Happy Birthday, Billy Corgan!

Little known fact: long before he was a professional wrestling promoter, Billy Corgan was once in a rock n roll combo named The Smashing Pumpkins. They never had the mega-success of say, a White Town or Baja Men, but they did alright.

WRONG THEY WERE THE GODDAMNED SMASHING PUMPKINS JUST ABOUT THE GREATEST BAND THAT EVER LIVED FOR A FEW ALBUMS.

Now, the Pumpkins live on with a kid for a drummer and none of its original members, save for Billy.

Let's ignore what they are now, and focus on their best song ever, "Cherub Rock"

Happy Birthday, Billy! May today be the greatest day you've ever known.

Whatever.

Sugar Ray Sinks Boat

As great as the 90s were for music, it's only a matter of time before we have to endure a terrible commercial on a Sunday afternoon advertising a watered down and overpriced Time Life compilation featuring nothing but "the best" of 90s alternative. No doubt, a man and woman dressed in some sort of flannel will speak directly to the camera (and you), reminding you of how great things were when you were young, and how easy it will be to feel that way again for 4 easy payments of $19.95 + S&H.

And this compilation will no doubt skip over the Nirvanas, Smashing Pumpkins and Radioheads of the world because their music still sells a good amount and doesn't need the licensing money that Time Life will offer them to put a 2nd or 3rd single on their box set.

Not only will those bands not be featured because they're too expensive, but also because the curators of this collection will try to get songs with the broadest appeal ("One Week" by the Barenaked Ladies will be on this hypothetical CD, I can guaran-damn-tee it), because let's face it - most people don't give a shit about music. Most people aren't interested in what made the Dandy Warhols different than Spacehog, because to most people it's the same shit and I just want to hear it and not think about it.

This is known in television as the "CBS Syndrome."

And it is because of the CBS Syndrome that Sugar Ray, Smash Mouth, the Gin Blossoms, the Spin Doctors and Marcy Playground will all appear on this compilation.

This is what people think of when they think of the 90s. Sugar Fucking Ray.

And because of this homogenization of the era's music, Mark McGrath of Sugar Ray was able to get the aforementioned bands together to tour.

Tour what? Arenas, with comfortable chairs and $10 parking? State fairs? Theme parks.

Nope. They're (going) on a boat.

To be precise, WERE going on a boat. Because as of 2 days ago, this Tragical History Tour was canceled.

Citing Carnival Cruise's Triumph disaster, in which an engine room fire let to looting and hall-pooping within presumably minutes, the planned cruise from Miami to the Bahamas has been canceled, leaving at least dozens of thirty-somethings desperate to get away from their kids (and relive the part of their lives that wasn't centered on a co-dependent 2'4" vomit machine) with nothing to do for 4 days and 5 nights in mid-October.

But don't fret fans of How I Met Your Mother, aka "No, Really, It's Not Like Big Bang Theory At All" (SPOILER ALERT: Yes, it fucking is.), for Mark McGrath and Co. have ditched the boat for the luxuries of charter tour buses and will be hitting the road this summer with a pretty much identical tour of Sugar Ray, the Gin Blossoms, Smash Mouth, Fastball and Vertical Horizon.

Vertical. Fucking. Horizon.

Whatever.

Stone Temple Pilots Terminates Scott Weiland

No doubt showing up naked and immediately stealing some bikers' clothes, the 3 members of Stone Temple Pilots that are not Scott Weiland have "terminated" Scott Weiland from the band just days before he is about to embark on a solo tour. A solo tour on which he will play Stone Temple Pilots songs. Without the rest of Stone Temple Pilots.

To further complicate things, Weiland claims that he hasn't been fired, and how could he, given that he "founded, fronted and co-wrote many of its biggest hits"?

Given that Weiland has made numerous bad decisions that have led to drugs, legal troubles, and being in Velvet Revolver, the fact that the DeLeos are moving on without him is hardly surprising. After all, they have done this before, when they formed Talk Show which lasted exactly one album before STP came back with No. 4 in late 1999.

Just so everyone remembers, here's STP with Weiland:

And here's STP without:

On second listen, maybe it doesn't matter if he's in the band or not. Just get that guy to put on a Weiland mask.

Whatever.

Happy Birthday, Kurt Cobain.

Had he not taken his own life, Kurt Cobain would have turned 46 today. As I've written before, the impact that Nirvana had on my life is immeasurable, and you can't hear their music today without wondering what might have been.

Here is one of my favorite Kurt interviews, from the beginning:

 

And another great one, from the end:

Wherever you are, I hope you've found peace. None of this would exist if it wasn't for you.

Whatever.

Happy Birthday, Billie Joe Armstrong!

A Happy 41st Birthday to Billie Joe Armstrong of Green Day, who is hopefully celebrating without drinking somewhere because of that whole breaking-down-at-a-giant-popfest-thing.

Wait, what the shit?! 41?! How is that possible?!

Good lord, it's been more than 20 years since this?

Incidentally, this is probably Green Day's best song. It's weird to think that there might be people reading this blog-

-Doubtful.

-Ahem. People reading this blog who are younger than that song. You see kids, a long time ago, back before the war(s), Green Day were an actual punk band that did ironic punk things, like tour in a bookmobile and throw mud at people on the biggest stage of their lives and curse on television and play a different song than they told the MTV people they were going to. Those rascals. Yes, believe it or not, they weren't always the corporate, polished, pretentious arena rockers they are today.

Uno, Dos and Tres? Seriously? C'mon guys. You couldn't cut those down to one album? There was one single between all three and it was T-E-R-R-I-B-L-E. "Oh, Love." THOSE WERE THE ONLY LYRICS! And you can't act like rock stations like KROQ wouldn't support it because they still play "When On I Come Around" on an HOURLY rotation like it was still goddamned 1995! KROQ, GET YOUR SHIT TOGETHER! YOU WERE ONCE AN IMPORTANT ROCK STATION! Now, you're playing that "$20 in my pocket" rap song. Just stop, already! And maybe ease up on the Sublime and Chili Peppers a little so I wouldn't be more inclined to listen to sports talk radio all day.

Anyway, Happy Birthday, Billie Joe. Please come back and excite me like you did when I was 15 and you were 23.

That sounds weird.

Whatever.

Marilyn Manson is Literally Sick of His Own Music

When alt rock took off in the early 90s, and being punk came in vogue again, there was a period where shock value was brought back into rock. The slam-dancing punk rock of the late 70s and early 80s had done their best to challenge the establishment, but there were only so many body parts you could pierce with safety pins before the effect wore off. This gave way to the 80s and more mainstream artists like Cyndi Lauper and Missing Persons making bold fashion statements by co-opting what was previously meant to shock.

After a while, that subsided and rock was once again fairly clean cut. Sure Motley Crue and GnR had did their best, but for each of them, there were 7 Warrants and 10 Def Leppards negating the attempt to defile every nubile girl and snort every ounce of coke on the Sunset Strip.

So when Nirvana came along, with their metered and determined anti-establishment ethos, and the resurrected gimmick of smashing their instruments after every performance, they seemed new and interesting and edgy. Kurt died his hair and wore a dress. He kissed his bandmates. They put a naked baby on the cover of their album.

While Nirvana and others did their best to upset things, there was a band gaining popularity in Florida that was determined to take it even further.

With each member creating pseudonyms for themselves comprised of a famous beautiful person and a serial killer, Marilyn Manson was born. The band, I mean. Not Brian Warner, the lead singer of the band that shares his fake name.

In starting a band, Warner seemed more intent on garnishing negative attention from his persona and stage antics than he did the music he was attempting to draw attention to. He was arrested for performing oral sex on a man onstage (really Jack Off Jill singer Jessicka Addams wearing a dildo). He named a song "Cake and Sodomy." He wore face paint.

This rebelliousness continued as the band gained popularity, largely based on an interesting cover of the Eurythmics "Sweet Dreams" and its video in which Warner rides a pig. 

 

Seriously. That's what he does.

Deciding he wasn't getting the right kind of attention, Manson named his next album Antichrist Superstar (at least he had a sense of humor about the whole thing. Kinda.) which spawned their most successful single to date, "The Beautiful People." And it was this song that prompted Manson to collapse and vomit onstage yesterday in Saskatoon, Canada, when he just kinda tipped over mid-song.

Good thing it was in a land with universal health care, eh?

Here's the video:

"The beautiful people, the beautiful pee- BLEEEECHHHH!!!!"

Compounding the problem was that he fell right as the song exits the chorus, when Manson and/or the backing track let out a pained wail. Even watching the video, it's hard to tell whether or not A. he sang that part and B. if it was a legitimate moan this time. Concert goers reported that he barfed all over but you can't tell from the video. Which is a good thing.

Given that this is the band's biggest and sort-of-only hit, Manson probably has had enough of the now 17-year-old (!!!) song and just doesn't want to play it anymore.

Maybe slipping back into the androgynous alien costume he wore during the Dope Show tour will lift his spirits. It certainly did ours.

Whatever.

90s Live Now #12 - BEN FOLDS FIVE

As you may have noticed, I grew up in the 90s. That's not exactly true. I grew up in the 80s and 90s. Though, I'm not really sure which decade I'm supposed to have grown up in when it comes to Buzzfeed articles and Microsoft Internet Explorer commercials. I was born in 1979, so I became self-aware in the middle of the 80s, but had reached a certain maturity level in the early 90s when I became a teenager.

But, when it comes to music, I'm all 90s. Obviously, since I write a 90s music blog that like 3 people look at. That takes a special kind of dedication.

The 80s, when it comes to music, kind of sucked. Don't get me wrong, there was great stuff in the 80s. Pixies, The Cure, REM, The Cars and other bands that were mostly on the fringe of the mainstream. And I love the hell out of Hall & Oates and Huey Lewis & The News. Unironically, even. But for the most part, I consider the early-to-mid 80s to be a bunch of synthy bullshit and the late 80s to be homogenized pop. Again, there are a lot of exceptions. But look at what the 80s did to great bands like Chicago and Jefferson Airplane. In the late 60s and early 70s, Chicago was pretty much the greatest thing alive and Jefferson Airplane was not far behind. In the 80s, "Hard to Say I'm Sorry" and "We Built This City." WE BUILT THIS FUCKING CITY. That's what the 80s were - "We Built This City" on endless repeat while yuppies snort coke in Volvos while wearing shoulder padded power suits and watching Dallas. 

But the 90s, now that was a special time. I know a lot of people will say, "Ugh the 90s was just grunge marf marf marf." But the mainstreaming of grunge lasted for like 18 months. And, it paved the way for alternative music to become popular, which it still is today: Mumford and Sons. Gotye. Fun. There's even some bands that don't suck.

For those that don't waste time dissecting this, "grunge" is synonymous with both the fashion of wearing beat-up clothes and flannel shirts, and the music. But to those people, "grunge" just means "loud guitars." Everclear and Eve 6 were grunge bands to a lot of people. This is wrong. Grunge was a very specific type of riff-based rock that was mostly popular in the Pacific Northwest. Early Soundgarden, Tad, Mudhoney, etc. It's a lot closer to Black Sabbath than it is to goddamned Everclear.

No, what these people consider to be grunge is actually "alternative rock" or "modern rock" or "alt rock" which is another umbrella term for rock that includes Soundgarden, Nirvana AND Everclear. And if you remove the rock, you just get alternative. Which allows for pretty much anything, including...

BEN FOLDS FIVE

Herein lies the greatness of 90s alternative and the 90s as a whole - you could turn on an alternative station in 1995 and hear Pearl Jam (rock), Beastie Boys (rap), Beck (whatever) and Ben Folds Five - which draws heavily from 70s-era soft rock like Elton John and Steely Dan - all on the same station, in a row. It was like your iPod on shuffle except with shitty commercials every 3 songs. Seriously, radio commercials are the lowest form of art.

But, as a child of the 90s, I hated this band. For years. Well, two years. But when you're a teenager, two years is a significant fraction of your existence.

My introduction to BFF came while watching 120 Minutes (February 4, 1996) and seeing the video for "Underground." My first thought, clear as day:

"WHAT. THE. SHIT."

In the previous hour, I had seen videos from Foo Fighters, Smashing Pumpkins, No Doubt, Spacehog and Radiohead. All guitar-based groups that used a buttload of distortion, which was the litmus test of musical awesomeness in the 90s. It took a lot to appreciate a group that wasn't stepping on a distortion pedal as the chorus starts. I came of age during the height of Nirvana; I was conditioned to hear a wall of distortion and feedback in every other song. And now, there's this twirpy guy banging on a piano in cowboy outfits singing about being cool and "Underground" in a weird falsetto like an adult Varys. This was the stuff of my 16-year-old nightmares. Well, that and Jennifer Bryant giving your friend Brent a handy when you clearly liked her.

I may have overreacted. After a couple more airings of that video it started to grow on me, but it wasn't until 3 months later when I saw the hilarious video for "Uncle Walter" that I came around and learned to appreciate this band for how great they were.

Fast forward a couple years and "Brick" just explodes. Everyone is singing it and no one can figure out that it's about abortion except me. Is that true? Of course not. Other people figured it out. But no one that I talked to at the time could. And no one had ever heard of this band before. Except me. I was so amazing and special and kind of an asshole for thinking that. Regardless of the newfound popularity, I had both of their albums on near-constant repeat. To me, this was as close as you could get to Weezer (my favorite band at the time), even if the loud guitars were replaced by a guy pounding his piano like it was a keg of Miller Lite at a freshman year frat party.

Fast forward a couple more years and we get to "Army" and The Unauthorized Biography of Reinhold Messner, the band's third album, and once again, I'm on the outside with BFF. Gone were the melodies and humor and fuzzy bass that was their first self-titled album and Whatever and Ever Amen. Messner was something else entirely, and I wasn't buying in. Until I gave it a year or so and re-listened and realized this was their best work. Hell, this was some of the best music of the whole decade.

Sadly, many others had the same initial reaction to Messner that I did. Music was changing; pop and boy bands and hip-hop and shitty Limp Bizkit buttrock were taking over and an album that could have been the Sgt. Pepper's to OK Computer's Pet Sounds had it just came out 4 years earlier was lost in the shuffle.

And then the band broke up, taking my chances to see them live with them.

I'd missed seeing a lot of bands in the 90s, but Ben Folds Five was with Buffalo Tom and that dog. at the top of the regrets list. So, when it was announced in August of 2011, a tour only seemed inevitable.

Which brings us to January 26, 2013 at the Wiltern Theater in Los Angeles' Koreatown neighborhood.

In past 90s Live Now entries, I've written about fevered crowds, but I've not seen anything like tonight. This band was beloved, and every single (white) person in the greater LA area was there, singing along with every song.

Seriously, everyone was white. It was like being at the Republican National Convention.

More seriously, the crowd was manic. During "Army", Ben turned the mike to the crowd, and we sang back the horn parts, even breaking them up into their distinct parts without any direction. It was one of those special moments that happens once in a never. Like the time Raine Maida of Our Lady Peace started crying when the crowd sang "4am" louder than he was and completely unprompted.

Last fall, the band released their fourth studio album, The Sound of the Life of the Mind. And unlike Buffalo Tom's Skins, this is an album I found myself listening to over and over and over again. While not quite as exuberant as their first 2 records, nor as melancholy and experimental as their 3rd, Sound has great songs for a band that hadn't even played together in 13 years. So, when they opened with "Michael Praytor, Five Years Later", the second track off of their newest album, there was none of the backlash that you would expect from a crowd who paid a lot of money (seriously, these tickets were expensive) to see one of their favorite bands reunited but they insist on playing the new shit no one knows. Point is, the new shit is good so no one cared.

Also helping - this is a tight band. Even during songs they just sort of made up on the spot, drummer Darren Jesse and bassist Robert Sledge expertly kept up with Ben Folds and his magical piano, making it seem like these little improvs were fully formed ideas that the band had rehearsed for weeks. It was like a little window into their creative process, furthered by Ben Folds' story about how the new song "Do It Anyway" was inspired by an event that occurred the last time he had played the Wiltern (short version, Ben said he couldn't dance on top of his piano to whatever song they were playing, a fan yelled "Do It Anyway" and he wrote 75% of it right there and then).

Another very cool thing about tonight's show: Ben Folds said that the band broke up 13 years ago and his kids are now 13 years old and tonight was the first time they had met Darren or Jesse and the first time they've seen BF5 perform live. What a spectacular first time to see them - in a packed auditorium, with thousands of people singing along with their dad's songs. They must've been beaming with pride. Hell, I was for them.

So, bottom line, amazing show. Like Buffalo Tom two years ago, this is a great live band, made better by the fact that I waited a decade and a half to see them live.

Here's the setlist:

Michael Praytor, Five Years Later

Jackson Cannery

Hold That Thought

Selfless, Cold and Composed

Erase Me

Landed

Sky High

Missing the War

Battle of Who Could Care Less

Draw a Crowd

Thank You For Breaking My Heart

Brick

Theme From Dr. Pyser

Army

Do It Anyway

Alice Childress

Tonight the Bottle Let me Down (Merle Haggard cover) 

Song For The Dumped

ENCORE:

Philosophy
Chopsticks (Liz Phair cover)

Magic
Underground

How fitting that they should end with the song that had first turned me against them before I learned to love them. It was a perfect way for the cosmos to rub my early stupidity in my face.

Whatever (And Ever. Amen.).