Good Songs XIX

Box of Rain – Grateful Dead

Would? – Alice In Chains

No Excuses – Alice In Chains

Low – Cracker

Loser – Beck

Killing in the Name Of – Rage Against the Machine

Me and Julio – Paul Simon

50 Ways to Leave Your Lover – Paul Simon

You Can Call Me Al – Paul Simon

New Style – The Beastie Boys

Verse Chorus Verse – Nirvana

Spin the Bottle – Juliana Hatfield

Mrs. Robinson – The Lemonheads

Into Your Arms – The Lemonheads

L.A. Medley – Jane’s Addiction

Been Caught Stealing – Jane’s Addiction

My Time – Jane’s Addiction

Rock & Roll – Jane’s Addiction

Sympathy – Jane’s Addiction

Fee – Phish

Linger – The Cranberries

If this playlist or mix tape had a smell, it would reek of Keystone Light or Milwaukee’s Best. This tape was created sometime in the spring of 1994 and it features a lot of the songs that my friend Archie and I would listen to while we sat in our dorm rooms, played cards or Sega Genesis and drank.

When I went to Merrimack College in the mid-1990s, the school was in a strange place. It was beginning a transition from a small Catholic college that didn’t have many students living on campus, to what it is now: a medium-sized Catholic college with a good amount of kids living on campus. There were advantages to attending a small college: most people knew who you were (which could also be a disadvantage) and the classes were smaller. But there were disadvantages; mainly the social life could be incredibly dull*. 

* Merrimack did have fraternities, but there was no need for them. Merrimack was located in North Andover and Andover, MA and both towns had laws strictly forbidding frat houses – not that it would matter, the rent for places in those two towns were astronomical. Many of the fraternity houses were located in the next city over: Lawrence. Freshman year, the parties were fun but as we got older, the parties became lame. The frat dudes didn’t want us there, which is understandable since we were guys. Who wanted more guys at a party? We’d end up paying $5 for a cup of skunky beer, which was refilled after you waited in line for 20 minutes, the cops would inevitably show up around 10:00 and we’d have to go home. After awhile, it wasn’t worth the trip to leave campus.

There were parties in the on-campus apartments, but we were sophomore guys and never got invited because, again, who wants more guys at a party? And most of my friends didn’t have the cash or the fake IDs to get into Boston bars. Therefore we had to drink in our tiny dorm rooms—which by the way, were dry, so we had to sneak our alcohol past resident assistants working the front door, days in advance*.

* I’m not even going to front and nostalgically say how sweet each beer tasted because you had to work to bring it up to your room. It sucked. There was nothing fun or romantic or cool about sneaking beer into your dorm room. Take this from a person who was busted doing this.

Archie had good music taste and we listened to a lot of Jane’s Addiction that spring – he was a big fan of the band. And I became obsessed with the group too, especially their first CD. Their first CD makes up a bulk of this tape and I’m surprised that I didn’t include “Jane Says” because I listened to that song a lot when I was a college sophomore.

Like I wrote about during the last entry, “L.A. Medley” hit me in a couple of areas: it comingled my old obsession (the Doors, most of the song was an “L.A. Woman” cover) with my new obsession (Jane’s Addiction), it was from a live bootleg CD (so exciting, so rare!), Perry Farrell was cool (he was the face of Lollapalooza) and the band had broken up (so I could wallow about missing them – I saw them play live twice in the coming years). Basically it had everything 1994 Byron was looking for in a group.

And I still think that 1994 Byron is right as Jane’s Addiction is a great group to listen to—especially their pre-Kettle Whistle/pre-reunion stuff. “Been Caught Stealing” was their break-through hit and was on heavy rotation on MTV back in the day. When I first saw it, the video seemed strange in that it featured a bunch of weird-looking people* ripping off food from a dimly lit and dirty supermarket. Added to that montage were quick shots of Farrell with nylons stretched over his head singing, which is an image that’s difficult to forget.

* Looking at the video now, the people weren’t really strange looking, they looked like folks you run into every day. Twenty five years ago, that looked “strange” because MTV was wall-to-wall beautiful people. On MTV, a person with normal body proportions and regular facial features looked grotesque and odd.

When grunge and alternative music exploded, I don’t know if Jane’s Addiction ever really got the mainstream credit that they deserved and that’s probably because they weren’t in the spotlight for too long. Both them and the Red Hot Chili Peppers were both LA-based bands that didn’t kowtow to the glitzy, hair-metal music that was popular at the time. Their sound wasn’t as polished, it was a bit more funky and sludgy at the same time (if that makes sense). The guitars were still fast, but the song lyrics were a bit more thoughtful, a bit more real than anything that Poison or Motley Crue were putting out at the time.

Jane’s Addiction broke up just a hair before the alternative music wave crashed into the mainstream. If they had stayed together, would they have been as popular as the Red Hot Chili Peppers? I don’t know. But it is interesting to think of a world where the RHCP broke up in 1991 and the JA kept making music together for over 30 years.

The Paul Simon tracks aren’t me thinking that I was Merrimack College’s answer to Lorne Michaels, but those songs were the ones that we listened to most when we were drinking. Now that I have children, “Me and Julio” has taken on a different connotation. The song was included on “The Muppets” (the Jason Segal remake – which was actually quite excellent) and my kids begged us to listen to this song over and over and over again. A request my wife and I complied with because, this song is awesome.

The Nirvana and Beastie Boy tracks are from an album called “No Alternative” which collected many of the best acts of the day—there was at least one song from every one of my favorite bands (Beasties, Nirvana, Soundgarden, the Breeders, Matthew Sweet) at the time, except for Pearl Jam—and the money was donated to AIDs relief. The Beastie Boy song is a live version of “The New Style” and the Nirvana cut is one of the “hidden tracks” that bands used to do back in the day.

A hidden track referred to a song being at the very end of the CD. It was never listed on the track list but sometimes, if you let a CD continue playing after the end of the last song, it would pop up. Sometimes, you’d have to listen for up to 20 minutes to get the hidden track, which was annoying (and scary – if you forgot that there was a bonus track) as hell, but it was a precursor to DVD Easter Eggs.

I told you that the 90s were a magical time!

It’s not often that something lives up to your imagination, but for one brief speck of time: I felt as that I had correctly foreseen my college experience. I made it through high school with decent grades, but I never studied for one test (aside from chemistry – God, I was terrible at chemistry). My philosophy was: I paid attention in class, I took notes, I did the homework; if I didn’t know the material at that point, then studying wasn’t going to help me. This is the rationale of a very lazy person.

However, I knew that college was going to be a different ball game, as I’d have to get serious and study because things were going to be much more difficult. The summer before college started, I was lying in my bed thinking about going to school outside of Amesbury for the first time and I began romanticized about late-night walks home from the library after cramming for a test. I had seen this scene a million times in countless movies about college and it seemed so cool: broken pencils and balled up papers, coffee cups stacked to the roof, the tell-tale signs of a person working his ass off to get a good grade. There was something very satisfying about it.

Fast forward to December of my freshman year, I was through studying for final exams (quick aside: not as glamorous as I envisioned!) and I was on my way home. It was snowing, but not very hard, there was a nip in the air and I was listening to the Cranberries “Linger” on my Walkman. And as I was walked down the street lamp-lined path to my dorm, it occurred to me that this was how I pictured this moment many months ago. Maybe not exactly, but the feeling of accomplishment that I imagined was exact. I felt good that I actually studied, I felt like I accomplished something, that I was finally becoming a responsible person.

After coasting through life and not really giving a shit, it was an amazing feeling that I did care.  

I once read that the sense of smell is linked most strongly to memory. But I think that a close second is your hearing, because every time I hear “Linger”; I feel that chill in the air, the snow falling gently on my face, the feeling of solitude and that sense of pride that one gets when they work hard and they’re prepared for the next day’s test.

As I was listening to that song this morning, I thought things may not be that great today, but they will be better tomorrow. It always is.   

Good Songs XVII

Would? – Alice in Chains

Sabotage – The Beastie Boys

Lucy in the Sky With Diamonds – The Beatles

Tones of Home – Blind Melon

Cannonball – The Breeders

Fire Woman – The Cult

Peace Frog – The Doors

Box of Rain – Grateful Dead

Rock N’ Roll All Nite – KISS

Alison’s Starting to Happen – The Lemonheads

My Sister – The Juliana Hatfield Three

Is There Any Love in Your Heart – Lenny Kravitz

LA Medly – Jane’s Addiction

Dazed and Confused – Led Zeppelin

Some Day I Suppose – Mighty Mighty Bosstones

Heart Shaped Box – Nirvana

Elderly Woman Behind a Counter in a Small Town – Pearl Jam

Fee – Phish

Every Little Thing She Does is Magic – The Police

End of the World as We Know It – REM

Rocket – Smashing Pumpkins

Deeper Shade of Soul – Urban Dance Squad

Blister in the Sun – Violent Femmes

Fire – Jimi Hendrix

This is a very long (over an hour and a half) Good Songs mix, so I’m starting to write this entry as I’m listening to it. Technically this is a no-no, but since it’s my blog, I’ll allow it.

I recorded this mix in the spring of 1994 and when I was thinking of college-era Good Songs tapes, this is what I was thinking of. A good mix of newer grunge-era stuff, mixed with some older stuff. The good news is that aside from one song, there’s nothing there’s nothing really embarrassing. In fact, a vast majority of these songs appear on upcoming Good Songs, so this is kind of the back bone of the next generation of Good Songs.

That translates into, what I was listening to when I was 20 is basically what I’ve been listening to for the rest of my life. In retrospect, that’s more than a little depressing. The one thing that jumps out at me about this mix is that there is no rap or hip-hop. Another thing that jumps out at me is that the tracks (aside from Hendrix) are listed alphabetically by artist – which answers my question from earlier today, “Why did I start this mix off with Alice in Chains?” I like AIC, a lot actually, but I don’t remember liking them that much that I’d start a Good Songs with them.

Since the track listing is not based on how I was feeling, but the alphabet and these songs repeat in subsequent editions of the Good Song catalong, I’m going write out 24 quick thoughts (FIVE bonus thoughts!) on these 24 songs.

Alice in Chains – if there is a quintessential song that not only sums up the mid 90s and the zeitgeist that surrounds it, AIC’s “Would?” does the trick. AIC was one of the four most popular groups from the Pacific Northwest and this song is featured prominently in Cameron Crowe’s ode to Seattle “Singles”. With its tuned-down guitars and lyrics that are dark, depressing and full of self-involved angst, it perfectly captures the mindset of Generation X. Layne Staley essentially heroined himself to death a few years later, which also captures the mindset of that same generation.

The Beastie Boys – this is my favorite video ever. And there’s nothing even close. But when I think of the group, I think about the two times I saw them live: once at a gym at the University of New Hampshire (with the Rollins Band and Ice Cube’s group Da Lench Mob opening) and once at Lollapalooza. The former site was excellent, the latter was a dystopian hellscape that actually featured the death of a concert goer. In 1994 Lollapalooza was held at the Quonset State Airport in Quonset, RI. It felt like 100 degrees, there was no shade, no water and most of us were completely dehydrated thanks to the amount of alcohol we consumed in the 50-mile traffic jam on the way to the show. The lineup was awesome: A Tribe Called Quest, The Beastie Boys, the Breeders, L7, Smashing Pumpkins and Georgeo Clinton and the P-Funk All Stars. The venue sucked. Hard.

The Beatles – pretty good band from Liverpool. Or so I’m told. This is their first appearance on a Good Songs tape and I’m sure the lads are touched. A real crowning achievement in their careers. Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds is the greatest psychedelic song ever recorded. Like the B-Boy’s “Sabotage” video, nothing comes close.

Blind Melon – the death of BM’s lead singer, Shannon Hoon disproves the axiom that the death of lead singer increases a band’s popularity. Blind Mellon released another album after this one (this is the one with the Bee Girl song, “No Rain) but it did nothing and people remember this band for their Bee Girl mascot. Hoon also shows up as a background singer in the Guns N’ Roses’ “Don’t Cry” video, so there’s that.

The Breeders -  I still enjoy this song. The bass line is infectious and I like to think that lead singer Kim Deal is singing to an actual cannonball. Or some guy doing a cannonball in a public pool. There’s probably some real interpretation to what the cannonball represents, but there are times where I like the Sigmund Freud version: “Sometimes a cannonball is just a cannonball.” Due to seeing this video (conservative estimate) over a thousand times, I think that even though the drummer in this band is a dude, I have a feeling that he used to get the crapped kicked out of him by the rest of his band mates on a regular basis.

The Cult – I think that the name “The Cult” is among the best names for a band. I don’t know whether it has to do with an extreme form of fandom or whether it harkens to spooky, mind-controlly type guru thing from the 60s, but loving a band is a lot like being in a cult. Especially when you’re young. I remember getting all fired up if someone said they thought the Doors sucked. The Doors! “How could you not like the Doors,” I’d wail. “They’re awesome!” And then I’d make up some bullcrap about how Jim Morrison redefined the role of rock star, was a thinking man’s* front man and how the rest of the band were extremely talented musicians (true). Then I’d start attacking the other person’s favorite band. Get a grip 20-year-old Byron, it’s just a band. Who cares?

* Yes, I actually once said that. God.

The Doors – I mumbled something about the Doors in a previous paragraph.

Grateful Dead – I have a couple of very long and thoughtful paragraphs about a band’s fans and how that can have an adverse reaction to that particular band’s music. But I think that I’m going to save that until I reach the Dave Matthews portion of the Good Songs universe – and that’s coming. But it’s hard to get past Deadheads (especially when you’re in college) and the Grateful Dead. This is a really sweet song that invokes a lot of things that one should be: a sense of community, sharing, helping out a person in need. And it’s not overly preachy too, which is nice. Juxtapose this with the scene in “Freaks and Geeks” where Lindsay is dancing in her room and you feel good about listening to this song. But talk to a Deadhead about this song (or any Dead song) and you’ll be lead down a labyrinth of bootlegs, concerts that occurred before you were born and minutia. Forest for the trees guys, forest for the trees*.

* That’s just not a Huey Lewis and the News song either.

Kiss – you know how I feel about Kiss. I don’t think that I need to restate my thoughts on this band. But I will say this, the only reason this song is included on this tape is because I was going through my incredibly annoying “Dazed and Confused” phase. To say that I was compulsively obsessed with that movie is just scratching the surface. I often wondered where the characters were right then (not the actors, the characters). Did they go to college? Did they leave their town? Did they enjoy the Aerosmith concert? How did the football team do that season? How did the coming of punk influence the incoming freshmen? The first thing I looked up on a search engine wasn’t porn (that would probably be the second), it was “Dazed and Confused”. And while I was thinking about the characters, I did everything I could to warp back to those times: lava lamps, beaded doors, the music, TV shows on Nick at Nite, it’s probably why I was equally obsessed with “Sabotage”. I felt as if I was a man out of my own time.

The Lemonheads – this was the first and only real band that played a concert at our college in the four years I went there. And it was the day after Kurt Cobain shot and killed himself, so there was a rumor that Evan Dando wasn’t going to show up, you know, out of respect for Cobain. I managed to get really wasted, almost fight someone in the mosh pit and spent a lot of time screaming for them to play “Mrs. Robinson” (they did not). Oh yeah, I had a friend, who didn’t go to college at Merrimack, came to visit me and got so incredibly wasted that instead of passing out in my room (like he said that he would) he walked 10 miles to his girlfriend’s house. He did not inform me of this change in plans until I found a note on my desk hours after the show ended – for awhile, I thought he was dead.  It was an eventful night. Years later I made a mix CD for my wife, who was my girlfriend at the time. This was the first song on the tape. I’m lucky she thought it was sweet.

Juliana Hatfield – if you were a woman and could play guitar, the early 90s were your salad days. I don’t think that there has ever been a time in popular music where women were so welcome to the show and weren’t treated primarily as sex objects. That being said, I had a big crush on Juliana Hatfield -- especially the image at the top of this entry. Feminism only goes so far, I guess.

Lenny Kravitz – as far as Lenny Kravitz songs goes, this is probably the best one out there. If that’s not damning with faint praise, I don’t know what is. From my understanding Kravitz is a notorious lady killer (I don’t mean that literally). But in this song he takes the point of view of jilted lover. He does a pretty good job of bitching and complaining about all the things she did to him. I bet Lisa Bonet tells people she doesn’t like this song, but really loves it. “Fuck you Lenny. How do you like it? Asshole.”

Jane’s Addiction – around this time, I really got into Jane’s Addiction. And this song was on a rarities album that my friend found in some rare record shop in Boston that cost at least $40 (big money back then). I downloaded it off iTunes for $1.29 a year ago. TECHNOLOGY! The beginning of the song is a cover the Doors’ “LA Woman” (which is still my favorite Doors song) and includes “Nausea” by X and “Lexicon Devil” by the Germs. At the time it married my two favorite bands and I still dig it. 

Led Zeppelin – this isn’t one of my favorite Zep songs, I guarantee I chose it because the movie was named after it. Man.

Mighty, Mighty Bosstones – in 1997 I was working at a job that I despised for a company that I hated. There was no email or internet connection (I worked for a bank and they were afraid we’d smuggle secrets out, I guess, no one knew who the internet worked back then) but we were able to listen to the radio. Most days I listened to Howard Stern in the morning (really low) and in the afternoon WBCN would come on and play music. This summer the MMBs blew up with the song “The Impression That I Get” and one day the DJ came on the air after the song and said, “Years from now when you hear this song, the first thing that pops into your mind will be the Summer of 1997.” And you know what, he’s right. Even when I hear another song by the MMB, that particular time pops into my head. I am so damn suggestible sometimes. I would have made a great cult member.

Nirvana and Pearl Jam – in 1994 if you were to ask someone who the more popular band was; Pearl Jam or Nirvana, I bet more would choose the former. Whether you base on album sales, concert sales or just accessibility, Pearl Jam was the clear winner, this is something that Bill Simmons writes about every so often. Pearl Jam had a friendly second album (“Vs.” over “In Utero”) and they were riding high. Cobain was unreliable, had a horrible wife and released an album meant to alienate fans*. Then Cobain shot himself and instantly became the martyred voice of a generation. Pearl Jam soldiered on, doing what they do and some how got slagged for not having a band member kill himself. It sucked that Cobain killed himself for a number of reasons (and this was always going to happen, I think) but the worst part was that there were a lot of “conversations” about what it meant to be a rock star and what were a rock star’s responsibilities and crap like that. Then OJ Simpson killed his wife and a waiter and everyone forgot about Kurt Cobain.

* I’ve read that In Utero was recorded to be the opposite of the “Nevermind”, in other words less poppy and relatable, because Cobain had grown to despise his new audience. The ones who were singing along to the chorus “Here we are now, entertain us” were the types of kids that beat the crap out of him when he was younger. While I’m sure he appreciated the irony, he knew that the audience were completely unaware.

Phish – I went to school with two guys with the last name Fee. They were both really funny, really cool dudes. I pray that’s the reason why I put this song on this tape because Phish is not my type of band. Though I will say that my skin still crawls when I hear the line, “Sliced him on the nipple” followed by a piece of paper being ripped. That’s just some good production, Vermont hippies.

The Police – I just finished a really good biography of the Clash called “Fashion is the Passion”. One of the things that made me laugh is just how much the Clash hated the Police. One example is when the replacement drummer for Topper Headon (I’m pretty sure it was Pete Howard) was brought on, he was on the bus minding his own business listening to a Police tape. The Clash’s manager bitched him out for a solid two hours, the dude was almost in tears. This is a good song though and I really like the ending parts where Sting is singing “There’s a big enough umbrella, but it’s always me that ends up getting wet” over and over like a mantra. That’s some self-loathing any kid can get behind.

REM – in 1995 I saw REM in concert because I thought that everyone in that band was going to be dead within two years. They were not and the concert was actually pretty good and the coolest part was the next day I went on-line to an REM usenet group where I was able to get a bootleg of the concert from some girl in Chicago. That’s when I realized that the Internet was going to be a big thing. The opening act of the REM show was none other than Radiohead. I’m not sure if they played “Creep” but if they didn’t, I was probably pissed.

Smashing Pumpkins – I never knew whether the word “smashing” in Smashing Pumpkins was a verb or an adjective. There is a huge difference. I saw them at Lollapalooza with the Beasties in Rhode Island and they were terrible. Their sound was shitty, they seemed drugged out, they just didn’t care.  Lead singer and Smashing Svengali Billy Corgan made guitarist James Iha tap dance for us, which seemed incredibly demeaning. Until the Pumpkins broke into the collective conscious in 1993, they were always this weird, ethereal, mysterious group. As much as I loved “Siamese Dream”, I kind of liked it that way better.

Urban Dance Squad – when I was in high school I really wanted this tape, but didn’t have a set of wheels. I would bug my friend to drive me to the mall (about a half hour away) and see if Sam Goody or Record Town or Tape World got “Mental Floss for the Globe”. More often than not, they didn’t. One fine day, one of those places did and I will never forget my friend’s words, “I hope that this tape is fucking awful.” Even if it was (it kind of was) I would tell him how great it was. Pretty much every day. I’m a hell of a good friend.

Violent Femmes – this band and especially this song is so college, the Violent Femmes Greatest Hits CD should come with every acceptance letter.

Jimi Hendrix – I’ve written over 2900 words. I can’t write anything about anything any more. Sorry Rover. San Dimas High School Football Rules!

Good Songs VIII

Kiss of Death – Dokken

Burning Like a Flame – Dokken

Epic – Faith No More

Falling to Pieces – Faith No More

Up All Night – Slaughter

Fly to the Angels – Slaughter

Never Enough – LA Guns

Ballad of Jayne – LA Guns

Cult of Personality – Living Colour

Glamour Boys – Living Colour

Type – Living Colour

Love Rears Its Ugly Head – Living Colour

Don’t Close Your Eyes – Kix

Cold Blood – Kix

Kickstart My Heart – Motley Crue

Doctor Feelgood – Motley Crue

Don’t Go Away Mad – Motley Crue

Same Old Situation – Motley Crue

Down Boys – Warrant

Currently, I am a marketer. Technically, I’m a product marketer and that can mean a lot of different things at a lot of different companies. However, the bulk of my job is understanding my product, crafting a message for that product and making sure that message gets to the buying public. Unless you have amazing brand recognition (Apple, Coca-Cola, McDonalds) getting that message out there can be difficult.

But that’s what I love about my job. I love determining what the product’s message and value props are going to be and figuring out a way to present it in a way that will make people reach into their wallets and pay my company their hard-earned money. That’s probably a crass way to put it, but that’s basically what my job boils down to.

One of the things that I would love to discover (and this is a discovery, more than an invention, thought I assume it could be argued either way) is an algorithm that will correctly predict the whims of the public. On a macro-level, I’m not sure if you need something like this. Normally, people will gravitate to something that has a ton of hype around it. Hype costs money, ergo if you have a ton of money you can get your hype and your customers. The trick is creating something worthwhile enough so that the hype can die down a bit and people will still actively seek out your product. The bottom line is, money helps.  

The algorithm that I would like to discover would operate  on the micro-level. Why do some towns and cities prefer Pepsi over Coke, Budweiser over Coors Light, Burger King over McDonalds. These hamlets have their regional favorites and there has to be a reason why. If you get enough of these micro-levels together, you get a chunk of the macro-level and start competing with the big guys.

The first two songs on this tape* sorta relate to this micro-level way of thinking.

* The next three Good Songs tapes were all created at the same time. They were broken up into Rock, Rap and Mix. As you might be able to tell from this tape, the first 14 songs are paired – a duo of songs from one tape. Except for some reason I really liked me some Motley Crue at this point, so I doubled the duo of Dr. Feelgood. Anyway, I’m not sure if I like this gimmick, it reminds me of those old “Two for Tuesdays” programs they’d run on the local radio station where you’d get two songs from the same artist. I have a feeling that I was influenced by MTV who was playing video blocks of the same type of music during the summer of 1990 and 91. At this point in my life, MTV was the Pied Piper, I’d pretty much buy anything that was in heavy rotation on MTV.

This micro-level of marketing refers to the band Dokken and my specifically high school. From any objectionable point-of-view there is no difference between Dokken and Ratt and LA Guns and Poison or any other mid-80s, LA heavy metal band. Like those bands, they were an amalgam of Led Zeppelin/Van Halen/Black Sabbath-influenced rock that placed a premium on looking a certain way (PRETTY!) and acting a certain way (obtuse and obnoxious). Also like those bands, Dokken didn’t do anything extraordinary. The lyrics weren’t anything special, the musicianship was mediocre and even the way that the singles were released (rockin’ one first, ballad second, whatever third) was all the same.

They were unoriginal soliders in a time where corporations were pumping out bands who were rockin’ by numbers. They were a disposable band that was an example of a successful musical formula.

For some reason, Dokken took ahold of my high school. Or at least the band took ahold of the cooler guys in my grade, which meant that the band Dokken had a heightened sense of awareness at Amesbury High School. It wasn’t “Dokken or Die” but I seem to remember that there were a lot of cafeteria conversations about whether Dokken guitarist was “Awesome”, “Fucking Awesome” or “Wicked Fucking Awesome”. On days when “Mr. Scary” was extra loud, there were some debates about whether Lynch was legitimately better than Jimi Hendrix or Jimmy Page.

I’m sure that every moderately popular band had an unexplained loyal following at every high school in America, so I don’t mean to single my high school out. I’m sure you could replace Lynch with Rikki Rocket or Richie Sambora or Mick Mars and the same conversations where taking place all throughout America at that time.

As a young person you have no real idea of what came before you but you have an endless amount of time to figure out where you heroes will rank. I thought that Jose Canseco would sail into the Hall of Fame on his first ballot, things happen. But what I’m most interested in is how did one high school in the middle of nowhere, Massachusetts have a slavish devotion to a completely forgettable and totally middle-of-the-road rock band? I’ve thought about this question for nigh 20 years and I don’t think that I ever figured out a good answer. Maybe an algorithm for predicting the trends of teenagers is dumb because there is too much randomness, but I don’t believe that. There should be an answer somewhere.

It’s been a long time since I’ve listened to Dokken* (actually, I do unironically enjoy the second song on this tape, “Burning Like a Flame”) but it’s interesting how hearing the opening riffs to “Kiss of Death” brings back those old high school memories. I never made a big deal of liking or disliking Dokken (in fact, I know I got “Back For the Attack” from the Columbia House tape club for a penny) but I’m not made of stone. I heard a bunch of people talking about a band, I listened to them a few dozen times, I thought that maybe I could get cool by osmosis, it didn’t work that way and I moved on. High school is a strange time.

* In the late 90s, MTV ran a retrospective Where-Are-They-Now special (this was pre-everyone having the internet and knowing where everyone is) on the heavy metal heroes of the late 80s. An interview with Dokken lead singer Don Dokken was surprising in just how unaware he was about his band’s place in the world was. He said that his band’s managers worked with Metallica at the time and would beg him and his mates not to fall in the trap of the LA scene of too much makeup, too much Aquanet, too much handkerchiefs, basically too much opulence. Be like Metallica they said and don’t follow the trends. The band ignored them and Dokken wistfully said—and I quote, “If we listened to them, we could have been Metallica.” No you wouldn’t, Don. No you wouldn’t.

I will not apologize for the Faith No More double-dip, though. Both of these songs were in heavy rotation on MTV and rock radio in the early 90s though not too many people remember the band itself. They had a modest hit later in the decade with the ironic cover of the Commodore’s “Easy (Like Sunday Morning)” but other than that, you didn’t hear too much about them. It’s easy to understand why because the group was ahead of its time. From the rock/rap melding to the band members’ detached, almost ironic sense of being, FNM had no business showing up in the self-absorbed stratosphere of the early 90s.

If you asked a person to tell you something about FNM, a majority would talk about the video for “Epic”, specifically the slow-motion video of a fish who had fallen out of its bowl and was gasping for breath. It wasn’t a particular shocking image, but for some reason it resonated with a lot of viewers. So much so that MTV News felt it was their duty to ask the band about the video. Lead guitarist Jim Martin glibly said, “Well, the fish deserved to be filmed too.” This answer was interesting on many levels in that a. it was a foolish “controversy” to be overly concerned about b. the visuals don’t matter, it’s supposed to be about the music. And c. the answer itself almost a non sequitor in that the interviewer obviously wasn’t concerned about the fish’s popularity but rather the fish’s well-being. Martin brought a sense of absurdity to the interview by turning an incredibly dumb question’s perception completely askew.

I watched a lot of MTV News and saw a lot of celebrities interviewed and that’s the only one that I remember because frankly, I don’t think that anyone else at that time could have given the same response.

Aside from Motley Crue and Living Colour (who I wrote about a few entries back) the rest of the bands are completely anonymous. A few quick hitters on what I remember from them:

Slaughter: the band that girls really loved, mainly because of Mark Slaughter. I thought that they might be kinda cool because I heard Gene Simmons “discovered” them and Gene let Mark wear his leather jacket in the “Fly to the Angels” video. Here’s a potentially embarrassing fact, if I get drunk and I have access to YouTube, I will probably play “Fly to the Angels” at least a half-dozen times. BTW, the line from "Up All Night", "Oh I wish we could stay up, 24 hours a day!" is perhaps the whiniest line ever song by a band that wanted to look cool or tough. Man, that was terrible. 

Kix: the name sounds like Kiss, but the band sounds like Great White. In fact, I get those two bands confused all the time. I owned the tape these two songs came from and I don’t think that I could name any other song these guys did.

LA Guns: I wonder if the Jayne from the “Ballad of Jayne” is the same Jane from Jane’s Addiction’s “Jane Says” (despite the spelling differences)? Probably not but  that last sentence holds the records for most times I’ve ever written the name Jane in any permutation of the name. I remember hearing that lead guitarist Tracii Guns was in a band with Axl Rose and that’s how the name Guns N Roses came to be. The story goes on to say that Axl kicked Tracii out and replaced him with Slash, but kept the name. Wikipedia says this story checks out, so good work AHS rumor mongers! Anyway, I always felt sorta bad for Guns and thought that he had to be kicking himself that he wasn’t actually in the multi-platinum band that was partly named after him.

Warrant: This band is usually short-hand for being part of the terrible rock scene that is being covered with this cassette. And for good reason, I suppose. I have no idea what a Down Boy is and I don’t remember caring too much. The one thing that I found refreshing about lead singer Jani Lane is that in that same MTV retrospective that I referred to earlier, he talks about going to the band’s record company in 1992 and seeing a huge poster of “Cherry Pie” hanging over the secretary’s desk. A year later, the poster was replaced by Alice In Chains. He then thought, “Crap. We’re probably in big trouble.”

He certainly was.