be questioned was the original Woodstock itself. Ganahl was typical in steadfastly refusing to take off her rose-colored glasses, insisting that the 1969 festival was marred only be “a few bad LSD trips and injuries mostly sustained from excessive lovemaking.” Actually, it was a little worse than that. Two people died at the original Woodstock; one from a drug overdose, the other from being run over by a tractor. And the grounds were reduced to such squalor that New York governor Nelson Rockefeller declared it a disaster area.

Nevertheless, considering what could have gone wrong given how anarchic the festival was, Woodstock was a considered a sort of happy accident, if not a full-fledged miracle. In a video commemorating the 40th anniversary of Woodstock produced by that famed counter-cultural rag The Wall Street Journal, Scher and Lang speak moonily about how “no one ever imagined that mass of humanity gathering in any one place for anything” and how “we were grabbing freedom in every direction we could.” While Woodstock 99 understandably wasn’t mentioned in the celebratory video, grabbing freedom in every direction was very much a part of that festival, too. “Letting it all hang out” was Woodstock’s raison d’être: It was a sloppily constructed sphere where everybody could do anything to anybody, and nobody was held responsible. The idea that this could be replicated (or should be replicated) suggests that Woodstock 99 wasn’t so much a reflection of soulless contemporary youth, but of overcooked ’60s romanticism taken to its inevitably extreme and destructive conclusion. Of all people, rap-folkie Everlast seemed to be the only Woodstock 99 participant to understand this at the time. “All those people are nostalgic for something that happened 30 years ago,” he told Spin. “I don’t think anything real came out of that first experience—it was just three days of sex and drugs and ‘Oh, the world is such a great place!’ Then they went home, became yuppies, and fucked the whole country up.”

Initial media reports about Woodstock 99 focused on the violence on the festival’s final night. But lawlessness ruled at the festival from the very beginning. The organizers had originally committed to a “Peace Patrol” force of 1,200 security guards, but it’s unclear if the detail ever came close to that amount. By Saturday morning, only 175 guards had signed in, and it’s likely at least some of those workers quit in the middle of their shifts. (Reports of guards shedding their uniforms and joining the party were not uncommon.) Security staff began quitting almost as soon as they were hired. Cheap labor had been rounded up at the local unemployment office, but public assistance was preferable to security work at Woodstock 99, where guards were given low pay and two meals a day in exchange for back-breaking shifts that lasted up to 14 hours. Organizers were so desperate for

help that they eventually recruited 40 prison guards from local jails to look after the prisoners of the Woodstock asylum.

The shabby security can be chalked up in part to the cheapness of the whole Woodstock 99 operation, but it also reflected a laissez-faire attitude that was an indelible part of Woodstock’s history. When pressed for answers about Woodstock’s disastrous closing night, Scher admitted to Spin that he assumed the crowd would “to some degree police themselves.” As it turned out, even the security guards were stealing from one another at Woodstock 99. (“We chipped in to have our own security person,” one guard told Spin.) At the gates, the focus was less on safety than on keeping out carry-in food and beverages. Some guards bartered with attendees trying to sneak in drugs; $20 was said to buy entry for mushrooms.

Once fans were past the gates, security became much less visible. Guards were instructed to look the other way when it came to sex and drugs; they were only supposed to step in to stop violence, though that proved to be easier said than done. Organizers had provided the space and the bands, but it was up to the people to create the life-altering orgy of physical and chemical delights that constituted the real Woodstock experience. It was time for a new generation to create their own fodder for future Woodstock retrospectives, inhibitions (and common decency) be damned.

Stories of what occurred inside Woodstock 99 range from ridiculous (like the one about the stolen Mercedes Benz that somebody somehow snuck through the gate and drove to within 80 yards of the stage) to salacious (like how the desert-like temperatures made naked body parts more mundane on the grounds than cargo shorts) to depressing and flat-out terrifying.

Sexual domination by the strong over the weak was as casual as a peck on the cheek at Woodstock 99, and seemingly so pervasive that the eight reported rapes seem like only the tip of a pitch-black iceberg. Rock critic Rob Sheffield observed as much while covering the festival for Rolling Stone. At one point Sheffield comes across a group of guys sitting on a trailer and aggressively encouraging every woman passing by to expose themselves: They point out girls in the pedestrian gantlet and chant, “Show your tits!” Goon accomplices on the ground find the girls and surround them. Other goons walking by join the huddle with their cameras.

They goons on the trailer chant, “Pick her up! Pick her up!' Two short girls with backpacks are surrounded by a mob of about 60 guys. As the “Pick them up” chant gets louder, the girls undo their bra tops, the cameras flash, and the trailer guys spot another target.

Later Sheffield catches up with the women to ask if they were frightened: “Yes,” they say in unison. “There was no way out,” the brunette tells me. “It was either show ’em or you don’t get out.”

“There was no choice,” the blonde says. When I ask whether they plan to report this to security, they look at me like I’m from Mars.

Sheffield’s experience reads like a cute flirtation among photogenic would-be lovers in an Amy Adams romantic comedy compared with the horrors of the Woodstock 99 mosh pits. Some of the most hellish experiences happened during Korn’s Friday night performance; Spin estimated that people were carried away on stretchers every three minutes, mostly because they kept ODing. But Dave Schneider, who was working at Woodstock’s Crisis Intervention Unit, kept his eyes fixed on the front of the stage. From Spin: Suddenly, Schneider saw a crowd-surfing woman get swallowed up by the pit; when she re-emerged, two men had clamped her arms to her sides. “She was giving a struggle,” said Schneider. “Her clothes were physically and forcibly removed.” Yet no one nearby seemed to react. Schneider said that the

woman and one of the men fell to the ground for about 20 seconds; then, he said, she was passed to his friend, who raped her, standing from behind. “The gentlemen’s pants were down, her pants were down, and you could see there was clearly sexual activity,” he said. Finally, the woman was pulled from the pit by some audience members, who handed her to security.

Schneider told Spin he witnessed five other women similarly assaulted during Korn’s set, though he couldn’t say for certain that they were all raped.

Korn and Limp Bizkit took the most heat for the acts of sexual degradation that took place during their Woodstock 99 performances. But women were also assaulted during female-friendly acts like Alanis Morissette, including the person who recounted the following to Spin: “I don’t know how they got me,” she said. “There were about three guys on each arm and each leg, and then three or four right inside me with their hands. One guy put his hand inside my anus. Another guy was yelling, ‘Rip her apart!’”

Because it was Woodstock, and it was the end of the ’90s, there was already so much baggage affixed to what happened at Woodstock 99 that commentators couldn’t resist tying the event’s laundry list of crimes and casualties to some grand generational statement. But grasping for meaning in the festival’s structural and emotional wreckage proved to be fruitless. Rolling Stone’s Jenny Eliscu was among those who whiffed: “It’s a picture of a generation that might answer the question, ‘What’s so funny ’bout peace, love and understanding?’ with a punch in the nose,” she wrote.

In fairness to Eliscu, it was only obvious in hindsight what Woodstock 99 really signified, which was the end of the conceit that a rock festival could actually be a metaphor for what an entire youth culture represented.

Today, grouping hundreds of thousands of people together to enjoy live music is hardly a once-in-a-lifetime phenomenon; it’s not even a once-a-year phenomenon. It would be silly to look at Coachella, Bonnaroo, or Lollapalooza as anything more than enjoyable (or possibly just overrated) entertainment events. These festivals come around at the same time every year, they stick around for a several days, and then they disappear until a similar amalgam of bands appears somewhere else a few months later.

There was a paradigm shift in ’99, but it didn’t grow out of the piles of mud and shit at Woodstock. Instead, it started that January with a freshman student at Boston’s Northeastern University, who was inspired to buy a programming book because he wanted to write easy-to-use software for exchanging digital music files between two (or exponentially more) hard drives. By December, the Recording Industry Association Of America was in court filing suit against that student, Shawn Fanning, and the company he created, Napster. But by then, Napster was quickly growing into something far larger than Woodstock, Woodstock 99, and every other rock festival put together. In January 2000, Napster had just over 1 million users; by August, it grew to 6.7 million. By the end of 2000, Fanning would tell Rolling Stone that Napster had an “info base” of 38 million people.

Napster motivated anyone who wasn’t already on the Internet to hop online and join the gravy train. Why have only three days in the pleasure garden when you could now live there? Suddenly, the idea of paying $150 just to harass women into doffing their tops or perpetrate violence on strangers in unfriendly and aesthetically displeasing surroundings seemed like an unnecessary chore, if not out-and-out archaic. Now naked breasts in all shapes and sizes were instantly accessible at a moment’s notice, for free, in the privacy of your own home. And Internet anonymity made verbal violence against millions an ideal (and fingerprint-less) way to virtually “break stuff,” so to speak.

In the first Whatever Happened To Alternative Nation? column, I wrote about being glad in retrospect that “I was just an ignorant kid stuck in a nowhere town where nothing cool seemed to happen” when I was 13 back in 1990, because there’s a certain allure to having to search for what you want rather than have it handed to you, unearned. That’s how I feel now, but at the time, I would’ve regarded the advent of the Internet as a dream

come true. When I was a kid, I had this fantasy about having a room in my house where every album ever made was stored. Little did I know that this would not only come true for me by the end of the ’90s, but for anybody with a high-speed Internet connection.

It makes sense that having greater access to music has made me love music more and more as I get older. I’m not just talking about technological access; I also mean the personal access I have to all the songs that have meant something to me as I’ve moved in and out of the stages of my life. I’ve never loved more bands and albums than I love right now, and I’ll certainly discover more to love by this time next week, next month, next year, so on. Through the music, I’ve dialogued with past versions of myself, taking stock of what I’ve learned, what I’ve forgotten, what I’ve gained, and what I’ve lost. At its core, Whatever Happened To Alternative Nation? was as much about getting reacquainted with the person I used to be as the bands I once obsessed over.

Because if there’s one thing I’ve learned from sifting through the sands of my past, it’s that the music I liked can’t be extracted from my experiences and judged on its own terms. It’s like trying to take a bass line out of the context of a song, and expecting to make sense of it without looking at how it communicates with the other parts of the whole.

I’ve found that if a particular artist or album didn’t age well for me, it was at least partially due to a particular period of my life not aging well for me. Grunge, in particular, instantly conjures a version of myself I’d just as soon forget. That guy was horribly awkward, shy, self-centered, petulant, and wracked by low self-confidence.

He didn’t have any real friends, and suspected that girls would never come around to liking him. He had no real concept of how the world worked, and his opinions on most subjects were trite and embarrassing. He spent way too much time feeling sorry for himself when he should’ve been investigating more effective means of disguising the various odors emitting from his body.

I’ve gotten to know that part of myself again over the course of this series, trying my best to understand him without judgment. In the process, old CDs that I bought almost 20 years ago seem fresh again. Sometimes, I take them off the shelf and just stare at them; everything else my 13-year-old self owned is gone now. Only the music remains.

Many readers have commented on how grunge was a corporate marketing construct intended to trick gullible teenagers into buying into a fabricated alternative rock “revolution.” They’ve said grunge didn’t last more than a few years, and therefore isn’t important or worth discussing. I might have said the same not that long ago. But I now know those people are wrong. My own personal history tells me so. Grunge set me off on a journey I’m still on. Nirvana, Pearl Jam, and their peers used rock stardom as a vehicle for exposing gullible teenagers like me to parts of life that were previously obscured or hidden from mainstream view. Records, movies, books, ideas—all it took was a casual reference to something you’d never heard of an in interview or an album’s liner notes to point you toward another avenue to explore, which then led to more avenues. These bands don’t matter? My God, if you were like me, they gave you the world.

This music changed me. It was important to me. I guess it always will be.