Acoustica

On the way back from Fort Lee, I stopped by the Park City Mall in Lancaster, Pennsylvania and picked up Grateful Dead’s Reckoning album, the acoustic live album paired up with Dead Set – which I’d bought a few years ago mainly because it has “Brokedown Palace”, a great tune from American Beauty. 

This was my second attempt to listen to this album, the first was in high school in Paris in the early 1980s.  At that time I plunked down the vinyl, preparing to hear some totally bad-ass music.   I mean, with a name like Grateful Dead and a skull and crossbones on the cover, and an album called Reckoning, we’re talking melting your face off like “Raiders of the Lost Ark”, right?

WRONG.   I couldn’t even get through “Dire Wolf”, the first song, before I took it off in disgust.  What the hell is this???   I gave the album to my buddy Sean C, and that was it for the Dead for a long, long time.   It wasn’t until Anthem of the Sun, which sounds Duane Allmann-y, that I could finally digest the acid country of the Dead.   This must have been in the early 00’s.   Yet I even saw GD w/Jerry Garcia in 1992 and 1995, so go figure.

This time around?  Well, I survived all the way to the last track, “Ripple” (also from American Beauty), though the “Bird Song” on here is underwhelming compared to the Fillmore East show in 1971 with the Beach Boys.  “Dire Wolf” is still not my favorite: “please….don’t murder me!”  Hardly a good theme song for the Stark family. 

As of right now, I have several electric guitars and no acoustics, not even a 12 string.  I really don’t like playing acoustic guitars.  A bulky body and super high action?  No thanks.  I can select clean channel on the Marshall and the neck pickup on an electric, turn on the chorus pedal, and that’s the sound I need.  Authentic?  Maybe not.  But it’s right.  And face-melting distortion is a footswitch away.  Acoustic guitars became mostly obsolete when Fender brought out the Broadcaster/No-Caster/Telecaster in 1948. 

I really do not like acoustic sets.  Let me articulate further with some examples.

Scorpions.  They did an acoustic album, Acoustica, AND an unplugged show in Athens, Greece fairly recently for MTV.   No sign of Michael or Uli, but Rudy pulled out his acoustic Flying V.  The highlight was “Born To Touch Your Feelings”, from Taken By Force.  Boring? No.  Tolerable?  Sure.  Exciting – and as good as the Wacken show with Uli Roth?  No way in Hell. 

Tesla.  Their Five Man Acoustical Jam (1990) started this nonsense way back when.  A few songs, like “Signs” and “Truckin” were OK, but mostly they butchered their awesome electric songs by making them acoustic.  Which is even more baffling because they’re named after Mr. Electric himself, Nikola Tesla.  Brian Wheat claims they resisted the idea, but apparently someone prevailed.  Fortunately they’ve been 100% electric since then, so Tesla himself can stop spinning in his grave, providing alternating current somehow.

Led Zeppelin III.  Tolerable.  The songs are… OK.  My favorite on here is “Since I’ve Been Loving You” – electric – and of the other two electrics, “Out on the Tiles” sucks a whole herd of donkeys, whereas “Immigrant Song” is …OK.  I like the Viking theme.  Granted, Page’s acoustic stuff is what makes Zeppelin so well-rounded, but I can take it in small doses only: the intro to “Stairway”, “Ten Years Gone”, etc., not a barrage of folk songs like III.

Alice In Chains.  Jerry Cantrell has some rare skill:  he can write original acoustic stuff that doesn’t suck.  SAP and Jar of Flies are both albums (EPs, sorry) which I listen to as often as any of their electric stuff.

Ultimately I find acoustic guitars boring and pretentious.   Remember that scene in the movie “Animal House”, where the guy on stairs sings, “I gave my love a cherry, that had…no…pit…” and Bluto (Belushi) comes by and smashes his guitar?  To me anyone with an acoustic guitar is “that guy”, and my inclination is the same as Bluto’s.  Don’t be “that guy”.

Grunge Revisited

Alice In Chains’ debut album Facelift came out in 1990; Soundgarden’s Badmotorfinger, Pearl Jam’s Ten, and Nirvana’s Nevermind all came out in 1991.  So it’s been over 20 years since grunge hit the US.  How are things today?

 Well, first off, I should backtrack and talk about two other bands.  The first is Mother Love Bone, the second is Temple of the Dog.

 My knowledge and understanding of grunge music was immensely improved by watching “Twenty”, which is Pearl Jam’s recent documentary (now that they’ve been around for 20 years).  If grunge music has a Syd Barrett, a whimsical, charismatic, inspired singer whose life was cut short by drugs, it’s Andrew Wood, the singer for Mother Love Bone.  Their only album, Apple, was released shortly after his death from a heroin overdose in 1990.  Chris Cornell talked about his death, saying that grunge’s “loss of innocence” wasn’t Kurt Cobain’s suicide in 1994, it was Andrew Wood’s death in 1990.  After Woods died, the band broke up, but Stone Gossard and Jeff Ament recruited a surfer from California (Eddie Vedder) to form a new band….Pearl Jam.   Now that I’ve listened to Apple, I can say that it’s (A) decent music worth listening to in its own right, and (B) not similar enough to Pearl Jam that anyone should listen to it expecting to hear an early version of that band.  

 Shortly after Wood died, Chris Cornell put together a band to make a tribute album to Wood called Temple of the Dog.  They released one album.  I recall “Hunger Strike” playing nonstop on the radio, the video – featuring Eddie Vedder (the only song he’s on) – also playing incessantly.  The rest of the album is sung by Cornell and has a slight funk-soul groove to it (very Glenn Hughes), similar to Mother Love Bone and aside from Cornell’s distinctive vocals, not very similar to Soundgarden.

 Pearl Jam.  Of the big 4, only this band has remained together continuously.  Singer Eddie Vedder neither overdosed on heroin (Layne Staley), shot himself (Kurt Cobain), nor did he disband the group (Chris Cornell). 

For some reason, PJ never really did it for me.  I have Ten, which I purchased long ago (probably a free CD from Columbia House) and Live on Ten Legs, their most recent live album.  Classic Rock magazine reviewed a recent show and proclaimed Pearl Jam the successor to the Grateful Dead as America’s premier jam band.  ???  No way, no how, nowhere close.  Phish are clearly that band.  About the only similarity between Pearl Jam and the Dead is that PJ share the Dead’s policy of playing a different set each night.  But Pearl Jam do not actually JAM (!!!).  The live versions of songs are only slightly longer than the studio versions, and they do not go off into 10-15 minute improvisations.  They are NOT a jam band.  I like a few songs (“Alive”, “Evenflow” and “Black”, all from Ten) but this band is just too boring for my liking.   Hardly surprisingly, I have never seen them live, and Live on Ten Legs has not convinced me to see them now.

 Nirvana.  Only recently did I finally get, and listen to, Nevermind.  I was never a Nirvana fan and never saw them in concert.  Now having listened to all of Nevermind – the Deluxe edition with b-sides and unreleased material – I can say I’m still not a Nirvana fan.  Whereas Soundgarden and Alice in Chains – the two grunge bands I really do like – seem to take Black Sabbath as a foundation, Nirvana are more punk oriented and appear to take the Ramones as their basis.  The “deep cuts” from Nevermind, the non-single tracks, might as well be Green Day songs.  As far as I’m concerned, “Smells Like the Teen Spirit” has to remain Nirvana’s defining song, just as “Smoke on the Water” is for Deep Purple and “Stairway to Heaven” is for Led Zeppelin.  Whoever picked the singles from that album had a good ear, as they are all much better than the “deep cuts”.  My favorite is “In Bloom”, and among the non-singles, “Curmudgeon” has a nice Hawkwind (!) feel to it, and “Something in the Way” buried itself in my head and wouldn’t leave. 

            With Kurt Cobain’s suicide in April 1994, Nirvana went out of business.  Dave Grohl has kept the Foo Fighters going since then.  Heresy it may be, but I prefer to Foo Fighters to Nirvana – but not enough to see them in concert either.

 Soundgarden have reunited, and have a new album coming out in November, King Animal.  I missed the reunion tour, but did see them back in 1994 on the Superunknown tour.   Oddly, this band formed way back in 1984, and released their first album, Ultramega OK, in 1988 – two years before Apple.   I prefer the second album, Louder Than Love, to Badmotorfinger (album #3) which was the “breakout” album when grunge came to national attention. Arguably, Superunknown is their best album, which I won’t dispute.  The fifth album, Down on the Upside, was inevitably going to disappoint after its predecessor, and they broke up soon thereafter.  Only now have they reunited (not at Cinnabon).   I did not pay any attention to Audioslave, Chris Cornell’s band with Tom Morello of Rage Against The Machine, nor to any of Cornell’s solo material. 

 Alice In Chains are also back together, with a new singer, William DuVall, who looks nothing at all like Layne Staley, but sounds exactly like him.  I recently saw them on their Black Gives Way to Blue tour (with the Deftones and Mastodon opening) – I got up way up front near the stage, at the Patriot Center.  On stage, DuVall has a kind of James Brown thing going, but less of a blatant homage or ripoff than Bruno Mars.  Prior to that, the last times I had seen AIC was back in 1991 – both times as an opening act:  Clash of the Titans (Anthrax, Megadeth and Slayer), and Van Halen’s F.U.C.K. tour.  At both of those shows I was way up in the bleachers and could barely see the band.  I mentioned earlier, and I’ll mention again: as far as I’m concerned ALL of AIC’s albums are excellent, as was Staley’s side project band Mad Season.

 Crossover.  The bands have shared some members, e.g. Jason Everman & Matt Cameron.  Both were in Soundgarden AND Pearl Jam.  Everman was also in Mind Funk, on their fantastic (!!!) album Dropped.  Mike McCready is in Pearl Jam, and was in both Temple of the Dog and Mad Season.    

Layne Staley, Alice in Chains, and Grunge

I thought about doing this as a homage to Layne Staley and Alice in Chains, then decided to go whole hog, stuff both Doc Martens-clad feet in my mouth, and go all out and make it a pithy review of grunge as a whole.

 The top 4 grunge bands are clearly Alice in Chains, Soundgarden, Nirvana and Pearl Jam. The Stone Temple Pilots and Mind Funk are sometimes classified as grunge (depending on who you talk to), though neither are from Seattle (STP are from San Diego, and Mind Funk were from New Jersey). Of these, only Pearl Jam survived intact. Alice In Chains and Nirvana suffered the loss of their main inspirations, Layne Staley and Kurt Cobain respectively. Soundgarden broke up – Chris Cornell is now in Audioslave with Tom Morello of Rage Against The Machine.

 I’m not from Seattle. I’ve never even been there. I’ve seen "Singles." I won’t claim to have any familiarity with "grunge" prior to 1991, i.e. the whole Sub Pop proto-grunge scene which includes Andrew Wood and Mother Love Bone. I’ll stick to what I know:

 Pearl Jam. I didn’t mind Ten, the first album, but nothing I heard from then on impressed me. Eddie Vedder seems a little too wrapped up in his own angst. Not a bad singer, nor a bad band. Just overrated. I never saw them in concert.

 Nirvana. Crucify me, but I prefer Dave Grohl’s Foo Fighters. The band was wayyyy overrated, even beyond Kurt Cobain. Maybe he did have some serious mental and physical problems. Maybe things weren’t happy with Courtney Hole, I mean Courtney Love. If his life was as boring and pointless as "Gus Van Zant’s Last Days" makes it out to be, perhaps his suicide was a cry for help. Ayn Rand argued that Marilyn Monroe killed herself because she discovered, to her horror, that despite "making it" and reaching the top, she could not escape the SHIT you have to deal with in life and only trade one set of bullshit for another. It strikes me that Cobain came to a similar conclusion; in his case, success couldn’t cure his stomach pain or his heroin addiction. Somehow being at the top and the center of attention was as stressful as being anywhere else.

 I don’t have a problem with Cobain himself – hell, in a Rolling Stone interview he surprised the knee-jerk liberal interviewer by expressing pro-gun political views ("no, you’re a rock star, you’re supposed to adopt the whole liberal viewpoint without thinking differently! Ask Dave Mustaine if you have any doubts!"). Again, my problem was that the band itself was overrated. "Smells Like the Teen Spirit" and Nevermind got far too much coverage and exposure. There was never much point in buying any Nirvana albums or seeing them in concert: you couldn’t turn on the radio or MTV without being buried in them 24/7. They were supposed to open up for Metallica on the Black Album tour (1991) but that turned out to be a rumor.

 I recall when Cobain killed himself: I was going up to New Jersey to visit my friend Ken, who at the time was the lead guitarist for a goth band, Coven of Hate, and the center idol figure for the band and its clique of Montclair State college kids. They were all majorly bummed out. I somehow wasn’t surprised, but nor was I jumping up and down with glee. One of the gang had to open his mouth about "what’s the big deal??" For me, I felt it best to let them wallow in agony. What better source of inspiration for a goth band, than the suicide of their favorite singer? It all fits together – life, even its abrupt and untimely end, works in strange ways.

 Soundgarden. At the time they first came to my attention, Badmotorfinger was the current album. Neither "Outshined" nor "Rusty Cage" impressed me, but I listened to Louder Than Love and got hooked; Ultramega OK was fine, but not as good. Then Superunknown came out, and all hell broke loose. I liked it much better than Badmotorfinger, and apparently everyone else agreed. Phil and I saw this tour at the Bender Arena at American University in 1994. They followed this up with Down on the Upside (doomed to be a letdown after Superunknown) and then broke up. Chris Cornell has one of the best voices in music, let alone grunge. Soundgarden are definitely the heaviest of the four and most reminiscent of Black Sabbath. They even covered "Into the Void" on an "Outshined" EP, albeit with different lyrics. An interviewer once suggested to Kim Thayil, the guitarist, that Soundgarden owes some royalties to Tony Iommi (Black Sabbath guitarist), to which Thayil simply replied, "maybe."

 Alice in Chains. I remember buying the Facelift album back in 1991 or so on the advice of my friend Ken. My buddy Jean and I went to Tower Records at Tysons Corner and bought the album. I loved it immediately. They followed it up with two studio albums, Dirt and Alice in Chains (either green or purple plastic jewel case with the B&W pic of a three-legged, sad-looking dog), two acoustic EPs, SAP and Jar of Flies, a live album Unplugged, and a boxed set.

 Listening to the AIC Unplugged album, I’m amazed at how well they pull it off, even better than the other bands who jumped on the acoustic bandwagon after Tesla (damn them!!!) started this nonsense with their Five Man Acoustical Jam. ("Signs" was fine, but the rest of their songs work better as electric pieces – and wasn’t that the point of a band named after Nikola Tesla?) Usually I can’t stand acoustic crap, but both Sap and Jar of Flies, the two acoustic EPs Alice in Chains put out, are fantastic. Three killer studio electric albums, Facelift, Dirt, and Alice in Chains; and adding in Above, the Mad Season side project album of Layne Staley’s, I’ve come to the conclusion that Staley and AIC have put out NOTHING, absolutely NOTHING of less than stellar quality.

 When Cobain killed himself, it didn’t hit me that much. But when Staley was found dead, on April 19, 2002 – estimated death on April 5, two weeks before (the same date as Cobain’s death, ironically enough) – it hurt me much more. And he died the worst way: alone, body found two weeks later, badly decomposed.

 Looking at his pics, Staley often appeared to be a freak. Even worse, he had that annoying appearance of being freakish for the sake of being so, very much like Perry Farrell (Jane’s Addiction and Porno for Pyros). Arrghh! But somehow Staley pulled it off. His voice was great; the lyrics, even if they were often bizarre, seemed to work (similar to Blue Oyster Cult). I was fortunate enough to see them twice live, both times as opening acts: the Clash of the Titans Show (Anthrax, Megadeth and Slayer) and Van Halen (For Unlawful Carnal Knowledge Tour) in 1991.

 If I had to pick a current successor to the grunge scene, aside from Pearl Jam themselves, I’d pick Queens of the Stone Age. Check them out.