Ye Olde Hit Parade: Velvet Roof

Editor's note: Ye Olde Hit Parade takes a look back at my favorite songs year by year (starting in 1978, when I really started paying attention to music).

1992: Buffalo Tom - Velvet Roof

There was a lot going on in '92. The Cold War officially ended, Bill Clinton was elected president, the L.A. Riots raged on and Sinead O'Connor pissed off a lot of Catholics by ripping up a photo of the Pope on SNL.

Meanwhile, I was 24 and still working at the Peabody Times, including a two-week stint covering a murder trial in Lawrence. I had moved in with my girlfriend the previous year and we ended up moving to a new apartment across town in Beverly in the spring of '92. It was a big year for me as a sports fan because the Toronto Blue Jays won their first World Series that fall, becoming the first time a team I rooted for had won anything. I celebrated with the last of a six-pack of Labatt's Blue that I brought back a few weeks earlier from a vacation in Toronto.

The popularity of so-called grunge really became apparent in early '92, as Nirvana's Nevermind album hit #1 on the Billboard album charts in January, unseating Michael Jackson and bringing this new offshoot of alt-rock to the forefront. But it wasn't just Nirvana. Albums from like-minded acts like Pearl Jam, Soundgarden and the Red Hot Chili Peppers began selling like grungy hotcakes. Cameron Crowe's movie Singles, which portrayed the romantic adventures of twentysomethings in Seattle amid the city's rock scene, managed to get lucky by featuring concert footage of PJ, Soundgarden and Alice In Chains and the soundtrack became a big hit.

A coincidental byproduct of this newly popular rock genre was the simultaneous disappearance of hair metal from the charts. I distinctly remember seeing the video for Warrant's "Cherry Pie," which was pretty by-the-book by '80s standards but stood out as mind-numbingly idiotic in 1992. Shows like MTV's 120 Minutes became increasingly important to me, while Headbanger's Ball was a non-entity. Which is funny, because bands like Soundgarden had straddled the line between metal and alternative for a few years by that point.

Arena rock shows held less appeal for me and a lot of others. I was going to club shows regularly. I saw Pearl Jam at the tiny Axis club in Boston just a few months before they went on the Lollapalooza tour and really became huge. Similarly, I saw Soundgarden at Avalon, Mudhoney at the Paradise, Alice In Chains/Screaming Trees at the Channel and the Lollapalooza tour at Great Woods in Mansfield. My younger brother was in college at this time and was a DJ at the radio station and subsequently introduced me to a lot of cool bands that weren't getting as much attention: Fugazi, Urge Overkill, Sonic Youth, Pavement, Rollins Band. There were still some so-called mainstream acts that I followed like Neil Young, Lou Reed and the Black Crowes, but I was paying a lot more attention to left-of-center stuff. I didn't walk around wearing flannel and ripped jeans or anything, but I was into it.



As for my favorite song, I'm going with Buffalo Tom's "Velvet Roof." I remember the first time I heard it was when I saw the video on 120 Minutes and it grabbed me from the very first note. I went out and bought the album and have been a fan of the band ever since. They started out as more of a Dinosaur Jr./Husker Du-influenced act but incorporated more rock and folk influences with subsequent albums. I've seen them a bunch of times over the years and that song still gets a club jumping. Never gets old, man.

Honorable mentions: Buffalo Tom - "Taillights Fade"; Sugar - "A Good Idea"; Sugar - "Hoover Dam"; Pavement - "Summer Babe"; Pavement - "In the Mouth a Desert"; The Tragically Hip - "At the Hundredth Meridian"; The Tragically Hip - "Looking For a Place to Happen"; Sloan - "Underwhelmed"; Sloan - "500 Up"; The Afghan Whigs - "Turn On the Water"; Rollins Band - "Low Self Opinion"; Beastie Boys - "So What'cha Want"; Beastie Boys - "Gratitude"; R.E.M. - "Drive"; R.E.M. - "Man on the Moon"; Chris Cornell - "Seasons"; Pearl Jam - "State of Love and Trust"; Screaming Trees - "Nearly Lost You"; The Jayhawks - "Waiting for the Sun"; Alice in Chains - "Got Me Wrong"; Alice in Chains - "Would"; The Black Crowes - "Remedy"; Faith No More - "Midlife Crisis"; Peter Gabriel - "Digging in the Dirt"; Soul Asylum - "Somebody to Shove"; Mudhoney - "Suck You Dry"; Neil Young - "Harvest Moon"; Rage Against the Machine - "Freedom"; Rage Against the Machine - "Killing in the Name"; Nirvana - "Sliver"; Nirvana - "Aneurysm"; The Lemonheads - "Rudderless"; Sonic Youth - "100%"; Lou Reed - "What's Good"; Wreckx-n-Effect - "Rump Shaker"; Prince - "My Name is Prince"; Dr. Dre - "Nuthin' But a G Thang"; Red Hot Chili Peppers - "Under the Bridge"