“Life beats down and crushes the soul, and art reminds you that you have one.”
- Stella Adler
Here's something I'll bet you didn't know: Elvis Presley, Judy Garland and Lenny Bruce all died on the toilet. You're welcome. Now on to the proceedings.
We might as well give the 90s the same treatment as the 80s. You're making a 90s rock playlist. What are the first THREE songs you're adding?
I'm going with personal and not universal.
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Teen Angst/Cracker: Around 1992, I was driving from Memphis to my hometown, Kirksville, MO, to visit my
parents. Going through St. Louis, I found a great alternative rock station. Friend Chris tells me it was most likely “The Point.” I was hungry for any edgy stuff I could find. We didn't have a good alternative station in Memphis and this being way before satellite radio, I was a happy guy. On comes a song that was everything I craved, a great driving guitar riff, an aggressive singer with an attitude and lyrics of bemused irritation about the state of this, that or the other thing. It was Teen Angst the DJ said, by Cracker. As soon as I could I snatched their self-titled first record. I ran a marathon in 1993 carrying a Sony Walkman with that album on repeat through most of it. I went to see them on February 9, 1994 at the New Daisy Theatre on Beale Street in Memphis. It was the night of the once in a century ice storm that hit the city. I went into the show at around 9:00 pm. It was a typical gray winter night. When I came out at 1:00 am, the world was a frozen odyssey. Ice enveloped the metro area and paralyzed it for ten days. I crept home, 10-miles east on Poplar Avenue. I had no electricity for a week. But Cracker put on a great show. I wonder how they got out of town. Also on the bill with them that night is the band that gets the next spot. - Rain King/Counting Crows: There was a pretty good record store in Memphis in the early 90s at Poplar and Estate. That was in the time when you went to such stores to discover what was new in music. An album called “August and Everything After” by a band I'd never heard of, Counting Crows, caught my eye. I bought it on a hunch; a lucky one. Soon songs from the album were all over the radio - Mr. Jones, Round Here, Omaha. Counting Crows are part of my memory of the 90s as well as the great ice storm of '94.
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Dyslexic Heart/Paul Westerberg: 1994 was a heady time for the Pacific Northwest. The grunge music scene had swept the land and I was all about it. A movie had come out in 1992 called Singles that was set in Seattle. It had a good story and a great cast, Matt Dillon, Bridget Fonda, Kyra Sedgwick, Campbell Scott, Eddie Vedder even made an appearance, and the music of the moment was also one of the characters. It romanticized the region in my mind. I'd never been out that way, so in ‘94 I took a solo trip. I wanted to scope out the music as well as the bourgeoning craft beer and coffee scene. Besides Seattle, I went west to the Olympic National Park (Where Kendra and I would get married three years later), then east into the Cascades. There I visited The Double R Diner (Mart-T Cafe in reality) in North Bend, WA, famous from the TV show Twin Peaks ("Damn fine coffee"). While in the mountains, I also went to Roslyn, WA where the exterior scenes for the TV show Northern Exposure were filmed. I took a quick jaunt to Vancouver too. The Singles soundtrack was a mighty fine one and Paul Westerberg of The Replacements had two good solo tunes on there. All of it’s part of my early 90s panorama.
* Now I'm going to cheat and add one more. The three above are from the early to mid 90s. I'll include one from the end of the decade. We lived in Cleveland, OH in 1998 and 1999. Lots of good memories from then, music and otherwise. One is Don't Go Away/Oasis.