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Monday, Nov 9, 2009
The author of a new biography of Kurt Cobain looks back at the best and worst of musical decades, the 1980s.
Aug 30, 2001 | During one distinct point of the 1980s, I became convinced -- as did everyone I knew who considered themselves alternative music aficionados -- that the Northwest finally had produced a certifiable new rock star. He was a talented songwriter and guitarist from Seattle who wrote unforgettable songs; he had a mop of hair that was perennially in his face, providing the aloofness required for stardom; his band's independently released debut scored good reviews; virtually everyone who saw the group in concert agreed they'd seen one of the most fun bands in the world; and, most important, those notices were beginning to bring the first national attention to the Northwest rock scene since Heart.
When the band in question actually was reviewed in Rolling Stone -- something very unusual at the time for any indie band, much less one from the sleepy Northwest -- it seemed inevitable that massive success was just around the corner.
But sadly the year was 1986, Sub Pop was still a cassette fanzine, "grunge" was something you found under your fingernails and the musician in question was Scott McCaughey of the Young Fresh Fellows. The Fellows went on to have a respectable career as indie-rock darlings, but there were only a few thousand fans buying their albums in the mid-'80s, not a few million. I liked the band enough that I designed their first two album covers, forgoing payment and taking instead what I thought would be valuable test-pressings. I was thoroughly convinced that the Fellows semi-anthem "Beer Money" would soon be blasting from every college dorm room in the land. I was wrong.
This fall you're going to see a slew of articles -- and even my own recently released biography of Kurt Cobain -- timed to celebrate the 10-year anniversary of Nirvana's "Nevermind" album. Few records get this kind of attention 10 years after they come out, of course, but "Nevermind" is an album worth celebrating, at least with the same kind of barroom nostalgia that baseball fans might use to discuss a fabled World Series win from days gone by. But amid the hoopla I hope we remember that while the rock historians, biography writers and magazine publicists are busy emphasizing the epochal shifts in music, they sometimes overshadow everything else -- the incremental changes that preceded such changes or that follow them; the worthy bands like the Fellows, who but for a genre fluke might have been the sensation; and, of course, the pop roadkill left behind. (1991 was also the year of C&C Music Factory.)
Though "Nevermind" did indeed sell a staggering 10 million copies, it was hardly the singular soundtrack to our lives, even during the fall of 1991 -- remember another little Seattle combo called Pearl Jam, who also released an album that month? Though "Nevermind" may be the only vintage 1991 album to still be on the cover of music magazines a decade later, it wasn't the only music that mattered or that was worth writing about. Unfortunately "Nevermind" casts such a large shadow on alternative rock it distorts our memory, much the way Dec. 7, 1941, made an earlier generation forget anything that happened on Dec. 7, 1940.
Memory is a funny thing, particularly when it comes to our own musical past. For the post baby-boomer demographic of rock fans that I belong too -- raised as children on Bob Dylan, weaned on Joni Mitchell and kicked out of the house by the time the Ramones came around -- we tend to ignore the past until some marketing genius comes along and sticks a Nick Drake song in a commercial. Much of our selective-memory disorder in rock 'n' roll can be laid upon the feet of the one evil corporate entity that gets blamed for everything, and usually with merit: MTV.
There are many reasons to hate MTV (and you won't find me arguing against a single one of them), but none is more justified than the fact that it became the marker for how we remember certain years, simply because it is easier to remember visual images than it is to recall audio moments. It also didn't hurt that MTV had the tendency to hit on one band -- even a band as awful as Extreme, one of the biggest MTV stars in the months before "Nevermind" -- and to play them to death, or at least play them until you could remember every frame of the video.
The network's impact on our cognitive recollection is so great that anyone under the age of 30 can immediately recall the hair on that guy in a Flock of Seagulls far more quickly than they can remember their ATM number. This effect is only compounded by VH1's "Behind the Music" franchise, where only the seamy stories get a hearing and where Leif Garrett and Nikki Sixx are more important to rock than Bob Mould or the Mekons.
