Unsung: Just Like Punk, Except It's Cars

Unsung is a feature in which I take a look at a pop culture phenomenon (be it music, TV, literary, whatever) that has been forgotten or underappreciated. In this installment, I take a look at early '90s Gen X marketing.

Generational marketing strategies have always had a certain amount of bullshit to them. It's kind of ridiculous to think that an entire generation of people would respond to the same themes and calls to action. Advertising really took off in the 1960s, '70s and '80s with the Baby Boomer generation, especially as they had more money to spend. 

As a member of so-called Generation X (people born between 1965 and 1980), I grew up watching an inordinate amount of television and seeing an onslaught of commercials. We didn't have ad-free streaming services, so when we watched a show or sporting event, we typically just sat through the commercials. Now it's a lot easier to avoid ads, except when you're watching local stations or live events. 

It definitely became noticeable when advertisers started to market to my generation when we became adults in the early '90s, especially as terms like Gen X were adopted, grunge became a thing and Madison Avenue became convinced that we were all slackers who wore flannel shirts and ripped jeans and didn't have a clue about what we wanted to do with our lives. And sure, there were people like that, but some of us were also career-driven professionals who had goals and aspirations.

So it was amusing to see some of the lame attempts to sell shit to us. Here's a few notable commercials that stood out to me.

'This Car is Like Punk Rock!'

Thanks to YouTube, we can go back watch early commercials featuring actors who went on to become familiar faces. Jeremy Davies (whose given name was Jeremy Boring) started out with appearances in the early '90s on General Hospital and The Wonder Years, but in 1993, he starred in a commercial for Subaru, comparing the Impreza to punk rock. He's wearing a baggy jacket and pants and a Cobain-esque striped shirt, pontificating on the inherent punkness of a crappy hatchback: "This car's all about reminding you and me what's great about a car, and moving forward, and making cars better and less disappointing. Just like punk, except it's cars." Sure, pal. I remember seeing the ad a few times and thinking about how dumb and obvious it was. No disrespect to Davies, who went on to appear in Saving Private Ryan and have great roles on LOST and Justified, two of my favorite shows. But I could picture some ad copywriter in his mid-50s thinking he was onto something with this punk rock thing, even though grunge and punk were not the same thing and clearly buying a Subaru was not remotely related to punk. I can only imagine what the guys in Fugazi thought about this bunk. It's fun to look back at, though.

'Things Are Going to be OK'

History is littered with the debris of soft drinks that came and went. In 1993, Coca-Cola tried to appeal to apathetic Gen Xers with a new beverage called OK Soda that was marketed with ironic ads that emphasized its "OK-ness." Trying to be cool by pretending to not give a shit about the product, Coke focused more on the marketing than the drink itself, which its own ads said tasted like "carbonated tree sap." It was supposedly similar to an orange soda mixed with Coke and it didn't sell well. The ads were oh-so-clever and hip, talking about "OK-ness," but they didn't resonate with anyone, let alone with the 20somethings they were going after. The cans had bleak packaging with drawings of glum-looking young people who couldn't care less if you liked the drink, and featured dour slogans like "What's the point of OK Soda? Well, what's the point of anything?" The underlying message of the ads was "Things are going to be OK," but ultimately they weren't for OK Soda, which was test-marketed in nine cities and was a huge flop.

'Obey Your Thirst'

Coca-Cola had better luck in 1994 with its "Obey Your Thirst" campaign for the lemon-lime beverage Sprite. The ads targeted African-American consumers with hip-hop-themed ads featuring NBA stars Grant Hill and Kobe Bryant and cool artists like Nas, LL Cool J and A Tribe Called Quest. One from 1996 featured three street ballers making a soda commercial, who when they screw up a take are revealed to be English thespians, with the lead saying, "Don't talk to me like a child. I played Hamlet at Cambridge." Then "Image is Nothing. Thirst is Everything" flashes on the screen, followed by a voiceover that says, "Trust your gut, not some actor." Sprite continued with the campaign until 2006, and has revived it a few times since.

'Save a Buck or Two'

One of the more '90s developments was the advent of services like 1-800-COLLECT. After AT&T's monopoly on collect calling was broken up in 1993, MCI made a big splash into the collect-calling market by launching 1-800-COLLECT, which would allow users to place collect calls at a cheaper rate than AT&T; of course, the person you were calling was still on the hook for the call. MCI rolled out a huge marketing blitz with commercials featuring celebrities like Phil Hartman, Wayne Knight, Mr. T. and Arsenio Hall, but some of the more memorable ads from 1994 featured SNL star David Spade and the great Larry "Bud" Melman, who rose to fame as a comic foil on David Letterman's late-night shows. Spade was known for his snarky personality and certainly brought that to the fore in the ads, which presented him as an irreverent and sarcastic/annoying Gen Xer (which of course he was). I never used the service and didn't know anyone who did, but the ads were on constantly. Most of the service's users were on pay phones, which were also prominently featured in the ads. But by the early 2000s, the burgeoning popularity of cell phones and declining use of pay phones led to the end of the ads, although the service is still operational, despite the fact that MCI isn't a thing anymore.

'Los Angeles, Start Your VCRs'

Beer commercials have always been a staple of TV advertising, and in the '90s, Bud Light began a regional campaign called Bud Light Spotlight in different markets around the country, focusing on "real" Bud Light drinkers in local bars. I never saw this at the time, but the Los Angeles market got a grunge-themed ad that is so cringeworthy and amazing. It features a long-haired Evan Dando wannabe who's singing "I just want a Bud Light" while one of the women he's with breathily describes how drinking a BL makes her feel good all over. It's something, that's for sure. I'd love to see a follow-up ad in 2025 that catches up with these three, just to see what they look like now. 

Unsung: Map of Your Failure

Unsung is a feature in which I take a look at a pop culture phenomenon (be it music, TV, literary, whatever) that has been forgotten or underappreciated. In this installment, I look at the album Platinum Jive by Detroit sludge-funk act Big Chief.

The late '80s saw a proliferation of funk-rock bands getting various degrees of attention: the Red Hot Chili Peppers, Faith No More, Living Colour and Fishbone were the most notable, but there were others like the Royal Crescent Mob and 24-7 Spyz (whose first singer Peter Forrest, aka P. Fluid, was brutally murdered in New York last week). 

Another act combining heavy guitar rock with funk was Big Chief, which was formed in 1989 by Michigan hardcore punk veterans Barry Henssler on vocals (formerly of the Necros), Mark Dancey (Born Without a Face) and Phil Durr (Dharma Bums, Motorhome) on guitar, Matt O'Brien (McDonalds) on bass and Mike Danner (Laughing Hyenas) on drums. The band was heavily influenced by Funkadelic's early work, as well as '70s funk and Blaxploitation movies. They generated some major label interest before they even released anything but released singles on indie labels before signing with Sub Pop for a Singles Club release. 

Big Chief compiled its early singles on the album Drive It Off, which was released in 1991 on the indie Get Hip. The band's debut album Face was released in Germany in '91 and on Sub Pop in May '92. The band combined Sabbath-esque sludge riffs with funk groove. Although the album didn't catch on with the grunge-splosion that was underway, the band scored an opening slot for the Beastie Boys, who were touring behind Check Your Head, an album that also explored funk and hardcore punk influences. 

For their next album, Big Chief tried to set themselves apart from the grunge hordes by embracing the '70s funk and R&B they loved with a concept album: 1993's Mack Avenue Skullgame was a soundtrack to a fictional blaxploitation flick about a pimp. Released on Sub Pop, the album presented the band as a more than just another guitar band, but it didn't get much attention. Which is too bad, because it was really good.

The band signed a major label deal with Capitol Records and released 1994's Platinum Jive, which was another high-concept effort. Subtitled Greatest Hits 1969-1999, the album was marketed by Capitol as grunge, but it actually explored a number of genres as it tracked "hits" from the various fictional albums made by the band (as well as from solo projects) over a 30-year period, including five years that hadn't happened yet. There's crunching riff rock ("Lion's Mouth," "Armed Love," "Lot Lizard"), hip hop ("Bona Fide," written and rapped by Schooly D), funk-rock raveups ("All Downhill From Here"), flute-driven funk whimsy ("The Liquor Talkin'"), rumbling grunge ("Locked Out"), some out-there instrumentals ("MD 20/20" and "Clown Pimp") and even a nod to '70s loverman R&B ("Simply Barry"). 

The fake liner notes perpetuate the concept, noting that the songs come from albums like 1999's Bright Future Behind You, Titty Twist Whitey (1969), Midwest Rules (1977), We Gotta Impeach Nixon (1973), Groove Factory (1995), Fool's Gold (1972), Inhale to the Chief (1974) and How the West Was Lost (1969), as well as solo albums like Barry Henssler: The Sexual Intellectual (1983).

I had heard of the band in '93 when a co-worker got a cassette for Mack Avenue Skullgame from Sub Pop, where his sister worked. A year later, I saw the video for "Lion's Mouth" on MTV's 120 Minutes and went and bought the Platinum Jive CD, which I enjoyed immensely. However, the general public didn't get the joke and the album quickly came and went. Big Chief supported the album by opening for the Cult.

The band split up in 1996, although it kept publishing a fanzine called Motorbooty, which was launched in 1987 and ran until 1999 and featured illustrations from Mark Dancey. The band backed up Thornetta Davis, who had provided backing vocals on a few of their songs, on her 1996 album Sunday Morning Music. Henssler worked as a DJ in Chicago clubs, and O'Brien and Durr played in other bands. In 2019, Durr died of a heart attack at age 53.

They weren't around for too long, but Big Chief provided some good genre-jumping hot rock in their day.

Day After Day #302: Sleeping Bag

Day After Day is an ambitious attempt to write about a song every day in 2024 (starting on Jan. 4).

Sleeping Bag (1993)

Everybody thinks of grunge bands as coming from Seattle, but there were plenty of bands signed from all over the country at the height of the grunge gold rush. One of them was Paw out of Lawrence, Kansas, who signed a three-album deal with A&M after a bidding war early in the grunge era. 

I first heard of Paw when I won a prize pack from A&M in late '93 and one of the things I received was a VHS tape with videos of A&M acts, including Soundgarden. The Paw video was for "Couldn't Know," a song about a whale. The band rocked and the singer, Mark Hennessy, had a powerful roar of a voice. I picked up the CD of the band's 1993 debut Dragline and listened to it a LOT over the next 18 months.

Paw was formed in 1990 by Hennessy, guitarist Grant Fitch, drummer Peter Fitch and bassist Charles Bryan. The band combined metal power with Southern rock and got some MTV airplay with their three videos, "Jessie," "Couldn't Know" and "Sleeping Bag." Much like labelmates Soundgarden, Paw was straddling the line between metal and alternative. The band toured with Nirvana, the Afghan Whigs, Tool, Smashing Pumpkins, Urge Overkill and Firehose.

"Sleeping Bag" tells the tale of a brother who's looking out for his sibling after an accident.

"I don't want to see your head caved in/I can't stand to see them wheel you in/Why'd you go and do that to your head?/Are you so goddamned miserable/You'd feel better if you were dead?/And then the tears from my eyes/Makes the road all wet and hard/For you to drive me never/Had a chance to see/The car, she's comin' straight at you/Hey, what are you gonna do?"

Hennessy's emotional vocals bring the brotherly concern to the forefront. 

"Someone call a doctor!/Hey, you're dying and you don't know/Hey, you make me hate myself/'Cause you're my only brother/And I can't say, 'I love you'/And this is pretty hard/Aww, you're not around, so I can't hold your hand/So I crawl/I crawl inside your sleeping bag/Oh, and I don't think he's gonna make it, make it home alive/Please, make it home alive."

The album never charted. Paw's next album, Death to Traitors, came out in 1995 and had more an alt-country feel mixed in with the heavier side of their sound, but it fared poorly and Paw was dropped by A&M a year later. In 1998, the Fitch brothers formed the band Palomar and released an album. Paw released an odds-and-sods collection, and then an EP in 2000 before splitting up.

In the years since, the band reunited in 2008 for some shows, but that was it. Grant Fitch has played in the New Franklin Panthers, but more recently has worked as a production manager on TV shows. Hennessy formed Godzillionaire a decade ago. 

Paw was one of many grunge-era bands who never made it, but they had some good songs.

 

 

Day After Day #260: Leash

Day After Day is an ambitious attempt to write about a song every day in 2024 (starting on Jan. 4).

Leash (1993)

Pearl Jam can provoke a lot of different reactions from rock fans, depending on who you talk to. There are indie/alternative fans who never really dug them or got sick of them after they got really big. And then there are those who never wavered in their fervor for the band. I'm closer to the latter, but I wouldn't call myself a fanatic; I've always liked them, but I liked them more in the early days.

Along with Foo Fighters and Green Day, Pearl Jam managed to transcend the "'90s rock" pigeonhole and maintain their popularity after all these years, even if it's not what it once was. For all the TIME magazine covers and "savior of rock" articles that followed them in the early days, PJ never pretended to be more than just a rock band. They didn't pretend to be punk, even though they had punk-inspired songs in their repertoire, and they certainly appreciated their influences like Neil Young and the Who. They caught a lot of heat early on for not being underground or alternative enough, and maybe that's why they stopped doing press for a while.

Formed in 1990, the band was formed by guitarist Stone Gossard and Jeff Ament, who had previously played in Seattle bands Green River (with Mark Arm and Steve Turner, who went on to form Mudhoney) and Mother Love Bone (with the late Andrew Wood). After Wood's death from a heroin overdose, Gossard and Ament teamed with Chris Cornell and Matt Cameron of Soundgarden and Gossard's childhood friend Mike McCready to record a tribute album to Wood. The group was called Temple of the Dog after a line from a Mother Love Bone song. 

At the same time, Gossard, Ament and McCready were starting a new band called Mookie Blaylock (after the basketball player) and had flown in a singer from San Diego named Eddie Vedder to audition. Vedder came to one of the Temple of the Dog rehearsals and contributed backing vocals to a few songs, including "Hunger Strike," which turned into a duet with Cornell. The resulting album came out in April 1991 on A&M and sold a modest 70,000 copies in the U.S., but it didn't chart.

Vedder ended up getting the gig with Mookie Blaylock, which added drummer Dave Krusen, playing their first show in Seattle in October 1990 and later opening some shows for Alice in Chains. They later renamed the band Pearl Jam and went into the studio to record their debut album Ten (which was Blaylock's uniform number). Krusen left the band after the sessions to go into rehab for alcoholism and Matt Chamberlin joined them; he only played a few shows before joining the Saturday Night Live band and was replaced by Dave Abbruzzese. 

The album was released in August 1991, around the same time as Soundgarden's Badmotorfinger, Nirvana's Nevermind and the Red Hot Chili Peppers' Blood Sugar Sex Magik. The other three albums started off strong, but Ten was a slow grower, a classic rock-inspired collection of dark tales. But as Pearl Jam began touring heavily and got more exposure on MTV with the video for "Alive," they started to grow in popularity. Nirvana's "Smells Like Teen Spirit" exploded out of the gate and led to headlines and constant coverage of what the music press started calling grunge music and the "Seattle sound"; soon, Pearl Jam, Soundgarden and Alice in Chains were swept up in the hysteria, even though the four bands didn't sound like each other at all. 

By April 1992, Pearl Jam was still playing small clubs but those dates were selling out. One of them was on April 8 at Axis in Boston, where my brother and I were in attendance. It was packed to the gills and the band put on a typically energetic and fun show. Three nights later, they played Saturday Night Live, where they played "Alive" and "Porch" and a few months later, they were in the middle of the bill on the second Lollapalooza tour and stardom ensued.

The last song of that Axis show was an unreleased track called "Leash," which would turn up on the band's 1993 album Vs. It was a furious ripper of a song that nobody really knew, but it was pretty easy to get behind the message and attitude.

"Troubled souls unite, we got ourselves tonight/I am fuel, you are friends, we got the means to make amends/I am lost, I'm no guide, but I'm by your side/I am right by your side/Young lover I stand/It was their idea, I proved to be a man/Take my fucking hand/It was their idea, I proved to be a man/Will myself to find a home, a home within myself/We will find a way, we will find our place/Drop the leash, drop the leash/Get outta my fuckin' face."

When you're in your 20s, "Drop the leash, get outta my fuckin' face" is a relatable sentiment, and the song was certainly memorable. It was 32 years ago, but I remember that tiny club vibrating as the band pummeled through that song. It almost seemed like a goodbye in some ways, that we'd never see them in a venue that small again. 

It was good to hear the song again on Vs. Reportedly the song was about the same girl who was the subject of the Ten song "Why Go," which Vedder said he wrote about a teenage girl in Chicago whose parents had her institutionalized for two years. 

"Drop the leash, we are young/Drop the leash, we are young/Get outta my fuckin' face/Drop the leash, drop the leash/Get outta my.../Delight, delight, delight in our youth/Get outta my fuckin' face..."

By the time Vs. came out in October 1993, Pearl Jam was huge. They did MTV Unplugged in '92, contributed to the soundtrack of (and appeared in) the Cameron Crowe movie Singles and won MTV Video Music Awards for their controversial video for "Jeremy." After that, the band refused to make videos for a while and consciously tried to scale back their press efforts. All that did was build up demand and Vs. sold over 950,000 copies in its first week. 

I saw them again at the Orpheum in Boston in April 1994. Not long afterward, the band started fighting against Ticketmaster's price gouging and tried to create their own tour of non-TM venues. Gossard and Ament even testified before a Congressional subcommittee investigating Ticketmaster's monopolistic practices. Pearl Jam canceled their 1994 summer tour in protest. They released Vitalogy in late '94 and continued to avoid Ticketmaster venues, which meant they barely played any U.S. dates in 1995-96. Abbruzzese was fired after Vitalogy was recorded over political differences; Jack Irons took his place. They also backed up Neil Young on his 1995 album Mirror Ball.

Pearl Jam released a quieter album, No Code, in 1996 and then a more mainstream rocker, Yield, in 1998. They also finally relented and began playing Ticketmaster venues again on the Yield tour. That year also marked the departure of Irons, who was replaced by Matt Cameron, who was free after Soundgarden broke up a year earlier. 

Since 2000, the band has released seven albums with the same lineup, including this year's Dark Matter. They're not topping the charts anymore, but no rock bands are these days. But they're still filling arenas and baseball stadiums every few years, with a pretty solid body of work for a 34-year-old band. I saw them last in 2006 at the Boston Garden, where they played "Leash" for the first time in 12 years. I had a chance to see them two weekends ago but had to go to a work conference and missed it. They're not the angry young men they once were, but they can still deliver the goods, and that definitely counts for something.

Day After Day #230: X-Static

Day After Day is an ambitious attempt to write about a song every day in 2024 (starting on Jan. 4).

X-Static (1995)

There are people who enjoy being in the spotlight and there are others who would rather avoid it. When Nirvana was on top of the world for that short stretch from 1992-1994, Kurt Cobain alternately hated and loved the attention; at least that's how it seemed from the outside. Of course, he was dealing with a lot of stuff at the time, so when he committed suicide in April '94, it was shocking but it was entirely surprising. 

Meanwhile, Dave Grohl was in the background, a lanky goofball who was more than happy to let Cobain get all the attention while he pounded the shit out of the drums. He had previously been the drummer for DC punk act Scream, joining the band when he was 17. Grohl replaced Chad Channing in Nirvana after Scream broke up in 1990 and soon the band recorded their second album, Nevermind, and well, you know what happened after that.

There were hints that Grohl could do more than just be an amazing drummer. In the summer of 1991, he went to WGNS Studios and recorded four songs, playing all the instruments. He combined them with six songs he had recorded in late 1990 and gave them to Jenny Toomey, co-founder of the cassette label Simple Machines. He didn't go by his own name, instead going with the name Late! and the album was called Pocketwatch and released in 1992. The album flew under the radar at first, but as Nevermind blew up, people started to find Pocketwatch. 

A few of the songs turned up in different versions later. "Color Pictures of a Marigold" was re-recorded with Nirvana bandmate Krist Novoselic and released as "Marigold" on the B-side of Nirvana's "Heart-Shaped Box" single. The song "Winnebago" showed up as a re-recorded B-side during the first Foo Fighters release. And "Friend of a Friend" was re-recorded for the Foo album In Your Honor in 2005. I acquired a bootleg CD of the Pocketwatch album around 1999 and quite enjoy it. It's raw and tuneful; you can hear echoes of Nirvana but also the roots of what would emerge in a few years.

After Cobain's suicide, Grohl wasn't sure what he wanted to do next. The first performance he did was playing with the Backbeat Band at the MTV Video Music Awards in June 1994. Backbeat was a 1994 movie about the early days of the Beatles in Germany and the soundtrack was recorded in March 1993, featuring an indie rock all-star cast including Grohl, Dave Pirner of Soul Asylum, Greg Dulli of the Afghan Whigs, Thurston Moore of Sonic Youth, Don Fleming of Gumball and Mike Mills of R.E.M. They played some of the covers the Beatles played in the Hamburg clubs such as "Money," "Long Tall Sally" and then added on "Helter Skelter" at the end of the show.  

Not long afterward, punk legend Mike Watt invited Grohl to play drums on Watt's album Ball-Hog or Tugboat?, which featured another collection of indie icons including Moore, Pirner, Henry Rollins, Evan Dando and Frank Black. Grohl enjoyed playing on the album and decided to work on his own project with producer Barrett Jones, who worked on Pocketwatch. He booked six days at a studio in Seattle, singing all the vocals and playing all the instruments. The only outside musician on the album was Dulli, who was in the studio watching the recording when Grohl asked him to play on the song "X-Static."

Grohl was invited to play drums with Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers on Saturday Night Live in November 1994; he turned down an invite to become the band's permanent drummer. He was reportedly considered as a possible replacement for Dave Abbruzzese in Pearl Jam and played on a few songs with them in Australia in early 1995, but the band decided to go with Jack Irons and Grohl decided to focus on his solo career.

Grohl originally planned to remain anonymous and release the album under the name Foo Fighters to give the impression it was a full band, much like Stewart Copeland did with his Klark Kent project years earlier. Grohl planned to keep it a low-key release, pressing 100 LPs and 100 cassette tapes of the session; he handed the tapes out to friends for feedback. Eddie Vedder played two songs from the tape in January 1995 on the Pearl Jam Self-Pollution Radio broadcast. Eventually, the tapes circulated through the music industry and labels grew interested, with Capitol Records signing a deal with Grohl.

Nine of the songs on the album were written before or during Grohl's time in Nirvana, recorded on home demos. The songs written after Cobain's death were "This is a Call," "I'll Stick Around," "X-Static" and "Wattershed." There was plenty of the loud-soft-loud dynamics popularized by the Pixies and Nirvana, a bunch of punk-pop rippers that ranged from hardcore punk to sweet pop confections. 

For the full band, Grohl recruited bassist Nate Mendel and drummer WiIliam Goldsmith of Sunny Day Real Estate (which had recently split up) and former Nirvana touring guitarist Pat Smear. In the spring of 1995, the Foo Fighters went on their first tour opening for Mike Watt and also (except for Mendel and along with Eddie Vedder, whose band Hovercraft was the first opening act) serving as Watt's backing band. I was lucky enough to catch this tour in Boston in late April at the old Avalon club on Landsdowne Street; promoters were asked not to use Grohl or Vedder's names to promote the show, but word had gotten out anyway. The Foo Fighters played songs from their forthcoming album, which none of us had heard anything from yet, and we were blown away. The album came out in July and the Foos returned to Avalon as headliners in August, a show that I also saw.

The first single was "This is a Call" and it was an immediate hit. There was a hunger for anything Nirvana-adjacent and the first Foos album certainly fell into that category, but there was also a strong pop sensibility that helped it stand on its own. The album spawned a few more rock radio and video hits in "I'll Stick Around" and "Big Me." Some critics complained that it was too unpolished, but I liked the raw power of it. People read a lot into the lyrics, even though many of them were written years earlier or off the cuff.

"X-Static" is a quieter song, with droning guitars and Grohl's rhythmic pounding drums, picking up in intensity even as it maintains a steady chug. 

"Leading everything along/Never far from being wrong/Nevermind these things at all/It's nothing/Couldn't find a way to you/Seems that's all I ever do/Turning up in black and blue/Rewarded/All the static that we are left."

Grohl has said he didn't put a lot of thought into the lyrics on this album, but later would find meaning in them.

"Take it back for them to keep/Fallen into something deep/Not that I had made that leap/Anointed/All the static we are left/Where have all the wishes gone/Now that all of that is done/Wish I would've felt I've won/For once."

When the band played it live, which wasn't often after that first tour, they would play it even quieter and slowed down.

The Foos toured into the spring of 1996 and then went back into the studio with producer Gil Norton (Pixies) to work on the second album. After the band laid down rough mixes, Grohl took them to Los Angeles to finish his vocals and guitar parts; while there, he replaced most of Goldsmith's drum tracks with his own, angering Goldsmith, who then left the group. Taylor Hawkins (who was drumming for Alanis Morissette and who I also saw in 1995) joined the Foos in time for the 1997 tour of The Colour and the Shape. The album was an even bigger hit, with "Monkey Wrench," "Everlong" and "My Hero" becoming radio staples. I saw the band twice on this tour, in Boston and Portland, mainly because Rocket from the Crypt was opening the shows. 

Since 1997, I haven't seen the band again. I've liked a few of the subsequent albums (One by One, Wasting Light), but I've found a lot of their music has become uninteresting to me. Meanwhile, Grohl has become the face of rock music, even as rock music has become an afterthought, dwarfed in popularity by country, pop and hip hop. The Foo Fighters are reliable purveyors of meat-and-potatoes rock, the .38 Special of alt-rock. They play huge venues like ballparks and arenas, sell a decent amount of albums and merch, and you can find Grohl popping up everywhere from the Muppet Show to talk shows to being a talking head in 97% of the music documentaries made since 2000. 

I don't begrudge the guy his success. He seems like a nice guy (but don't tell that to William Goldsmith) and I appreciate his work ethic, but I'm just not interested in his music anymore. But throw on those first two Foo albums or the other two I mentioned and I can dig it; it's just that a lot of their recent music has become very generic. It's okay, I've got plenty of other stuff to check out.

Day After Day #211: Dollar Bill

Day After Day is an ambitious attempt to write about a song every day in 2024 (starting on Jan. 4). 

Dollar Bill (1991)

When it comes to the bands of the Seattle scene of the early '90s, the Screaming Trees were always underrated. Nirvana, Pearl Jam, Soundgarden and Alice in Chains got all the press, Mudhoney had the street cred, but the Trees were definitely under the radar.

Formed in 1987 in Ellensburg, WA, by Mark Lanegan (vocals), brothers Van (bass) and Gary Lee Conner (guitar) and Mark Pickerel (drums), the band initially had a psychedelic rock sound but gradually evolved into a '70s hard rock act. The x-factor was Lanegan, who brought a world-weary vibe to the band's muscular sound. After releasing their debut album on Velvetone Records, the Trees signed to SST for their next three, gradually building up a following. They signed with major label Epic in 1990, releasing Uncle Anesthesia in 1991. 

Barrett Martin replaced Pickerel on drums before the recording of 1992's Sweet Oblivion. When the movie Singles came out in the fall of '92, the soundtrack included "Nearly Lost You" by the Trees. The soundtrack was actually released three months in advance of the movie and was a huge hit, thanks to the success of the Seattle scene and the fact that a bunch of those bands (Soundgarden, AIC, Pearl Jam) were on the soundtrack. "Nearly Lost You" was a big rock radio and MTV hit, but the soundtrack got all the sales related to that; when Sweet Oblivion came out in September, it sold 300,000 copies, but didn't become the success that the other Seattle acts enjoyed.

"Nearly Lost You" got all the attention, but there were plenty of other great songs on the album. "Dollar Bill" features Lanegan at his raggedy best.

"Torn like an old dollar bill/Girl let them say what they will/That no one should hurt you/And that's all I seem to do/That no one should desert you/And that's all I seem to do/I got to tell you, goodbye mama/We've taken this too far/Been trying to tell you what's going on/Trying to make it easy on you/Trying to make it better/Make it easier on you/It's all I came to do/It's all I came to do."

This didn't come as a surprise to anyone who followed Lanegan's solo career, which began in 1990 with the release of The Winding Sheet on Sub Pop. The album is known for having guests like Kurt Cobain and Krist Novoselic, but it's Lanegan's gravelly vocals that really stand out. It's stripped-down blues and was an inspiration for Nirvana's Unplugged show.

"Now I'm down in the light/And I must be dreaming it/'Cause I see clearly, I see angels here/Bringing something to me, Mother Mercy/I told a lie, I didn't mean it/Goodbye mama, I've taken this too far/Been gone a while/Been gone a long way, oh yeah."

"Dollar Bill" hit #28 on the Billboard Alternative Airplay chart and #40 on the Mainstream Rock chart, while getting up to #52 on the U.K. Singles Chart. 

I saw the Trees in November 1992 at the late lamented Channel club in Boston, opening a show for Alice in Chains before AIC really blew up. Lanegan stood statue-still on stage, gripping the mic stand while the Conner brothers, who are both large men, jumped and rolled around behind him. 

The Trees didn't release another album until 1996's Dust, with delays caused by Lanegan's drug problem and tensions between band members (namely between Lanegan and the Conner brothers). Dust was another solid album, but it didn't match the success of Sweet Oblivion. After touring (with Josh Homme of Kyuss as an extra guitarist), the Trees tried to get back in the studio but was unable to finish an album and split up in 2000. The results of their aborted sessions were released in 2011 as Last Words: The Final Recordings.

Lanegan continued with his solo career, releasing another 11 excellent solo albums and playing key roles in Queens of the Stone Age, the Twilight Singers and the Gutter Twins (the latter two with Greg Dulli). He also collaborated with many artists, including Isobel Campbell, Unkle, Duke Garwood and Slash. He was able to kick his drug habit, which he wrote about in harrowing detail in his autobiography Sing Backwards and Weep. He survived a near-death scare after catching COVID-19 but died in 2022 at the age of 57. No cause of death was released.

Van Conner died in 2023 at age 55. The official cause was pneumonia, but he had fallen into a coma after stomach surgery and then contracted COVID.

The Screaming Trees never really got their due, but dammit, they should have.

Day After Day #183: 4th of July

Day After Day is an ambitious attempt to write about a song every day in 2024 (starting on Jan. 4).

4th of July (1994)

My first memory of a July 4th celebration was in 1976. I was 9 years old and we were on vacation in Florida, so it was the first time I'd ever been in the U.S. on the 4th. It also happened to be the Bicentennial, so things were extra amped up. I remember we had sparklers and there were big fireworks displays. But then a few days later, we were back home in Canada and I didn't think about it much. Of course, as it turned out we ended up moving to the U.S. at the end of '81 and have been here ever since. 

I've never been a particularly jingoistic person, but I can appreciate the value of independence. That said, my favorite songs related to July 4 are never the typical ones. I have a few that I always tend to listen to, but Soundgarden's "4th of July" is my favorite, probably because it's not really about the holiday at all.

Soundgarden got their start in the early '80s around Seattle with a band called the Shemps that included bassist Hiro Yamamoto and drummer and singer Chris Cornell; after Yamamoto left, the band added guitarist Kim Thayil to replace him. After the Shemps split up, Cornell and Yamamoto started jamming together and were joined by Thayil, and the trio formed Soundgarden in 1984. Scott Sundquist took over on drums in 1985 so Cornell could focus on vocals. The group's first three recorded songs appeared on historic 1986 comp Deep Six on C/Z Records; it also featured songs from Green River, Skin Yard, Malfunkshun, the U-Men and the Melvins. Eventually Sundquist left the group and was replaced by Matt Cameron.

After releasing the Screaming Life and Fopp EPs on Sub Pop in 1987 and 1988, Soundgarden signed with SST and released their debut Ultramega OK in 1988. The band's sound was very heavy, balancing proto-punk influences like the MC5 and Stooges with hard rock touchstones like Black Sabbath and Led Zeppelin. The band then signed with A&M and made Louder Than Love, a heavy album that both embraced and lampooned the metal scene. Right before the tour began, Yamamoto quit the band and was replaced by Jason Everman, who had briefly been the second guitarist in Nirvana.

Everman was fired after the tour and replaced by Ben Shepherd, who joined in time for the recording of the band's epic 1991 release Badmotorfinger. Cornell's careening vocals made songs like "Outshined," "Rusty Cage" and "Jesus Christ Pose" even more powerful. The album came out at the same time as Nevermind and Ten, but eventually audiences caught up with it. Soundgarden toured heavily for the album, opening for Guns N' Roses and Skid Row and then joining the 1992 Lollapalooza tour.

But the biggest album for Soundgarden was 1994's Superunknown, which debuted at #1 on the Billboard 200 and spawning the hits "Spoonman," "Black Hole Sun," "The Day I Tried to Live" and "Fell on Black Days." I quickly tired of the songs that got the most airplay like "Black Hole Sun" and "Spoonman," but the deep cuts on this album were my favorites. 

One of those was "4th of July," which starts with a slow, grinding guitar intro before Cornell sings quietly about an apocalyptic vision.

"Shower in the dark day, clean sparks diving down/Cool in the waterway where the baptized drown/Naked in the cold sun, breathing life like fire/I thought I was the only one, but that was just a lie/'Cause I heard it in the wind/And I saw it in the sky/I thought it was the end/I thought it was the 4th of July." 

The song picks up steam as the vision continues, with Thayil's sludgy guitar leading the way.

"Pale in the flare light, the scared light cracks and disappears/And leads the scorched ones here/And everywhere no one cares, the fire is spreading/And no one wants to speak about it/Down in the hole/Jesus tries to crack a smile/Beneath another shovel load."

Cornell told RIP magazine in 1994 that he wrote the song about an acid trip he had. "One time I was on acid, and there were voices 10 feet behind my head. The whole time I'd be walking, they'd be talking behind me. It actually made me feel good, because I felt like I was with some people...It was kinda like a dream, though, where I'd wake up and focus once in a while and realize there was no one there. I'd go, 'Oh fuck, I'm hearing voices.' '4th of July' is pretty much about that day. You wouldn't get that if you read it. It doesn't read like, 'Woke up, dropped some acid, got into a car and went to the Indian reservation.'"

Soundgarden released one more album, 1996's underrated Down on the Upside, before splitting up in 1997; the band later blamed tension among the group members and burnout from the music business as reasons for the breakup. In the years afterward, Cornell released solo albums and formed Audioslave with three-fourths of Rage Against the Machine. Cameron joined Pearl Jam in 1998 and remains in the band. Thayil and Shepherd both worked on various projects. 

The members of Soundgarden got back together in 2010, headlining Lollapalooza and then releasing a new compilation album. In 2012, they released a new studio album, King Animal. They had begun work on a new album in 2016, but the following May, Cornell was found dead after a show in Detroit. That was the end of Soundgarden.

I caught them on the Badmotorfinger tour at Avalon in Boston in early 1992, then at Lollapalooza that summer in Mansfield and one more time at Fitchburg State College in the summer of '94. The band was pretty impressive, to say the least. It's too bad Cornell isn't still around to enjoy the legacy he helped build.

Soundgarden's "4th of July" isn't your typical flag-waving anthem, which is perfectly fine by me. I'm a big fan of sludgy dirges about acid trips.

Day After Day #149: Aneurysm

Day After Day is an ambitious attempt to write about a song every day in 2024 (starting on Jan. 4). 

Aneurysm (1991)

They weren't around for very long for obvious reasons, but Nirvana got a lot done. Kurt Cobain and company didn't do anything that hadn't been done before, but they did it well and did it at the right time to make the most impact. Unless you were paying close attention to the Seattle music scene in 1988-1990, you probably didn't know much about Nirvana.

But after their second album Nevermind came out in September 1991, everybody knew who Nirvana was. The first single "Smells Like Teen Spirit" and its iconic video hit home for an entire generation of Gen X kids who had grown tired of the classic rock and hair metal that was all over radio and MTV. The album blew up, putting Cobain, bassist Krist Novoselic and drummer Dave Grohl on the cover of every music magazine.

One of the B-sides for the "Smells Like Teen Spirit" single was "Aneurysm," which was recorded at the band's first session with Grohl on New Year's Day 1991. The song was written by Cobain after he split with his girlfriend Tobi Vail; biographer Charles Cross wrote that the song was an attempt to win Vail back.

"Come on over and do the twist/Overdo it and have a fit/Love you so much, it makes me sick/Come on over and do the twist/Beat me out of me/Beat me out of me/Beat me out of me/Beat me out of me."

"Aneurysm" follows the loud/quiet/loud pattern that the band loved, alternating between heavy riffing and quieter sections. 

Lyrically, the song isn't very complex, but there's a lot going on musically. Cobain's delivery of the line "Love you so much, it makes me sick" makes it sound like he's in physical pain as he squeezes out the syllables. The end of that relationship has him singing in the refrain as the song careens to its conclusion: "She keeps it pumping straight to my heart."

The song didn't get a lot of attention when it first came out, but it was included on the B-sides collection Incesticide in 1992, when the band was everywhere and DJs and fans were looking for more Nirvana content. This was when I discovered the song, which instantly became one of my favorites by the band.

A live version of "Aneurysm" was released as a single when the live album From the Muddy Banks of the Wishkah came out in October 1996.

Of course, by this time, Cobain had been dead for 18 months and the band was no longer a functioning entity (but very much was still releasing content). 

In the 30 years since Cobain's passing, Nirvana has become a classic rock act and its songs are played repeatedly on rock radio stations. There are several songs that I never need to hear again, including "Teen Spirit." But I never get sick of hearing "Aneurysm," which is one of the greatest songs to emerge from the grunge era.

Day After Day #70: Drown

Day After Day is an ambitious attempt to write about a song every day in 2024 (starting on Jan. 4).

Drown (1992)

Let's face it, soundtrack albums are usually a mixed bag. One or two good songs, a couple of songs you've heard before and then a bunch of filler. This was especially the case in the 1980s, when artists discovered they could make a lot of money doing songs for movie soundtracks; a video of the song would feature clips from the movie interspersed with the musical performance. It was pretty lucrative for the likes of Phil Collins, Bryan Adams, Sting and the like. 

Soundtracks got a little better in the '90s because directors had more of a say in what went on them. Quentin Tarantino created eclectic soundtrack albums for Reservoir Dogs and Pulp Fiction that featured older AM radio hits from a wide range of artists. Then there was the Singles soundtrack, which benefited from having new music from artists who were blowing up at the exact same time. 

Singles was a Cameron Crowe-directed rom-com looking at the romantic lives of a group of Gen X young adults in Seattle, with the burgeoning grunge scene happening around them. It's nothing overly special, but it's charming and I like it more than Reality Bites, a 1994 movie directed by Ben Stiller that has its moments but tries a little too hard to be hip. People bag on Crowe for jumping on the Seattle bandwagon, but he was living there at the time (he was married at the time to Heart guitarist Nancy Wilson) and his previous film, 1989's excellent Say Anything, was set there. Filming of Singles took place between March and May 1991, several months before grunge really exploded, but bands like Soundgarden and Alice in Chains were definitely happening, and three-fifths of what became Pearl Jam were featured as Matt Dillon's character's backing band (Nirvana declined to be included, possibly because they were working on Nevermind at the time and possibly because they didn't give a shit.). 

The soundtrack was released in June 1992, nearly three months before the movie finally came out (it made a modest $18 million and had mostly good reviews). By this time, grunge mania was running wild and Nirvana, Pearl Jam and Soundgarden were enjoying newfound success. The soundtrack featured new songs from Seattle stalwarts Alice in Chains, Pearl Jam, Soundgarden (in addition to a Chris Cornell solo song), Mudhoney and Screaming Trees, as well as the first post-Replacement songs from Paul Westerberg, a Zeppelin cover from the Lovemongers (aka Ann and Nancy Wilson of Heart) and older songs from Mother Love Bone and Jimi Hendrix. 

It also featured an 8:17 slow-building ripper from Smashing Pumpkins, a Chicago band that was coming off its outstanding 1991 debut album Gish. The Pumpkins were lumped in with the grunge bands, although they blended a lot of different styles including hard rock, psychedelia, shoegaze and prog under the mad hatter auspices of singer-guitarist Billy Corgan. Gish wasn't a big success, peaking at #195 on the Billboard 200, but it was produced by Corgan and Butch Vig (who went on to produce Nevermind). The band signed with Virgin Records not long after Gish came out.

"Drown" was recorded after Gish was released and made its live debut on that tour. Unlike some of the other songs that became popular off the Singles soundtrack, it starts quietly as Corgan laments a lost love.

"No matter where you are/I can still hear you when you drown/You've traveled very far/Just to see you I'll come around/When I'm down/All of those yesterdays/Coming down."

The song remains calm until the bridge, when the big guitars kick in, and then gets quiet again before it ramps up to the final verse: "I wish, I wish I could fly/I wish, I wish I could lie/I will, I will try/I will, I will/Goodbye." That's where the single version of the song ends, the full version then continues for the next four minutes with trippy yet tuneful guitar feedback. It's truly majestic.

Corgan has been quoted as saying he wanted "Drown" to be released as the second single off the soundtrack, but the label (Epic) opted to release the Alice in Chains and Screaming Trees songs, both of which became radio staples. Eventually, a promotional single was released to radio only and "Drown" became fairly popular, albeit only the first four minutes. 

I wasn't familiar with the Pumpkins at the time and thought this was what they sounded like on all their songs, and I was there for it. Sadly, that wasn't true, but I picked up their next album, Siamese Dream, when it came out in '93 and later got Gish, which I really love. Siamese Dream was a huge hit, selling 4 million copies in the U.S., although Corgan and the Pumpkins caught flak from indie rockers like Pavement and Bob Mould. They forged on and had another monster hit in 1995-96 with the double album Mellon Collie and the Infinite Sadness. Things were up and down for them after that, as they switched to a more electronic sound and look and struggled with substance abuse issues and lineup changes. Corgan split up the band in 2000, only to reform it in 2005. The band has released several albums since then and continues to record and tour.

I've never seen the Pumpkins in concert, although my brother and I had tickets to see them at Avalon in Boston in 1993 on Siamese Dream tour. Two hours before the show, the band canceled, citing illness; the rescheduled date was at the Orpheum, a bigger venue that I didn't feel like dealing with so I got a refund. My interest in Smashing Pumpkins waned in the late '90s, especially as Corgan got weirder and weirder, but I still enjoy the early stuff. There's a lot of strong songs in the early catalog, and that "Drown" might be the best of them all.

Day After Day #16: Touch Me I'm Sick

Day After Day is an ambitious attempt to write about a song every day in 2024 (starting on Jan. 4).

Touch Me I'm Sick

A lot was happening in the summer of 1988. Medical waste was washing up on beaches in the greater New York area, Michael Dukakis was nominated as the Democratic presidential candidate, Wrigley Field had its first night game and Wayne Gretzky was traded to the LA Kings. 

I spent the summer as a reporting intern at the Peabody Times, a small daily newspaper in Massachusetts. I was commuting from Kingston, NH, to Peabody, which was about 45 minutes each way, and getting great experience as I worked in what I expected would be my career for life. The Times had three full-time reporters in addition to me, so I was doing a lot of puff pieces and stuff like that but I didn't care. I was having a blast. But by early August, one of the reporters took another job and suddenly I had to the opportunity to cover some more interesting stories. I went back for my senior year at UNH in the fall, but I impressed the higher-ups enough that they offered me a job before I even graduated. 

Album sales that summer were dominated by the likes of Van Halen, Def Leppard and Guns N' Roses, while the singles chart was topped by Steve Winwood, Cheap Trick, Debbie Gibson and Michael Jackson, among others. Meanwhile, on the West Coast, a scruffy group of outcasts called Mudhoney released its first single, "Touch Me I'm Sick" on the Sub Pop label on Aug. 1. 

A full three years before grunge mania captured the music industry's attention, Mudhoney was delivering the template: yowling vocals, guitars drenched in fuzz and distortion, pummeling bass and rapid-fire drumming singing about disease and sex for two and a half minutes. The band has cited the Stooges and the Yardbirds as direct influences on the song, which launches into a razor-wire riff and doesn't let up. The cover of the single was a toilet bowl. The band had originally planned to make "Sweet Young Thing Ain't Sweet No More" the A side and "Touch Me I'm Sick" the B side, but wisely reversed it.

It wasn't long before college radio picked it up and the song became an underground hit. Sub Pop sold out of its initial pressings of the single and the band later included it on the Superfuzz Bigmuff EP. Sonic Youth and Mudhoney ended up releasing a split single where SY covered "Touch Me I'm Sick" with Kim Gordon on vocals and Mudhoney covered SY's "Halloween." Mudhoney soon became the premier act on Sub Pop. Soundgarden had been on the label but left for SST in '88.

Mudhoney's members weren't new to the Seattle scene. Arm and guitarist Steve Turner were previously in Mr. Epp and the Calculations and Green River (with future Pearl Jammers Stone Gossard and Jeff Ament). They teamed up with bassist Matt Lukin, who was previously in the Melvins.

The band released a self-titled album in '89 and Every Good Boy Deserves Fudge in '91 before signing with Reprise in '92. By this point, pretty much every band in the greater Seattle area and beyond was getting signed to a major. I first saw them play at the Paradise in Boston in 1992 with my brother, and again the following year at Avalon on the Piece of Cake tour (and several more times over the years). While Nirvana, Pearl Jam and Soundgarden were blowing up, Mudhoney was sort off to the side watching the frenzy and laughing. They didn't appear in Cameron Crowe's Seattle-set movie Singles, but they contributed the excellent "Overblown" to the soundtrack, making fun of the whole scene. And even though they poked fun at Chris Cornell being "shirtless and flexing," the band was friendly with him and pretty much everybody else. They opened for Nirvana and Pearl Jam, they appeared as themselves in the Chris Farley movie Black Sheep and they just kept playing the messy fuzz-rock they always had.

As grunge petered out in the late '90s, Mudhoney was dumped by Reprise. Lukin left the band and they added Guy Maddison to replace him. The band has sporadically released albums on Sub Pop over the last 20 years, including last year's solid Plastic Eternity, and have toured behind them. Arm is the manager of the Sub Pop warehouse now.

It's been 35+ years, but Mudhoney's still playing loud, messy and fun music. They've outlasted many of their contemporaries and they still sound great. And their best song is still "Touch Me I'm Sick." 

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"