Can you remember 1992? I certainly can, and what I remember is that trash TV — and to some extent, even the mainstream media — was filled with stories about Kurt Cobain and his bride, Courtney Love. They had been married in Hawaii in February of that year, and already there were lurid tales of addiction, arrest, and marital discord. In the midst of it all a daughter, Frances Bean Cobain, was born in August.
A lot of the stories questioned Cobain’s “health,” by which they meant drug addiction, but there were also rumors that Nirvana might be breaking up. It didn’t help things when the band decided not to undertake another U.S. tour to promote their major label debut, Nevermind, instead opting for select dates here and there. The reason given at the time was “exhaustion,” and everyone knew, or thought they knew, what that meant.
The band’s answer to all the rumors came at England’s legendary Reading Festival on August 30, 1992. Nirvana had played Reading the previous year, but at that time, they were halfway down the bill. When they returned in 1992, it was as the headliners. That night Nirvana played what Kerrang magazine called one #1 of the “100 Gigs That Shook the World,” and Nirvana fans voted the show “Nirvana’s #1 Greatest Moment” in a NME poll. (more…)
In the 1988 film Tapeheads, aspiring video jockeys Ivan (John Cusack) and Josh (Tim Robbins) put together a ludicrous first effort for record producer Mo Fuzz (Don Cornelius) that features a band called Cube Squared performing the Devo song “Baby Doll” as Ivan drenches them with colored paint and feathers. “I can’t do anything with this,” Mo tells them after he watches it, “I need production value.” As Ivan and Josh react with confusion over the concept of obtaining production value with no budget, Mo explains, “There’s only one thing that adds real production value … tits and ass.”
The combination of cheerleading and music videos seems like a match made in heaven. Cheerleading has always featured a healthy dose of “tits and ass” as Mo puts it, and it’s evolved a long way from its early days of long-sleeved sweaters, pom-poms, and rhythmic chants. High school and college cheerleading is a full-on gymnastics show, and most professional cheerleading groups have morphed into “dance squads” that don’t even pretend to lead cheers anymore. And certainly more than a few music videos have taken advantage of this synergy to grab a few cheap glances. But strangely enough, there are only a few music videos where cheerleaders truly dominate the stage. Here are my top five favorites:
Last week, I was trying to figure out the awkwardly titled decade called “The 2000s.” Yes, there’s been an A.D.D. quality to the last 10 years, but it could also be argued that there’s also a postmodern current flowing underneath all those mini-trends that came and went so fast they didn’t say goodbye. If I may be so bold as to throw another musical novelty borne out of the proliferation of cheap multitrack audio software into this decade, it would be the mashup. I think the first time I heard a kind of mashup was with the release of the Small Soldiers soundtrack. Just a few years later, people wouldn’t need recording studios to do what the DJs where able to do on that soundtrack — and I’m thinking specifically of the “Love Is a Battlefield” Kay Gee remix with Queen Latifah and Pat Benatar. Nowadays, it’s clear that ProTools can do wonders, and the more people with time and interest on their hands delve into what new musical forms they can weave into familiar songs, the more the original songs take on new and interesting twists when mashed up together. Having tried to do my own version of a mashup called “the smashup” — where I smashed covers of certain songs together — I know the time and dedication it takes to put these mixes together. So, here we go with a mix from some very creative individuals who clearly have talented ears and great skills with a multitrack recorder. (more…)
It’s hard to believe (for those of us who lived it, anyway) that it’s been fifteen years since Kurt Cobain committed suicide. On April 5th, 1994, the Seattle native left the world with the same cold-water shock his band Nirvana had on the world when the album Nevermind broke in 1991.
But to a larger degree, Cobain’s death has become a coda-like representation in our pop culture vernacular as the beginning of the end for the “grunge” era in Seattle. Greg Prato’s new book Grunge is Dead: The Oral History of Seattle Rock Music disagrees. The book attempts to set this (and gads of other misnomers perpetuated by “so-called experts, who didn’t show up until the ‘90s, as Pearl Jam’s Jeff Ament has said) straight.
Prato’s nearly 500-page digest does what no other documentary on the subject has before—it leaves the reflection to those who lived it, in their own words, without a filter. To that end, this is a truly great oral history. (more…)
“The only place I get hurt is out there. The world don’t give a shit about me.”
I. Well, I’m Frustrated and Outdated
The first voice you hear is a dead man’s scream. It’s one of those full-throated primal belts, like Roger Daltrey’s in “Won’t Get Fooled Again.” Here it’s Kevin DuBrow, his scalded screech busting the floodgates for “Bang Your Head (Metal Health),” the second single from Quiet Riot’s landmark Metal Health (1983), the first slab of fuzz ’n’ meedley to ever reach #1 on the Billboard Albums chart.
The band was at its mainstream zenith then. Randy “The Ram” Robinson (Mickey Rourke) was probably just getting started, years of toil finally paying off as professional wrestling graduated from the sweathouse din of high school gyms to respectable arenas in metropolitan cities. It came with a price, of course. Regional territories were swallowed by ambitious, growing monoliths. But that wouldn’t matter for a while, not even to the Ram. Luckily, he was in his prime, synchronous with the era. He was the ’80s.
Someday that would come back to haunt him, but someday was just a harmless, nebulous future. For now we’re in his past. Wisely, director Darren Aronofsky (on a Robert D. Siegel script) never shows us this past except as a collage of scattered magazines and handbills against the ghostly chatter of ringside patter and a raucous anthem that rocked a long-gone summer, growled by a man who in 2007 was silenced forever.
But Ram still struts to this hoary buzzsaw, having plucked it during its popularity and transformed it into his ring-entrance music. When the riffs kick in to summon his fist-pumping form, the crowds respond as they would at a concert. They know what’s coming: a classic blast from their childhoods, riding into town with a near-suicidal need to entertain. And the outcome is always predetermined. Once their faded hero climbs the ropes and drops that old-school Ram Jam finisher — his greatest hit — it’s over, brother.
Tin Machine was flat-out great, featuring fierce guitars, edgy lyrics and even edgier production. The world thought it stunk, and threw stuff at David Bowie and his noisy bandmates when they took the stage and played its songs. For this critic’s CD-buying money, the two records Tin Machine did—this 1989 debut and the 1991 Tin Machine II followup—are still the finest post-Let’s Dance material Bowie’s made.
Tin Machine’s main fault was that it refused to pump out another tired Ziggy Stardust nostalgia cruise on stage—with some Low, Lodger, and Young Americans stuff interspersed to keep it real—that hardcore Bowiephiles wanted. Instead, Bowie forsook his brand and Tin Machine played originals like [video embedding prohibited—so we link] the cut after which the band was named, “Tin Machine.”
How dare he play dissonant songs, charged with aggressively political and at times angrily anti-religious lyrical content? The words were a good-news, bad-news proposition: Popdose colleague David Medsker claims that a couplet from “Crack City”—”They’re just a bunch of assholes, with buttholes for their brains”—is one of the worst couplets in rock history.* Hard to disagree with that. Some of Tin Machine’s lyrics, and for that matter, the feedback, seem gratuitous.
The point is, we remember those words two decades later. Can anyone give me any couplet, good or bad, from Black Tie White Noise? Or from 1. Outside? Does anyone even remember those Bowie album titles? Nobody? The prosecution rests, your honor. (more…)
My first impression of Kurt Cobain, even before I knew anything about him, was that he was the kid in school who was painfully quiet, but whose mind was silently screaming. This, I remember thinking, was a kid who had spent a lot of time alone. Not because he wanted to, of course, but because, from Day One, he’d been made to feel that he was alone.
Like you (one can only presume), I have felt the odd juxtaposition of loneliness within a crowded room and written it off as self-manufactured. In Kurt’s case, loneliness was but a byproduct of absolute, unadulterated alienation, he of the broken home with no dad and a mom who couldn’t have given two shits about him if it meant any bit of sacrifice on her part.
If he and Nirvana had arrived at any other time in the history of rock & roll, they’d have gone unnoticed, but, since they came on the scene with their songs of anger and alienation at a time when the youth of this world could no longer maintain a happy façade, their music was welcomed with open arms. Sure, it didn’t happen overnight. Their first album, Bleach, was only a moderate indie success, but it had led to a deal with major label, Geffen, and the strange planetary alignment that would result in the recording and release of an album that would change the world.
Upon its arrival, Nevermind changed little, if anything. I personally remember weeks of watching MTV’s “120 Minutes,” seeing their video, and not being at all moved by the band. Then one day some three months after the album’s release, I turn on the car radio and hear “Smells Like Teen Spirit” on the local AOR radio station. I do a quick check to see if this is, indeed, the right station, because they’re more prone to play an old Pink Floyd or Billy Squier song than something like this. Whether I’ve heard the song before or not, I cannot recall, but, at that very moment, it is the single most beautiful and powerful thing I’ve ever heard. To this day, I remember every nuance of that moment like others remember where they were when JFK was assassinated.
The next day, determined to get my hands on the album this amazing song is from, I run to the local record store and find that I am not alone in my desire to procure said album. As I stand at the register, eager to part with my cash, the guy behind the counter gives the cassette (!) an odd glance — he doesn’t seem to know who Nirvana is, but mentions that a lot of people have been in the past few days looking for the album and that he’d been telling them he didn’t have it. “I should probably order some more of these,” he says as I exit the premises. (more…)
In Red Sox lore, the facts state that 10,454 fans–a pathetic number–attended Ted Williams’ last game in 1960, when he grew his legend to Mount Rushmore proportions by slamming a home run in his last at-bat. The whole epic game was frozen in time by John Updike, who published an essay on the game–one of his most famous nonfiction pieces–in The New Yorker.
Here’s the lore part: Nowadays, about 70,000 old-timers claim to have been at the game, or roughly twice as many as the since-expanded Fenway Pahk can seat, standing room included. Truth is, the Sox stunk at the time. Fans didn’t like Ted, and Ted didn’t like them, either. There were many more empty seats than not on that day. And that’s that. Don’t be a sentimental loser and take us on some nostalgia cruise.
Nirvana’s 1989 debut is similar in rock lore: It cost $606.16 to record at Recpirocal in Seattle and was produced by Jack Endino–who presided over many seminal Northwest grunge sessions and rode Nirvana’s popularity into his own rightfully earned fifteen minutes of “hottest producer in the world” fame. Since local guitarist Jason Everman liked the band, he fronted the dough for the studio time and was depicted on a poster included in the first 3,000 copies, the first thousand pressed on white vinyl ($1,500 on eBay 20 years later if you have the stones to bid on what looks like an original), the next 2,000 on black, and later pressings in red and blue. In total, it sold 30,000 copies before Nevermind.
After Nevermind, this record went platinum along with it. And, like the folks who “witnessed” The Splendid Splinter’s swan song but somehow misplaced their ticket stubs, a lot of Nirvana fans conveniently time-shifted their date of discovering the band back to the Bleach days. Don’t believe ‘em for a second. I do know a few ex-hardcore Sub Pop Records addicts who would buy literally everything the label put out in 1989 (this is how Mojo discovered that Soundgarden sucked way before they were famous), but in 2009, only one of those dudes claims to have heard Bleach before Nevermind, and he cops to thinking it wasn’t very good at the time (and still is much less impressed with the record than its multi-platinum followup–and even given that, prefers listening to Mudhoney two decades later). (more…)
Live albums have been a staple of the music business for ages, and even if you’re someone who loudly proclaims to have no interest in them whatsoever, it’s probable that you have at least one or two buried somewhere in your collection, even if it’s stretching back to your vinyl or cassette days. I’m pretty sure the first live album I ever purchased was Wings Over America, which served as my transition from the Beatles into Paul McCartney’s ’70s solo output – to this day, attempts to sing along to the studio versions of the songs from that record never fail to throw me – but there are quite a few other live records that I’ll spin with regularity, from the Smiths’ Rank to Robyn Hitchcock’s Storefront Hitchcock to Howard Jones’ The Peaceful Tour Live. (Yeah, I know, that last one might sound like a bit of a head-scratcher, but my wife and I saw HoJo in concert while on honeymoon in the UK in 2001, and that disc is a solid representation of the set he performed.)
On the whole, however, I must admit that I tend to prefer those live albums where the artists reinvent their songs by placing them in an acoustic setting. Nowadays, it’s something that everyone does…and more often than not, when they do so, it’s with an attitude generally reserved for someone who’s just reinvented the wheel. It’s as if they’re saying, “I am so awesome because I could take my song and de-rock-ify it,” when the reality is that they probably just figured, “Hey, here’s a way I can make a few more bucks off my old hits!” I’m not saying that I don’t still tend to enjoy them, anyway, but…okay, look, here’s the deal with acoustic live albums: the last one that truly mattered was Nirvana’s MTV Unplugged in New York. Now, as far as the best acoustic live albums that mattered before Nirvana, you can vote for Clapton or Tesla or even McCartney, but I only ever think of one: Richard Barone’s Cool Blue Halo.
Now, if you’re a regular NPR listener or find yourself scouring their website, you may be saying, “Hey, this guy is totally jumping on the bandwagon started by Tom Moon in March 2007!” Not true. I picked up my copy of Cool Blue Halo on cassette in a cut-out bin way back in 1990, and I’ve loved it ever since. The reasons I picked it up were threefold: 1) I’d seen his name in my copy of the Trouser Press Record Guide and remembered the write-up as being favorable, 2) it included a cover of the Beatles’ “Cry Baby Cry,” and 3) it was less than $2.00. (C’mon, gimme a break: I was a poor college student at the time!)
As it turned out, I found myself in love with the album long before I ever hit that Beatles cover.
Most rock & roll memoirs are penned either by rock stars themselves (Clapton, Dylan) or by the original titans of the industry (Ertegun, Yetnikoff), and as our pal Pete Lubin discovered when he tried peddling his own account of his life in the biz, there’s a reason for this: The number of people who purchase books filled with rock-geek trivia — shit, the number of people who purchase books period — is woefully small. It’s surprising, then, to see Gotham taking a flier on an autobiography from Danny Goldberg — but as you’ll quickly discover if you pick up a copy, it’s quite a pleasant surprise.
Goldberg, for the non-geeks among us, was one of the biggest seat-hoppers in the game of high-stakes musical chairs played by the major labels in the ’90s — and before that he was, in order of occurrence, a Billboard staffer, Led Zeppelin’s publicist (and eventual label VP), and manager to Stevie Nicks, Bonnie Raitt, and Kurt Cobain. A man with that perfect combination of dumb luck and ears for talent, in other words — and a veritable treasure trove of behind-the-scenes stories.
Sadly for readers who pick up books like this in search of juice and dirt, Bumping Into Geniuses focuses less on who did what to whom and more on how incredibly fucking awesome it is to fall in love with rock & roll, and then fall ass over elbow into one pile of money after another until you’re sitting on top of the Warner Music Group without any real idea of how it happened. I’m oversimplifying things a bit — and surely Goldberg did have a very clear grasp of how he rose so far, so fast — but that’s the basic tone of the book: It’s a gee-whiz account of Goldberg’s many brushes with greatness. (The title, by the way, comes from Ahmet Ertegun’s quip to a teenage Goldberg that the secret to success in the business is to walk around bumping into geniuses.) (more…)
Can you remember 1992? I certainly can, and what I remember is that trash TV — and to some extent, even the mainstream media — was filled with stories about Kurt Cobain and his bride, Courtney Love. They had been married in Hawaii in February of that year, and already there were lurid tales of addiction, arrest, and marital discord. In the midst of it all a daughter, Frances Bean Cobain, was born in August.
It’s hard to believe (for those of us who lived it, anyway) that it’s been fifteen years since Kurt Cobain committed suicide. On April 5th, 1994, the Seattle native left the world with the same cold-water shock his band Nirvana had on the world when the album 
In Red Sox lore, the facts state that 10,454 fans–a pathetic number–attended Ted Williams’ last game in 1960, when he grew his legend to Mount Rushmore proportions by slamming a home run in his last at-bat. The whole epic game was 
Danny Goldberg – Bumping Into Geniuses: My Life Inside the Rock and Roll Business (2008)