First of all , I have a confession - I do not have any Nirvana albums on my hard drive to listen to while I type this. Instead, i am listening to Mudhoney's "Superfuzz Bigmuff", which I regard as superior to anything Nirvana put out.
If presented with a choice between having to listen to Nirvana's In Utero or the entire Ace of Base catalog, I'd probably go with Ace of Base. That's not a joke. I find In Utero insufferable. More on that later.
Starting back at the beginning, I first heard Nirvana on my thirteenth birthday while riding in the car with my older sister, a few days before my first day of seventh grade. The song was "Smells Like Teen Spirit", and it was just starting to get a little airplay on the local college radio station. If I remember correctly, I initially disliked the song because the melody of the "with the lights out / it's less dangerous / here we are now / entertain us " was catchy, but I couldn't yet make out the words. It's usually a good sign when something like that bothers me, and as the days went on and I started hearing the song more often, it grew on me.
I was sitting at a lunch table packed with former Pettengill Elementry students one day towards the end of the first week of school. We were discussing music, and I mentioned "Smells Like Teen Spirit". Most of the other people at the table hadn't heard it, and the one who claimed to have called me a fag for liking them. Coincidentally, that person later turned out to be gay.
I actually liked "Come As You Are" better than "Teen Spirit", and to this day, it remains one of the few songs actually written by Nirvana that I genuinely love. I remember having an awkward conversation with a friend about the video and how I really liked the melody. She told me that she really didn't like Nirvana because they had a song called lithium.
I didn't end up getting "Nevermind" until much later, but I did have a cd single of "Teen Spirit" that I got in a trade along with a copy of Final Fantasy II for the SNES in exchange for Final Fight. I feel like I got the better part of that deal, even if the liner notes to the single smelled like skunk weed and patchouli.
About a year later, "Incesticide" came out, and I got it for Christmas, along with Minor Threat's complete discography.
(I just switched up, and am listening to Azam Ali's "From Night to the Edge of Day" because it's getting late and I want to unwind.)
"Incesticide" is a compilation of unreleased and older material from early singles, EPs and mix tapes. The best three tracks on the album, in my opinion, are a cover of Devo's "Turnaround" and a pair of Vaselines covers. Those two Vaselines covers, "Molly's Lips" and "Son of a Gun" are actually my favorite Nirvana recordings, which is why Incesticide is the only Nirvana album I still own. In case you're wondering, I sold my copies of "Nevermind" and "In Utero" at a garage sale about 18 years ago.
"In Utero" came out a few weeks into my freshman year of high school. I didn't like it. Maybe I am alone in this sentiment, but when I was severely depressed, suffering from insomnia because I couldn't get the image of my mother's brain pulsing through a crack in her skull and the tinny gurgle of blood choking her airways out of my head, just trying to make it through my day without losing it, listening to some rich junkie who has the world in the motherfucking palm of his hand whine and wallow in his own misery just didn't hold that much appeal for me.
For what it's worth, the MTV unplugged recording is pretty great, but
its always bugged me that the strongest songs on the album are the
covers. Plus, I hate the way Kurt sings the word "birds".
Hindsight plays a role in my generally negative appraisal of Nirvana, and especially In Utero. Once it stopped being shocking, Kurt Cobain's suicide really just pissed me off. Not just the media attention or his posthumous rise to iconic status, though that fucking droopy dog looking image that wound up plastered on shirts sold at Spencers and Hot Topic still pisses me off. I mean that the act itself really just pissed me off. I know that he was mentally ill and suffering from drug addiction and Crohn's disease, so his judgement was fucked, but he had a wife and kid and countless other people who gave a shit about him. Instead of getting help, he ate a fucking gun.
Even before he offed himself though, my interest was shifting away from mainstream music and more towards punk and hardcore. As I mentioned in my last post, I was listening to the Sex Pistols a lot, along with Crass, punk and hip hop era Beastie Boys and the Dead Kennedys, and my sister had just introduced me to Green Day and the Bouncing Souls. A few months later, I'd run across Rancid, who had a much bigger impact on me.
....
Five years later, on the anniversary of his death, I was running a punk, oi! and hardcore radio show on WRBC. These kids kept calling in, asking me to play Nirvana and sobbing when I would refuse. It almost would have been funny, if they weren't so persistent and whiny.
Sunday, October 19, 2014
Friday, October 17, 2014
Damage Case #2: Never Mind the Bollucks, Here's The Sex Pistols
Let's talk about the Sex Pistols for a moment, shall we?
Never Mind the Bollocks, Here's the Sex Pistols is, in my opinion, the single best example of punk rock ever recorded. Sure, there are plenty of faults with the band, their formation, talent, originality, convictions and image. They were a punk-themed boy band manufactured by a guy who had previously managed the New York Dolls and failed to coax Cock Sparrer into the role he wanted. I don't think any of that is up for debate at this point.
The thing is, once you get past all the hype and Sid & Nancy bullshit, you have this timeless, genuinely awesome album. It's abrasive, brash, offensive, ballsy and angry. It delves into subject matter like abortion and the holocaust that are still taboo nearly 40 years later. In fact, it's such a solid album that it's kind of the punk equivalent of Dick & Jane. It's often the first punk album people explore and, frequently, that leads to people who have been fans of the genre for a while to start taking it for granted. I was totally guilty of that.
....
My first encounter with the Sex Pistols came one summer night when I was ten years old. My older sister, Kate, and her pen pal from Bangor were watching Sid & Nancy in the living room, and invited me to watch it with them. I was still very sheltered and the drug use in the movie made me really uncomfortable. I eventually walked out, not quite sure why anyone would want to watch people shoot up.
A few months later, however, I saw Return of the Living Dead at a Halloween party at my family's very liberal church, and decided that I wanted to be a punk after all. I asked Kate if she had any of the music from the ROTLD soundtrack. She didn't, but she gave me a tape with the Great Rock N Roll Swindle on one side and Ministry's "The Mind is a Terrible Thing to Taste" on the other.
I never made it past the weird Malcolm McLaren opening on Swindle, and just skipped over to the Ministry side because it was the loudest, hardest and fastest thing I had ever heard. Dumb decision, maybe. Whatever. I later played the Ministry side during my 6th Grade Christmas party after my teacher proclaimed her hatred for the New Kids on the Block Christmas album and asked if anyone else had music. I think that makes my misstep forgivable.
Over the next few years, I'd hear the "Anarchy in the U.K." and "God Save the Queen" pretty frequently on mix tapes, WRBC's Hardcore Happy Hour or while hanging out with my sister and her friends, but they weren't really that interesting to me.
Then I turned fifteen.
Fifteen was an ugly year for me. The summer of my fifteenth birthday opened with me finding my mother convulsing in a pool of blood after she had a seizure and split her head open. Meanwhile, my father's PTSD stemming from Vietnam had gotten to the point that he had to spend most of the Summer at the Togus VA hospital. No one really happened to notice that I was pretty severely traumatized by the whole experience because my family was just struggling to get by.
On top of all that wonderfulness, my parents had enrolled me at a private school that had claimed to be better equipped to handle my attention deficit disorder than Lewiston High School. So on top of suffering from severe insomnia, depression and a complete lack of self-worth, I was suddenly having to adjust to a new school that, among other things, was full of wealthy, waspy pricks.
Suddenly, the Sex Pistols music made a lot of sense to me. Beyond everything else, they were a symbol that I could hide behind when I wanted the entire world to just fuck off and leave me alone. But they also had some pretty great songs. I could relate to "No Feelings" and "Pretty Vacant", that desire to kick people in the head, mocking people's joy, ridiculing how hollow the beautiful, happy people around me seemed.
One of the worst parts about the school was that the bus ride in and out took nearly an hour. I'd have to get up at five and wouldn't get home until nearly six thirty most days. I spent the bulk of those rides slumped up against a window near the back of the bus, drowning out the world with my walkman. "Never Mind the Bollucks" was one of my albums of choice for those rides.
...
Eventually, I stopped listening to them. Maybe I burned out on them, or maybe I just scratched the CD too much for it to play in my stereo. Whatever the reason, I don't remember listening to them very often between the ages of seventeen and thirty-two.
One day, while cleaning out my apartment during my move from 77 to 48 Congress Street, I was listening to the Casualties station on Pandora, when "No Feelings" came on. Suddenly I was hearing the song with an adult set of years that had been actively listening to and learning about music for a good fifteen years, dissecting and interpreting its meaning and appreciating how influential it had been for so many bands I'd fallen in love with since. It was like a revelation. I dug out my damaged copy of "Never Mind the Bollucks" and attempted to burn it onto my computer. I managed to copy most of the songs, and downloaded the remainder. It held up. Hell, I liked it better. It's been on a pretty steady rotation ever since.
Never Mind the Bollocks, Here's the Sex Pistols is, in my opinion, the single best example of punk rock ever recorded. Sure, there are plenty of faults with the band, their formation, talent, originality, convictions and image. They were a punk-themed boy band manufactured by a guy who had previously managed the New York Dolls and failed to coax Cock Sparrer into the role he wanted. I don't think any of that is up for debate at this point.
The thing is, once you get past all the hype and Sid & Nancy bullshit, you have this timeless, genuinely awesome album. It's abrasive, brash, offensive, ballsy and angry. It delves into subject matter like abortion and the holocaust that are still taboo nearly 40 years later. In fact, it's such a solid album that it's kind of the punk equivalent of Dick & Jane. It's often the first punk album people explore and, frequently, that leads to people who have been fans of the genre for a while to start taking it for granted. I was totally guilty of that.
....
My first encounter with the Sex Pistols came one summer night when I was ten years old. My older sister, Kate, and her pen pal from Bangor were watching Sid & Nancy in the living room, and invited me to watch it with them. I was still very sheltered and the drug use in the movie made me really uncomfortable. I eventually walked out, not quite sure why anyone would want to watch people shoot up.
A few months later, however, I saw Return of the Living Dead at a Halloween party at my family's very liberal church, and decided that I wanted to be a punk after all. I asked Kate if she had any of the music from the ROTLD soundtrack. She didn't, but she gave me a tape with the Great Rock N Roll Swindle on one side and Ministry's "The Mind is a Terrible Thing to Taste" on the other.
I never made it past the weird Malcolm McLaren opening on Swindle, and just skipped over to the Ministry side because it was the loudest, hardest and fastest thing I had ever heard. Dumb decision, maybe. Whatever. I later played the Ministry side during my 6th Grade Christmas party after my teacher proclaimed her hatred for the New Kids on the Block Christmas album and asked if anyone else had music. I think that makes my misstep forgivable.
Over the next few years, I'd hear the "Anarchy in the U.K." and "God Save the Queen" pretty frequently on mix tapes, WRBC's Hardcore Happy Hour or while hanging out with my sister and her friends, but they weren't really that interesting to me.
Then I turned fifteen.
Fifteen was an ugly year for me. The summer of my fifteenth birthday opened with me finding my mother convulsing in a pool of blood after she had a seizure and split her head open. Meanwhile, my father's PTSD stemming from Vietnam had gotten to the point that he had to spend most of the Summer at the Togus VA hospital. No one really happened to notice that I was pretty severely traumatized by the whole experience because my family was just struggling to get by.
On top of all that wonderfulness, my parents had enrolled me at a private school that had claimed to be better equipped to handle my attention deficit disorder than Lewiston High School. So on top of suffering from severe insomnia, depression and a complete lack of self-worth, I was suddenly having to adjust to a new school that, among other things, was full of wealthy, waspy pricks.
Suddenly, the Sex Pistols music made a lot of sense to me. Beyond everything else, they were a symbol that I could hide behind when I wanted the entire world to just fuck off and leave me alone. But they also had some pretty great songs. I could relate to "No Feelings" and "Pretty Vacant", that desire to kick people in the head, mocking people's joy, ridiculing how hollow the beautiful, happy people around me seemed.
One of the worst parts about the school was that the bus ride in and out took nearly an hour. I'd have to get up at five and wouldn't get home until nearly six thirty most days. I spent the bulk of those rides slumped up against a window near the back of the bus, drowning out the world with my walkman. "Never Mind the Bollucks" was one of my albums of choice for those rides.
...
Eventually, I stopped listening to them. Maybe I burned out on them, or maybe I just scratched the CD too much for it to play in my stereo. Whatever the reason, I don't remember listening to them very often between the ages of seventeen and thirty-two.
One day, while cleaning out my apartment during my move from 77 to 48 Congress Street, I was listening to the Casualties station on Pandora, when "No Feelings" came on. Suddenly I was hearing the song with an adult set of years that had been actively listening to and learning about music for a good fifteen years, dissecting and interpreting its meaning and appreciating how influential it had been for so many bands I'd fallen in love with since. It was like a revelation. I dug out my damaged copy of "Never Mind the Bollucks" and attempted to burn it onto my computer. I managed to copy most of the songs, and downloaded the remainder. It held up. Hell, I liked it better. It's been on a pretty steady rotation ever since.
Thursday, October 16, 2014
Damage Case #1: Rancid
I've decided to just start listening to my favorite bands/albums and just write about my experiences relating to them. I'm not sure where it will take me, but I'm just hoping to get the creative juices flowing with it.
....
Two years ago, my wife came back from the local market up the street, looking perplexed. When I asked her what was up, she explained that this kid at the store had seen our two year old son's D.I.Y. Rancid shirt and felt the need to tell her that he had liked their first album, but felt that they had subsequently sold out. She was really confused as to why this fucking kid felt the need to talk shit about my kids shirt. I explained to her that he was an elitist, hipster fuck.
Rancid are, hands down, my favorite band of all time. They're the band that made me fall in love with guitars and the band that my friends and I bonded over in high school. They've consistently put out great punk albums for the last twenty years. They've done more to support the worldwide punk, oi!, ska and psychobilly scenes than any other band I can think of. They've employed friends of mine and given smaller bands chances to open for them.
But of course, Rancid committed the cardinal sin of being slightly successful in the mid '90s. Therefore, idiot kids who were still shitting their diapers when that happened who feel the need to score street cred spew canned put downs when you mention that you like them. Its a fucking bullshit attitude that runs deep through the punk community, this double standard not applied to the Clash, the Cramps or any of the older bands by people hoping to count coup.
....
I purchased Rancid's "Let's Go!" at the Strawberries in Auburn on the Friday of the first week of my sophomore year of high school. My friend Erin worked there, and I'd gone in hoping to see her. It was a random purchase. I didn't realize the Op Ivy connection, and just picked it up because of the picture of the band on the back of the cover looked badass.
I will never forget hearing the opening feedback of "Nihilism" through my headphones for the first time. It was like a sucker punch to the gut. I immediately fell in love. They were singing about their lives, their friends, their neighborhoods, feeling poor and alienated. It was the first time I really ever felt a personal connection to music. It changed my fucking life. I work in a record store today because I want to facilitate that experience to other fucked up kids.
....
It was late in the afternoon. The North Hamptom Fairgrounds were hot and dusty. I'd fought my way to the front of the crowd to see Rancid's set at Warped Tour '98. They were going on late and would only be playing a short set. The rumor I'd heard was that The Cherry Poppin' Daddies had been little bitches when it was raining during their scheduled performance time because they didn't want to damage their zoot suits. This, in turn, had cut into the time allotted for Dropkick Murphy's set. Now, this was Dropkick's only show in the Boston area that summer, and the New England punk and skinhead scene was there in full force to see them. Rancid had supposedly volunteered to give up some of their set time so that DKM could play a full set.
It was over 100 degrees, and water cost an arm, a leg and a decent view of the stage. I opted for dehydration and claustrophobia, and clutched the guard rail to see my favorite band. I honestly don't remember all that much of the actual performance because I was so uncomfortable. But at the end of the set, I found myself directly in front of Lars as he was unplugging his guitar. He had a bottle of water at his feet. Slightly starstruck, I summoned up some courage and asked him if I could have what was left of his water. He smiled and passed it over to me. It was like the kid getting the football players towel.
....
About eleven or twelve years ago, I was looking through the rockabilly vinyl at Amoeba Records on the Sunset Strip while visiting my cousin in LA. I noticed this guy on the other side of the bin dressed in a floppy hat and a loose fitting white shirt had a 101ers tattoo on his neck. After a moment of disbelief, I realized that it was, in fact, Tim Armstrong. We made eye contact and exchanged nods, then went back to browsing. Two music nerds being nerdy in Music Nerd Mecca. It was this amazing, quiet moment, something I will always treasure.
....
Two years ago, my wife came back from the local market up the street, looking perplexed. When I asked her what was up, she explained that this kid at the store had seen our two year old son's D.I.Y. Rancid shirt and felt the need to tell her that he had liked their first album, but felt that they had subsequently sold out. She was really confused as to why this fucking kid felt the need to talk shit about my kids shirt. I explained to her that he was an elitist, hipster fuck.
Rancid are, hands down, my favorite band of all time. They're the band that made me fall in love with guitars and the band that my friends and I bonded over in high school. They've consistently put out great punk albums for the last twenty years. They've done more to support the worldwide punk, oi!, ska and psychobilly scenes than any other band I can think of. They've employed friends of mine and given smaller bands chances to open for them.
But of course, Rancid committed the cardinal sin of being slightly successful in the mid '90s. Therefore, idiot kids who were still shitting their diapers when that happened who feel the need to score street cred spew canned put downs when you mention that you like them. Its a fucking bullshit attitude that runs deep through the punk community, this double standard not applied to the Clash, the Cramps or any of the older bands by people hoping to count coup.
....
I purchased Rancid's "Let's Go!" at the Strawberries in Auburn on the Friday of the first week of my sophomore year of high school. My friend Erin worked there, and I'd gone in hoping to see her. It was a random purchase. I didn't realize the Op Ivy connection, and just picked it up because of the picture of the band on the back of the cover looked badass.
I will never forget hearing the opening feedback of "Nihilism" through my headphones for the first time. It was like a sucker punch to the gut. I immediately fell in love. They were singing about their lives, their friends, their neighborhoods, feeling poor and alienated. It was the first time I really ever felt a personal connection to music. It changed my fucking life. I work in a record store today because I want to facilitate that experience to other fucked up kids.
....
It was late in the afternoon. The North Hamptom Fairgrounds were hot and dusty. I'd fought my way to the front of the crowd to see Rancid's set at Warped Tour '98. They were going on late and would only be playing a short set. The rumor I'd heard was that The Cherry Poppin' Daddies had been little bitches when it was raining during their scheduled performance time because they didn't want to damage their zoot suits. This, in turn, had cut into the time allotted for Dropkick Murphy's set. Now, this was Dropkick's only show in the Boston area that summer, and the New England punk and skinhead scene was there in full force to see them. Rancid had supposedly volunteered to give up some of their set time so that DKM could play a full set.
It was over 100 degrees, and water cost an arm, a leg and a decent view of the stage. I opted for dehydration and claustrophobia, and clutched the guard rail to see my favorite band. I honestly don't remember all that much of the actual performance because I was so uncomfortable. But at the end of the set, I found myself directly in front of Lars as he was unplugging his guitar. He had a bottle of water at his feet. Slightly starstruck, I summoned up some courage and asked him if I could have what was left of his water. He smiled and passed it over to me. It was like the kid getting the football players towel.
....
About eleven or twelve years ago, I was looking through the rockabilly vinyl at Amoeba Records on the Sunset Strip while visiting my cousin in LA. I noticed this guy on the other side of the bin dressed in a floppy hat and a loose fitting white shirt had a 101ers tattoo on his neck. After a moment of disbelief, I realized that it was, in fact, Tim Armstrong. We made eye contact and exchanged nods, then went back to browsing. Two music nerds being nerdy in Music Nerd Mecca. It was this amazing, quiet moment, something I will always treasure.
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