We've come to the part of the Top 19 where I no longer talked about these albums on Facebook. Even though they're still in the Top 19 I guess you can consider them honorable mentions or runners up to the Top 10 Facebook list.*
* This preamble seems highly unnecessary but so is this list.
On the list of these 15 or so albums (it actually might be more, I'm having a lot of fun writing these blog posts), this might be the album that I've listened to the least. I like it a lot, but this album and this band is really an amalgam of all the female bands that came out in the mid-90s that I enjoyed. From the Breeders to Juliana Hatfield to Belly to L7 to Garbage to Liz Phair to Jewel (yeah, I know) to Letters to Cleo to the Cranberries to Luscious Jackson to Hole*, there was something about a woman with a guitar that just got me.
Yes, all of these women were good looking and I'm sure that had something to do with it initially. And I know that sounds chauvinistic but beauty sort of wears off once you buy their CD and spend a lot of time listening to it. I'm not sure why the record industry started pushing female-lead bands, but I'm glad they did. It was a great alternative to the male-dominated rock songs that were ruling the charts at the time.
What made the female-lead rock band explosion so interesting is that for years, the music industry seemed to ignore females and guitars. Through the 80s (when I was growing up in music), rock and roll was male dominated. If you were a woman, you played pop. Maybe some R&B. The only women who rocked were Joan Jett, Lita Ford (who both were in the 70s sexploitation band "The Runaways") and Pat Benatar. They were considered anomalies and curiosities, not real "rockers" like Warrant or Winger. But they were. Those women fucking rocked harder than a lot of guys, because they had to. But they never seemed to be taken too seriously.
* Did I like Courtney Love? No. Like a lot of "serious" music fans, I spent a lot of the 90s blaming her for the death and subsequent profiteering of Kurt Cobain. Even before Cobain took his life, Love was cast as the Yoko Ono of the 1990s. Was this fair? I don't know. Possibly. Possibly not. Cobain was a troubled guy and I think that people who put their faith in him as the voice of a generation couldn't face that it was him that was letting them down, so they turned their vitriol towards Love. That being said, Love was also a loud, obnoxious, opportunistic, drug addled mess (though it's funny, we tend to worship men who are loud, obnoxious, opportunity, drug addled messes -- but that's a discussion for another day). But her band rocked. Whether Cobain or Smashing Pumpkins leader Billy Corgan wrote their songs, it doesn't matter; Hole fucking delivered. And I think that what was so maddening about Courtney Love. If she was a no-talent, it would be easier to dismiss her. But she was talented and she controlled the narrative and sometimes that's tough to wrap your brain around.
Veruca Salt was fronted by guitarist Nina Gordon and Louise Post with drummer Jim Shaprio and bassist Steve Lack marking up the rhythm section. You didn't really see Shapiro and Lack very much, the focus was on Gordon and Post. Their first single, "Seether" was a pretty big hit on MTV and that's when I first discovered the band. I recall hearing the single in 1994 and that's all I thought about.
I bought the album some time later and it's excellent, my favorite song of the 90s is on it: "Number One Blind". The video only aired on MTV a handful of times, which is borderline criminal. It really captures a time in my life when things were in a strange upheaval of where I knew that I was in one place, but I wasn't going to be there for too long. My educational journey was ending soon and the real world was coming on fast. I was an English major, but what the fuck does that get me in the job world?
The chorus, "Levolor, which of us is blind?" is haunting and has continued to stay with me for a long time. Not just because of the words, but the way that Gordon so ablely sings it. The dueling guitars through out the song also bring a sort of sadness that adds to the melancholy and diachotomy of the lyrics. "Be my blind. Be it all the time. Be it night or day. Take my sun away. Away." There's a push and pull in this song that just grabs me. I can't explain why or how, but every so often you land on a song that just nails you right.
"Number One Blind" from Veruca Salt does that.
A few years ago the band reunited (there was a rumor that Gordon and Post dissolved the band because one found out that the other was sleeping with Foo Fighter Dave Grohl) and I wanted to see them. This was during our time in Burlington when we had close to zero friends, so I couldn't ask anyone around here. None of my college friends wanted to go and for some reason, I didn't feel like going by myself, so I asked the priest who married Aly and I if he wanted to go. Our priest is an incredibly nice man, whose close to my age and has incredibly awesome musical taste. He deferred too. What sucked about not seeing them is that they played "Number One Blind".
The following year the came back into town in support of their newest album "Ghost Notes" (which is actually pretty awesome, you should check it out) and we suddenly had a group of friends in town. I asked my friend Ken if he wanted to go (he had never really heard of them before) and he agreed. And it was a great show. They didn't play "Number One Blind", but that was okay. The club that we saw them, the Paradise, is pretty small so we got really close to the band. And again, they ripped it up.
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