the second round

(3) Radiohead, “creep”
starved
(6) temple of the dog, “hunger strike”
402-382
and will play on in the sweet 16

Read the essays, listen to the songs, and vote. Winner is the aggregate of the poll below and the @marchxness twitter poll. Polls closed @ 9am Arizona time on March 16.

The Cool Big Brother: rob hays on “creep”

You’ve never seen a band try harder and attain more to escape the very song that started their success. Radiohead was able to use the song “Creep” to establish an everlasting career where they pushed themselves from the shadow of “Creep” to a career of expanding the boundaries and expectations of what a rock & roll band is and what it can accomplish.
Watching this band in real time during the formative years of my life, they’ve helped me grow and understand music in ways that far outstripped the naivety and shallowness of an inexperienced listener. They acted like a big brother to me by steering me in the right musical directions and helping me as a person to higher levels of thought and appreciation.
When I say big brother here, it’s in the context of the cool, big brother who was making you mixtapes of all the bands he thought you should be listening to, helping shape your thoughts and ideals as a person. Helping you embark on thought explorations that take you to different places that transform the mind and soul.
I did have real big brothers, but not in the transformative, mind-shaping way that I feel about Radiohead. My oldest brother wasn’t really into music, he was more of an athlete, mostly gravitating toward songs that motivated him to work out more. I remember songs like Snap’s “The Power,” or that song that kept sampling the line, “Mars needs women”. My other brother was much more musically oriented and I did appreciate him trying to include me in his musical explorations, even if it didn’t quite mold me the way it did him. He was a big Beatles and Paul McCartney fan. He was listening to bands like Yes, ELO, and Styx. He had a fondness for arena rock.
My brothers and I grew up in a slightly less than ideal setting occupied by machinists, factory workers, truck drivers and low level clerical workers just trying to get by. It was typical blue collar fare, and you were much more likely to hear someone play Lynyrd Skynyrd or Bob Seger than Hüsker Dü or The Wedding Present. More often than not, if you mentioned those bands in my home town you would get strange looks.
A lot of my early musical education came from the radio. Growing up in Cleveland, in the 80s, radio was kind of a big deal. We were constantly reminded of 1950’s Cleveland disc jockey, Alan Freed, who popularized the phrase “rock & roll” and how our local station, WMMS (nicknamed The Buzzard) often broke new artists like Bruce Springsteen, Rush and David Bowie. Listening to these rock staples led to some confused and often eclectic musical listening tastes that would follow me through my years in high school. I remember when Guns and Roses and the Beastie Boys were first making waves and while today’s me would want to tune in, 80’s me couldn’t care less. I was enjoying Huey Lewis and the News (still do) and listening to adult contemporary artists like Billy Joel, and Rod Stewart. It wasn’t till I started working minimum wage joe jobs when I was sixteen that I started having my first meaningful music conversations. It was then, I would bring up said artists and was mocked mercilessly for it, that my feelings toward music were willing to change.
It was during this time that a band I never heard of and wouldn’t care about for some years to come was also finding their musical inspiration.
Radiohead has always had the same line-up throughout their career: Phil Selway, Collin Greenwood, his younger brother Jonny, Ed O’Brien, and singer Thom Yorke. They have known each other since they were at Abingdon School just outside of Oxford, England, in the mid ’80s. They started their band while they were all going through school and would play around town together, even staying together and playing whenever they were on break as they made their way through university. When Thom graduated from Exeter, with his English degree, he started taking the band more seriously.
I used to work the closing shift at a local fast food taco place. There, my real musical education began. I had a manager, who had a side gig as a bassist in a local hard rock band. After closing the dining room at night, he would invite his friends in and they would hook up their guitars and amps and noodle on their instruments while the rest of us were getting orders out for the drive-thru. I was taught to appreciate the work of Ozzy Osbourne, and the brief, inspirational career of Randy Rhoads. Rush was revered, Guns and Roses rocked, but so did Mötley Crüe, Dokken, Ratt, and Poison. These weren’t my only influences during that time, just the loudest. There was also the girl who had all kinds of piercings, who really liked Skinny Puppy and Jane’s Addiction. There were also my nerdy friends from school who preferred rap and were into the likes of Third Bass, DJ Jazzy Jeff and The Fresh Prince, 2 Live Crew, and The Digital Underground.
It was one of those late shifts, working the drive thru, that someone put in Pearl Jam’s Ten for the first time. This was truly an exciting, transformational album. I had not heard anything quite like it before, but my initial reaction to the song, “Alive” was that I was all in. It was my first exposure to the grunge movement, a movement I had no idea would affect me so profoundly. I was ready for more.
In England, Radiohead was initially known as On a Friday, named after the day they could all come together and rehearse. They had a following around town, and eventually gained the noticed of A&R people, scoring a record deal. It wasn’t till they were being signed that they changed the name.
Their first EP, Drill, didn’t sell very well and gained them little notice. It was during those early studio sessions that “Creep” first came into being. In a small independent studio, they were rehearsing songs with their new producers for what was to be their first album, Pablo Honey. Ed O’Brien once described Pablo Honey as “Our collection of greatest hits as an unsigned band.” The songs were heavily influenced by the bands they were most into at the time: the Pixies and R.E.M. The novice members of Radiohead all wanted to be rock stars, but had yet to gain a style and develop a sound that was their own. While in studio, taking a break from the list of songs their producers wanted for the album, they played a song, referred to as the “Scott Walker” song (a solo artist popular in the UK during the 60s and 70s), mostly to just change things up. They had not played the song in their live shows and this was the first time the producers had heard it. They were amazed, and “Creep” came to be.
The members of the band thought of it as a throwaway number, nothing of any real consequence. Initially, when released in the UK in September of 1992, it did not get much fanfare, topping out at number 78 on the UK singles charts. BBC’s RADIO ONE barely played it, saying that the song was “too depressing.” It wasn’t till the end of the year when the song started becoming a huge hit in places like, Israel, Scandinavia, and New Zealand. In America, it first started getting recognition at a small college station outside San Fransisco. It eventually swept across the nation in popularity, with listeners relating to the song’s themes of alienation and self-loathing.
I tried really hard to remember the first time I heard “Creep.” it came in with a number of new sounding music at the time. Nirvana was still a big deal, and Soundgarden was making a name for themselves. “Creep” was just another interesting song coming from the radio. While alienation and self-loathing were not new to my teenage self, I wasn’t ready to empathize with this song in any meaningful way.
The song was first written by Thom early in his time at Exeter University. The actual story behind the song is a little fuzzy and hard to pin down. To hear others tell it, Thom wasn’t very comfortable around women early in his adult life, and the song appears to speak of a time, where he took a fancy to a woman who hung around with a different group of people, and while he liked her, he never felt comfortable talking to her or being around her, and was remorseful for the feelings he was having. In interviews, years later, Thom would remark that he always thought the song was a bit of a joke and disliked the fact a lot of people identified him as the “Creep.”
The song followed a familiar song structure: verse, bridge, chorus, verse, bridge, chorus, mid section climax, verse, bridge, chorus. It was Thom’s heart felt singing and emotional lyrics that had people take notice. It was also the aggressive jabs of guitarist Jonny Greenwood’s prelude to the chorus that helped give the song some of its most distinctive elements. Jonny was derisive about the song and was later quoted as saying, “I didn’t like it. It stayed quiet…So I hit the guitar hard – really hard.” It was often thought of as Jonny’s attempt to sabotage the song. The producers loved it, and made it a point of emphasis for the song. It was even featured on MTV’s Beavis and Butthead.
Cleveland had finally gotten its first Alternative Rock station around this time. They played music for the 90s, leaving behind classic staples like The Who, Led Zeppelin, and AC/DC. All the bands that 80s Cleveland radio had taught me to admire and enjoy.
“Creep” was an okay song, I didn’t mind it when it was on the radio, but my early, totally misguided music tastes had me smack in the bullseye for a band called Candlebox. Their first album was amazing. It had that hard rock edge that my friends at the late night drive-thru appreciated as well as some great guitar hooks and lyrics that spoke to an emerging adolescent brain in a way other songs hadn’t before. It was these alt rock inspirations that prepped me for my musical journey’s to come. For the time being, I was was excited to be rockin’ out to “You” by Candlebox, or “Three Strange Days” from School of Fish, or “Teen Angst” by Cracker. These last two songs inspired me to do album reviews in my local high school news paper. For the first time, I wasn’t just listening to the music, I was “hearing” it.
Meanwhile “Creep”, launched Radiohead to the forefront of the modern rock movement. They toured America and played at MTV Beach House and on Arsenio Hall as well as several other late night talk shows. The song was rereleased in the U.K. where it reached number 7 on the singles chart. Readers of Melody Maker and NME magazines named “Creep” “Single of the Year”. It was the Rolling Stone’s writers, top choice for best song of 1993.
By 1995, Radiohead really started to sour on the song. There were rumors their record company thought of them as one-hit-wonders. The band was growing impatient with the type of audience that was showing up for their shows, where fans would scream for “Creep” to be played then leave immediately after. One band member was quoted as saying, “There was a point where we seemed to be living out the same four-and-a half minutes of our lives over and over again. It was incredibly stultifying.” While they continued to play it, they often would just refer to it as “that song.” The band themselves never thought of it as a good song and were astonished as to how popular it had become. They’ve been trying to move away from “that song“ ever since.
I could relate to those feelings. Early musical fascinations were no longer doing it for me. I once thought groups like Foreigner, Bad Company, and Journey were what music listeners favored, not realizing it was a preference of the working class people around me that I had trouble relating too. I had grown up a certain way and was expected to be into certain music, and I was finding it was leaving me empty. Grunge music hit me at just the right time, helping me expand my musical tastes and inspirations.
For Radiohead, their next album, The Bends, was said to be a tortured affair to make. Thom had a lot of anxiety around trying to prove that Radiohead was more than just “that song.” They had been playing it at just about every show for a couple years and Thom thought of it as playing a cover of some other band’s song. John Leckie, the producer for The Bends, was quoted, “My impression, was they were being requested to do something even better than ‘Creep.’ And they felt they were being asked to better something, where they didn’t know what was good about it in the first place.“
Their first single from The Bends was “My Iron Lung,” a song still very much in the grunge style, written during their fury of touring supporting the Pablo Honey album. It was a response from the band to all the success brought to them by “Creep.” The end of the song contained the lyrics: 

This this is our new song
Just like the last one
A total w.a.s.t.e. of time
My iron lung

It was around this time I first started noticing Radiohead. I was in college, still living high on my enjoyment of Candlebox, and catching them live during their many frequent tours, getting exposure to other bands that would open for them, like Sponge and the Flaming Lips. I was just getting past my latest musical fixation at the time, Live’s Throwing Copper album, and was ready to move on to something different.
I heard Radiohead’s song “High and Dry” and enjoyed the simple melody and the story painted from the lyrics. For some reason, this was all brought more into context by the music video featuring some bizarre Pulp Fiction type narrative in a diner. I wanted more. I picked up The Bends and remembered it to be a more challenging, deeper album. It didn’t have a bunch of instantly likable hits. My brain was still trying to divest itself from all the corporate radio and adult contemporary miasma I had embraced earlier in my youth. I had to think about the music more, I had to dig deeper into songs that stopped following familiar song structures. Songs willing to go in a different direction. The Bends was one of the first transformative records for me, it challenged the ways I had originally thought about music and took me away as a convert.
Radiohead started making changes around this time that would start forming their direction and distinguishing them from other bands. Early on, Thom had written all the lyrics, very much evident on the Pablo Honey album. Except for “Creep,” no one was claiming there was anything lyrically significant about the songs. Thom had a conversation with friends about this where he later explained that he wasn’t really interested in writing lyrics at the time, and it showed. His friends pointed out to him, “Your lyrics are crap, They’re too honest, too personal, to direct, and there’s nothing left to the imagination.” It was during this time that Thom started working more with Jonny and the others, and pushed the band into a different creative direction. Radiohead was evolving.
Radiohead started working with new members of their team that have helped them shape their image and music over the coming years. Nigel Godrich came on as an engineer during The Bends, and he would go on to produce OK Computer and every Radiohead album thereafter.
     Another key addition during this time was artist Stanley Donwood. He worked with Thom Yorke initially on the art work for The Bends and, like Godrich, would contribute in that role for the remaining albums. The addition of these people were key to the band in helping deliver a more consistent sound and a more congruous image which was largely dark and dystopian in nature. Feelings I was much in line with at the time.
After completing a couple years of junior college, I was going away to school for the first time to complete my four-year degree. With my eyes and ears open to new experiences I started integrating into the musical conversations happening around me. There was the prog-metal fan who was in the room across the hall, who really wanted to get me into Dream Theater. There were guys down the hall, who introduced me to 90’s techno in the forms of the Prodigy, Apex Twin, DJ Shadow, and Orbital. Then there was a friend, who loved Frank Black, not just his work with the Pixies, but his solo stuff, like Teenager of the Year. It was these tangential musical discussions that got me excited about music. I joined the local college radio station and while I played a lot of R.E.M. and U2, and occasionally still throwing on a Bob Seger album, I was opening myself up to stuff I wasn’t willing to consider before like The Eels, Buffalo Tom, and Pavement. I was also willing to explore earlier work by bands I already liked; Camper von Beethoven was a treat after enjoying the first couple Cracker Albums. I also started to acknowledge musicians I should have respected in the first place, like Johnny Cash and The Rolling Stones, not so much for their catchy tunes, but understanding their influence on music as a whole.
   By the time OK Computer came around, Radiohead was starting to establish a theme to how they go about their work. They wanted to keep doing something new and had little interest in looking back. Radiohead understood they could put out another album like The Bends and make a lot of money and fans would be happy, but they thought that was boring. They were interested in pushing in new directions. OK Computer brought in more effects and atmospheric sounds, leaving behind the introspective songs that were on Pablo Honey and The Bends and focusing more on society’s modern ills and how they affect us.
     I was starting to feel a bit of regret and disenfranchisement by this point in my college career. I was pursuing a degree in International Economics and Management and was taking an International Business class that did various case studies of business failures. It was my first introduction into the often hurtful practices of capitalism abroad. This usually involved some form of American company A, going to Country B, doing no due diligence on local culture or customs and insulting or hurting the local population in some way with product C. Granted, we were taught to be good, empathetic souls trying to meet the company’s goals, but it was not hard to see how the themes from these case studies kept repeating themselves in various ways.
It wasn’t just listening to the music of Radiohead who also seemed to feel very uncomfortable with the world they were experiencing around them, but buying into the whole message they were sending. I remember getting their Airbag EP and there was a quote from Noam Chomsky in the liner notes telling me not to unknowingly leave the complicated matters of the world to others, to pay attention; the world is more messed up than you think. These just weren’t messages being delivered by Britney Spears, Whitney Houston or other popular musicians of that era. It was thoughtful, intelligent, and pushed the limits of what I knew of the world.
     Kid A would take another step completely to the left of OK Computer introducing a shocking, at the time, mix of guitar and electronica, creating rich atmospheric songs with very abstract lyrics. While the Kid A and the Amnesiac albums were recorded around the same time, each album that came after had its own distinct sound. The songs in them fit together, where you could distinguish specific tracks, but the listening experience worked as a whole. There were no filler songs. Every song would be worked on till the band felt it was good enough to release to the world.
The album was a huge challenge to absorb upon first listen. The songs diverged from the music that came before it. I remember not liking “The National Anthem” with its bombastic horns and discordant rhythms. It took several listens before I could appreciate what was happening. It was moving forward, it was bringing the next big thing. Each song on the album could be found to be beautiful If you just looked hard enough, and today Kid A delivers some of my favorite Radiohead tracks.
“Everything in its Right Place,” the first track off Kid A, was as if Radiohead was saying they were never looking back to “Creep.” The digitized vocals, the dark, haunting synthesizer melody that becomes more driving as the song progresses, the dissonant sampling, mixed throughout. It introduces everything that would change about Radiohead going forward. “Idioteque” is another one. DJ Shadow once sampled it into one of his mixes and left it almost entirely intact. It was so well done, why change it? The song is mostly electronica, a modular synthesizer with a series of beats and effects in loop. Mixing this with the urgency in Thom’s voice as he sings the lyrics that make you feel like the world is falling apart but energizing you at the same time is the kind of thing only music can deliver.
It was around this time when Radiohead first pointed me toward the book, “No Logo” by Naomi Klein, about how our current consumer culture works. Helping me learn about EPZ’s (Export Processing Zones) and desperate factory workers, who endure bad conditions for little money with the promise the work will be better than their rural subsistence farming existence could bring them.
     I abandoned that dream of international business travel and taking capitalism to people in the far reaches of the world.I ended up in technology and now work for a company that, I at least think, is helping better the world in a more positive way. I feel I’m more aware of what’s happening in the spaces around me. I feel more empathetic.
Was it all the evolution of Radiohead, the evolution of myself that brought me to this state? I like to think there was a little responsibility there. I’m no longer listening to Rod Stewart or Candlebox. I find myself listening to a multitude of different types of music these days. I abandoned the tropes of my youth and everything radio said I should be admiring about music. Really, music is never about what everyone wants, it’s about personal connections, and the music you’re interested in is always the most important. I don’t know if I’d have ever gotten to this state if it wasn’t for Radiohead allowing me to see that music can change. Radiohead and I are both different entities since “Creep” was popular. Like that cool big brother, they showed me there can be a different way.      Radiohead would continue to make new albums and “Creep” would continue to be a sore spot for the band. They hardly ever played it after Kid A was released. They’ve come to accept the song and what it is since then, introducing it a little bit more into their concert sets on the A Moon Shaped Pool tour.
Thom Yorke recently married Italian actress Dajana Roncione. This came after the divorce, and not long after passing, of his long-time partner, whom he met while at university. Dajana is beautiful, the kind of girl one could “look in the eye,” maybe “float like a feather in a beautiful world.” This time around, Thom is “so fucking special,” a creep no more.

Rob Hays is a technologist currently residing in the Cleveland area. He spends much of his free time searching for the next band to get excited about. 

OVERFILLED: LYDIA PUDZIANOWSKI ON “HUNGER STRIKE”

By the time the world heard Temple of the Dog’s “Hunger Strike,” Seattle was over grunge and mourning its own losses. Because music and drugs were exploding simultaneously, the scene was memorializing itself before anyone else knew what was happening. Friends were saying goodbye to each other left and right, and the rest of America had no idea.
Chances are, if you were watching MTV in the early ’90s, you saw the second version of the “Hunger Strike” video. It was edited about a year after its initial release to highlight the fact that Temple of the Dog was composed of members of Pearl Jam and Soundgarden, bands that were rapidly becoming astronomically famous. But the song and the album and the band were a tribute to the frontman of the first wave of grunge: Mother Love Bone’s Andrew Wood, who died of a drug overdose in 1990 at age 24.
Temple of the Dog was made up of Wood’s Mother Love Bone bandmates Jeff Ament and Stone Gossard, who were about to co-found Pearl Jam, and Matt Cameron and Chris Cornell of Soundgarden, a band already at the height of their Seattle fame. In terms of songwriting, Cornell was Temple of the Dog. All lyrics are credited to him, and he wrote the majority of the music as well, with assists from Gossard and Ament. “Hunger Strike” itself is composed of fewer lyrics than you might remember; it’s really just a single verse repeated, with the last line drawn out into an ostensible chorus. Per the CD booklet, here are all 55 words:

I don’t mind stealing bread
From the mouths of decadence
But I can’t feed on the powerless
When my cup’s already overfilled
But it’s on the table
The fire is cooking
And their [sic] farming babies
While the slaves are working
The blood is on the table
And their mouths are choking
But I’m growing hungry

(Weird that the official line is “growing hungry,” because every performance, including the one on the album, has Vedder and Cornell singing “going hungry.”)
Cornell has said of the song, “I was wanting to express the gratitude for my life but also disdain for people where that's not enough, where they want more. There's no way to really have a whole lot more than you need usually without taking from somebody else that can't really afford to give it to you. It's sort of about taking advantage of a person or people who really don't have anything.” Interestingly, this theme would come up in “Corduroy,” Pearl Jam’s possibly accidental version of the song, with lyrics like “I would rather starve than eat your bread” and “Can’t buy what I want because it’s free.” This was kind of the ethos of the whole scene, though, and bands were judged by the way they responded to major-label interest and how they spent their free time (apparently the guys of Alice in Chains wanted to be famous from the outset and loved a good strip club, while Cornell’s Soundgarden bandmates repeatedly asked him to please stop taking his shirt off onstage because they weren’t about that).
Certain images from the “Hunger Strike” video—filmed at Seattle’s Discovery Park, with views across the water of Bainbridge Island, where Andrew Wood grew up—are in the hall of fame of grunge iconography: Eddie Vedder standing in the grass, intermittent shots of that lighthouse, the band playing their unplugged electric instruments on the beach.
By 1991, when the song came out, major labels had snapped up the established Seattle bands (save Mudhoney, who, along with Nirvana’s debut album, kept hometown label Sub Pop from going out of business around that time) and were engaged in bidding wars over fresh blood. If you were from Seattle, you got signed. Chronologically, if not necessarily on purpose, “Hunger Strike” marks the end of the well-kept secret phase. It’s Grunge 101, a tribute to itself, a bridge from relative obscurity to world domination. It showcases the past, present, and future of a movement all at once, which is quite a feat, and America embraced it fully, equal parts enthusiastic and overdue.
And then I showed up, beyond excited—and holy shit, was I late.

SCENE: Positively Records, Levittown, PA, 2004. I, sixteen years old, am perusing used CDs in a very cool manner.
Me (sidling up to the counter): Hey, so, uh, got anything by Temple of the Dog?
Guy behind the counter: ...you mean the one thing they put out? Yeah, I think we've got some of those.

How did this skin-peeling cringefest come to be? Well, despite being born in 1987, putting me at a solid four years old when Nirvana’s Nevermind came out in September of 1991, I spent my teen years obsessed with grunge.
Musically, what I recall from the actual ’90s—my childhood—is unremarkable. I started listening to the radio obsessively around 1996, when I was eight or nine, so we’re talking Bush, Collective Soul, Live, Alanis Morrisette. The black boom box in my room was tuned to 97.5 WPST, Real Music Variety, out of Trenton, NJ (I grew up directly across the river in Bucks County, PA, where Washington crossed the Delaware on Christmas 1776—ye olde punk rock). My elementary-school BFF lived down the street with her mom, grandma, aunt, and cousin, who had a giant Alice in Chains poster in his room. We were terrified of it. Every time I walked to her house for a sleepover, pillow in tow, I knew I was about to do stuff I couldn’t do at my house: eat a bunch of Gushers, play King’s Quest on the computer, and hope her cousin wasn’t home so we could sneak into his room, stare at his poster, and dance to his Presidents of the United States of America CD. That’s how I spent the 1990s.
In 2001, I was a freshman in high school, and my wheelhouse was classic rock. The Beatles, on whom I was raised, were always number one. Then came the Rolling Stones, Pink Floyd, and the Doors. I was obsessed with Jim Morrison. I printed out a photo of him and taped it to the wall next to my bed. He was later joined by James Dean and Brandon Lee, and my parents, probably using humor to deal with their growing concern and unease, christened this corner the Wall of Dead Men. But I was ready for something new—er, something else old that was also new.
In combing through the rest of my dad’s CD collection for fresh meat, I came across Nirvana’s Nevermind. I recognized this as an album I should know, I knew who Dave Grohl was because of the Foo Fighters, and I knew that Kurt Cobain was dead, so my interest was piqued. I absconded with the CD to the backyard, where I listened to it on an endless loop in my metallic blue Sony Walkman in our family’s hammock as noticeably morosely as possible. My best friend Megan got me a copy of Rock: The Rough Guide, a Bible-sized encyclopedia of bands and their essential releases, and I treated it like scripture, sticking it full of Post-Its as I learned more about grunge: Green River begat Mudhoney, Malfunkshun begat Mother Love Bone, let there be light, etc. I purchased a QUIT WORK MAKE MUSIC decal from Hot Topic with my parents’ money and adhered it to my bedroom window in their house, which was in an excellent school district clearly for their own health.
All of this culminated in an exclusive VIP vigil on the tenth anniversary of Kurt Cobain’s death in 2004. It took place in my bedroom. I lit candles, carefully arranged my collected issues of Rolling Stone with the honoree’s face on the cover, and cried the most dramatic tears I could muster. The reluctant attendees were my sister from down the hall and my high-school boyfriend, who walked into my room and started laughing uncontrollably.
Not that I need to say so, but this was all deeply uncool. By the time I stumbled into grunge, it had just happened. It wasn’t old enough to be cool again. The radio was busy playing its skid marks, like Nickelback and Puddle of Mudd and Staind, so no one was particularly nostalgic for the vocal stylings of Eddie Vedder. As I go through my old CD collection now, the evidence is as clear as the price stickers on the cases: $1.99 for a used copy of Vs. from the Princeton Record Exchange, $2.99 for Sweet Oblivion by the Screaming Trees, $4.99 for Alice in Chains’ Unplugged, the BEST VALUE sticker on the Singles soundtrack. But guess what? Couldn’t have worked out better for me in 2004, after Jim Shearer told me which grunge albums were the best during the Nirvana special on MTV2. Let me at that bargain bin. I’m here for the glut.
When I had transportation and a credit card, I saw as many of these bands as I could. Whoever the ’90s left behind, if they were touring, I was there: Pearl Jam, Stone Temple Pilots, Soul Asylum. I wasn’t seeing these guys on their world tours in 1992, because that was the year I turned five years old. I was seeing them on their I-need-some-cash tours in 2006 to support the my-kid-needs-a-college-fund comeback album, the I-mismanaged-my-money solo tours booked in smaller rock clubs as opposed to stadiums.
I’ve seen Pearl Jam the most, but that’s by default. Nirvana ended in 1994. I have little interest in Alice in Chains without Layne Staley, who died in 2002. Soundgarden broke up in 1997 and then again for good when Chris Cornell died in 2017. Last man standing? Pearl Jam and Eddie Vedder, a surfer from San Diego who showed up in Seattle to record “Hunger Strike” as a tribute to a man he’d never met. This was the first time his vocals were featured. It was his first music video. In 1993, Time Magazine would put Vedder’s face on its cover accompanying the headline “All The Rage.” Now, he and his band are forced to work even more of their late friends’ songs into their setlists, and I, a person who changed her Gmail address to a Pearl Jam reference in the year of our lord 2005, wouldn’t miss any of it.
When I finally made it to Seattle at age 27 (this timing was, somehow, not on purpose), I cried when I saw the Space Needle. Then I got to work. I had a to-do list a decade-plus in the making. I needed to force myself to cry at Brandon Lee’s grave, which proved to be a challenge; the site he shares with his father, Bruce, was beset by tourists. I suppose it can’t rain all the time. I needed to visit Bad Animals, the recording studio formerly owned by Ann and Nancy Wilson of Heart, a Seattle institution. I needed to visit the apartment complex that served as the center of the action in Singles—where Chris Cornell watched Matt Dillon crank TAD’s “Jinx” so loud on the apology sound system he installed in Bridget Fonda’s car that all the windows exploded; where Dillon’s band Citizen Dick (hit single: “Touch Me I’m Dick”), AKA Pearl Jam, held practice sessions; where Kyra Sedgwick checked out Campbell Scott’s record collection after meeting him at an Alice in Chains show.
And I needed to go to Kurt Cobain’s last place of residence. I had built this up so incredibly in my mind, but it turns out that all you need is a car and Google Maps to get to his quiet, hilly, rich neighborhood. I got as close to the house as I could on foot, which was shockingly close, not exactly sure what I was hoping to see. I sat on the bench in Viretta Park, the square of green space next door, on which other worshippers scrawled Kurt’s words back to him. I wrote something with the Sharpie I brought for the occasion. My offering was a lyric from “Drain You”: “One baby to another said, I’m lucky to have met you.”
Could I pretend that I didn’t spend the early aughts, my formative years, listening to the greatest hits of 1993? Could I reminisce about being obsessed with Julian Casablancas instead of Kurt Cobain? Sure, but four years of my online journal would disprove that in two or three entries chosen at random, as would my constitution as an adult. (Late in my 20s, I saw L7 at Riot Fest in Chicago, and Kat Bjelland from Babes in Toyland was watching from the wings. Guess what? I cried.) Was I the only person in my high school who knew about Andrew Wood? Probably, but that’s because everyone was listening to Interpol and Amnesiac by Radiohead. Is it cool that I was obsessed with Singles? No. The fact that a major studio released a grunge movie was the opposite of cool, even though it was directed by Cameron Crowe, who was Mr. Nancy Wilson at the time. Is it cool that I thought Temple of the Dog, by their powers combined, was the zenith of music in 2002? No.
But the heart is a lonely hunter. When your only chance to see an approximation of Kurt Cobain is to go to a Weird Al show and watch him perform “Smells Like Nirvana” in a crunchy blond wig, you grab it. When Chris Cornell is scheduled to play the Electric Factory in Philly in 2007, even though it’s to promote a mediocre solo album—the one with the James Bond song—you go, because he’s going to sing “Spoonman.” When Pearl Jam rolls through town and stops at the Tweeter Center in Camden, New Jersey, you are there, because it is now your church, and for one night only, God—er, Dog—is in the house.

Lydia Pudzianowski is a writer living in Bucks County, PA, with her husband and cat. She would move to Seattle, but Positively Records is right down the street.