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weekendwarriorblog · 4 years

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30 Minute Experiment: 90s Alternative Bands #30ME

I warned very early on that I would eventually throw it out to you, the reader -- all two of you -- to come up with a few topics for me to write about. With that in mind, my music-savvy pal Peter Foy has thrown out the topic of ‘90s Alternative Bands to write about in today’s #30ME. And so, prepare yourself for thirty minutes of me writing about Nickelback and Creed... ready?

Well, no, actually I’d consider Nickelback and Creed the alternative to good ‘90s bands (see what I did there?) but since I have insisted that I can spend 30 minutes writing about anything, and I do have some experience with ‘90s alternative bands, it seems like I can ramble for about 30 minutes (now 28 minutes) about the topic... but of course, I’m gonna make this more about me.

You have to remember (in case you didn’t know me this long) that I moved to New York City in 1987 mainly for the music and music scene and being able to work in music. I was a pretty big-time anglophile, regularly buying the weekly British music trades -- Sounds, NME, Melody Maker (the latter being my fave) -- and avidly ingesting all of the new bands coming out of England and then eventually Boston, Seattle and even New York. By the advent of the ‘90s, I was working at a pretty cool downtown recording studio called the Magic Shop and started working with a lot of the cool bands and artists that I loved, including They Might Be Giants and Sonic Youth.

So I had a pretty good entry into what was going on in terms of alternative bands by the time the ‘90s came around, and it led to a lot of surprises, such as the time when the really cute blonde background singer came into a session and was telling me about this new band she loved called “Nirvana.” Granted, I had already been into Nirvana since they started off in the ‘80s. I’d even seen them on their tour with fellow Sub Pop band, Tad, at a small club called The Pyramid, and again with Jesus Lizard at Maxwell’s in Hoboken. (I must have still been living in Jersey City at that time since I rarely went out there for bands. Also saw My Bloody Valentine there.)

I didn’t know a ton of people into the bands I liked, including Nirvana, so when this bright, cheery and yes, very cute, woman proclaimed she was into Nirvana, I was pretty shocked, in fact. Obviously, “Smells like Teen Spirit” and “Nevermind” had come out by then, so it should’t have been too big a surprise, but I still saw Nirvana as this grungy alternative band that only former stoners, classic rock and punk enthusiasts like me might get. Mind you, I’d be working with Nevermind producer Butch Vig within a few short months after that, but it was still a pretty major sea change for me (and also for the Magic Shop, as I’d learn from owner Steve Rosenthal many decades later).

Just a bit of an aside that I left the Magic Shop under not great circumstances that I won’t go into as they are very long in the past, and me and Steve become friends once again. In fact, it was seeing the Magic Shop on David Grohl’s Sonic Highways show that made me reach out to Steve and swing by the Magic Shop to see how it changed. There were still signs of my presence even 20 years later!).

The point of that aside is that the success of NIrvana and the sudden interest by American labels in signing American bands, including some of the grungy New York City descendants of the ‘80s New York noise scene allowed me to work with some very cool (and very noisy) New York bands in the ‘90s.

Around this same time, and I may have mentioned this in an earlier #30ME, is that as the ‘90s went along, I stopped buying all of the British trades, I stopped buying a stack of import records every week with my hard-earned cast, and I started focusing more on my studio work. By the late ‘90s, I was working at Sam Ash in the computer department and my focus had shifted more towards digital and computer recording as Pro Tools was becoming more available to the masses who couldn’t afford a music system that costs tens of thousands of dollars.

Getting back to the actual topic, it was interesting to see how this change in technology, as well as my own changes in terms of listening to music, led to changes in the bands that I worked with at The Magic Shop who were now making music (quite literally in one case) on their laptops and shifting away to the live recordings that I used to enjoy doing.

I could tell you tons of stories about the records I worked on as an engineer and eventually producer, but the ones I liked most were the bands that I could just set up in a live room with baffles between the drums and amps, and I could get a pretty decent recording to tape. I could also tell you about the famous two-day session I did with Chan Marshall, better known as Cat Power, recording and mixing two records in Sonic Youth’s rehearsal space with Steve Shelley and Tim Foljahn (from Two Dollar Guitar and many other bands from that time). It was a pretty amazing experience knowing that two records came out of those sessions but in my defense, I was mixing the songs (from 8 track) while a very loud rock band played in the rehearsal space above us.

Anyway, my thoughts on alternative bands of the ‘90s definitely shifted as the years went on, and I ended up missing a lot of bands like Suede and Pulp and even Supergrass (who would later become faves of mine) because I wasn’t paying as much attention to what was going on in England. I also wasn’t watching as much MTV whereas I was an avid viewer of “120 Minutes” for most of the late ‘80s and early ‘90s.

It’s hard to really get into new bands without having those things keeping me up to date on what was coming from other places than New York, but sometime around the late ‘90s or early ‘00s, I got my first iPod and started putting a lot more music in there as I ran around New York to gigs, so I’d have something to listen to on the subway. I was doing more computer tech work than recording/mixing in those days but still not really doing any writing about movies as of yet.

The ‘00s was a bit more of a transitional phase as I moved away from music and studio work into movies and writing about them, but that also kept me listening to music and I was still regularly going to concerts and discovering new bands.

But for me, the ‘90s was almost as much as seeing the bands I was getting into in the ‘80s going through changes, seeing them playing bigger concerts and festivals like Lollapalooza, more than really getting into some of the new bands that I would sometimes discover later.

The cool part about trying to stay on top of music during the early ‘90s is that it meant that I got to see bands like My Bloody Valentine and Blur and Radiohead VERY early in their careers, as well as having first prints of many of their earlier records, on vinyl no less. I gotta find them and see if they’re in good enough shape to sell and get some money once record shops reopen. I honestly wouldn’t even know where to find what those records are worth but I sure as shit am not going to make the mistake I made with my comic collection and sell them for way below what they’re worth. (I probably haven’t gotten into it too much but spending 40 years collecting comics and then getting WAY less than I’d hope for my collection due to my circumstances, it was definitely the worst moment of 2019. What is going on right now will probably be my low point of 2020.)

So yeah, you can ask me about ‘90s music that I was into, and I can easily go off on a 30-minute or longer ramble about the bands and music I loved and listened to but I still feel (and this is more recently) that I missed out on quite a bit, maybe because I was already starting to get pretty picky and choosy about what I liked and didn’t like and didn’t even want to bother to listen to. Nickelback and Creed definitely fall into the latter category but there were plenty of other bands that I know found quite a huge fanbase during those years (Better Than Ezra? Kings of Leon?) who I honestly couldn’t name a single song.

Another part of this that I should have mentioned before is that by the ‘90s I was listening to a lot less radio. WLIR slowly went away and it wasn’t that easy to get its signal in New York City, but I also listened to the radio more when I was driving around, something that I stopped quite soon after moving to NYC. My last driver’s license expired in 1992.

But driving is probably a story for another day and another #30ME. I hope others will throw out a few topics to use as the basis for a #30ME, cause while I’m finding these 30 minutes to be quite cathartic every day, I’m also running around of things that I want to talk about without getting into some dicier political topics. Hopefully it won’t come to that.

And with that, my time is up...

#30ME #30MInuteExperiment #90sAlternativeBands

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