A largely acoustic and piano-based affair, The Winding Sheet is hardly a dictionary-definition grunge album. But on his 1990 solo debut, he looked back far beyond the ’60s and ’70s to forge spiritual communion with pre-rock forms like folk, blues, and murder ballads, which included digging up a certain Lead Belly standard that his friend and backing singer Kurt Cobain would later claim for himself. Sub Pop Mark Lanegan: The Winding Sheet (1990)Īs lead singer for Ellensburg, Washington quartet Screaming Trees, Mark Lanegan had helped formulate grunge’s mix of grubby garage-rock, brown-acid psychedelia, and corrosive melodies. (After all, it’s just a short crowd-surf from the cocksure choogle of “ Holy Roller” to the dam-bursting momentum of “ Even Flow.”) More significantly, the album’s sad epilogue cast a dark cloud over the scene that even its most successful ambassadors would never fully escape. Even as it embodies the very qualities-glamor, world-beating attitude, sexualized swagger-that grunge was supposed to reject, Apple is nonetheless a foundational text for prophesying how the genre’s grimy guitar sound could be reengineered for arena-rattling mass appeal. And who knows: If the psychedelically inclined Wood had survived, it’s entirely possible that Seattle would be better known today for floral patterns and cosmic power ballads than flannel and dropped-D tuning.Īlready a scene star thanks to his tenure in ’80s hard rockers Malfunkshun, Wood was destined to enter his rightful golden-god realm with Mother Love Bone, whose vision of grunge hit the sweet spot between Guns N’ Roses’ underbelly grit and Jane’s Addiction’s boho-Zeppelin ambitions. Soon after, Mother Love Bone guitarist Stone Gossard and bassist Jeff Ament became demo-trading pen-pals with a San Diego gas-station attendant named Eddie Vedder, marking the beginning of Pearl Jam. His passing proved to be a particularly pivotal event in the history of grunge. Mother Love Bone frontman Andrew Wood died of a heroin overdose in March 1990, at age 24, mere days before his band was set to release this debut album. Stardog / Mercury Mother Love Bone: Apple (1990) And just as it served as the battering ram that dismantled the gates separating America’s freak scene from the top of the charts, grunge’s revolution raged in both directions, luring scores of impressionable kids into the nation’s DIY ecosystem, with all those obscure bands that Kurt Cobain name-dropped in interviews serving as wormholes into an outsider musical universe. Certainly, there was a canyon of aesthetic difference between, say, the cheeky garage-punk of Mudhoney and the dramatic, Sabbath-schooled dirges of Alice in Chains, but collectively they represented a united affront to the corporate-rock excesses of the ’80s. However, with the 1991 insurrection of Nirvana’s Nevermind, grunge became the sort of once-in-a-generation phenomenon that permanently altered the sound of rock radio, turned the surplus-store discount rack into catwalk fodder, and inspired hordes of disaffected Gen Xers to grow their hair longer and shower less.Īs with any suddenly hip genre, pretty much everyone slapped with the grunge label rejected it, which paradoxically gave it more power and reach. (Take your pick: boredom, shitty weather, robust local college-radio support, Reagan-era malaise, grim local history, easy access to good coffee, deep-seated aversions to both hair-metal pageantry and hardcore orthodoxy.) Initially, what became known as grunge was a thriving regional scene that rallied around proudly scuzzy trailblazers like Green River, crucial compilations like C/Z Records’ Deep Six, and impoverished but media-savvy labels like Sub Pop. Numerous books, documentaries, and podcasts have been devoted to the subject of how and why grunge came to be.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |