Happy birthday, Kurt Cobain

Happy birthday Kurt Cobain, shown here watching the first Lollapalooza tour with Dave Grohl at the Irvine Meadows Ampitheatre in 1991, two months before Nevermind's release. Dave later told Body Count's Ernie C that he and Kurt enjoyed their performance. I've got some quotes from Ernie and Talib Kweli about Nirvana's influence and their connection to Body Count in my book.

Scott Weiland

In 1996, MTV was running a short making-of documentary on Tiny Music... Songs from the Vatican Gift Shop, the upcoming third album by Stone Temple Pilots. The show gave more or less equal time to all four members, but the standout was the lead singer. With bright orange hair that almost didn't look dyed, a stylish goatee and sunken but alert eyes, he effortlessly drew the camera to him even when soon-to-be-standard hard rock riffs performed by his bandmates next to him. He danced like no one I had ever seen. He had an ongoing history of drug abuse (he's troubled!) and being dismissed by mainstream media critics (he's misunderstood!). And for a generation of kids reaching the age where they understood why adults liked Han Solo more than Luke Skywalker, Scott Weiland looked like the coolest man in the world.



Timing had something to do with it, and Weiland wouldn't be getting the respects he's getting this week if the media weren't being taken over by people who reached adolescence in the '90s. But timing was also Weiland's curse. STP's debut arrived right on the coattails of Nirvana and Pearl Jam, and critics were quick to bash them as copycats, even though they'd been playing grunge for years before Core in 1992. Yet they also arrived too soon, before anyone had any idea how bland and numerous the neo-grunge also-rans would get--it took countless Collective Souls and Seven Mary Threes for tastemakers to realize, whether or not they'd admit it, that maybe STP weren't so bad after all. Five years earlier or later, Stone Temple Pilots would have been hailed as rock saviors. Instead, they received the brunt of critics trying to prove how cool they were by pretending someone else wasn't.

A lot of the blame was thrown on Weiland, too handsome and ripped to portray the outsider he claimed to be. He sounded like a bully and a rapist in "Sex Type Thing", one of the most chilling portrayals of sexual assault in rock music. His baritone warble echoed Eddie Vedder's and Kurt Cobain's. Elitists turned up their noses for the same reasons they dismissed Led Zeppelin in the 70s--a bunch of cock-rock yahoos, ripping off better artists, with grudgingly infectious hooks. But the records kept selling, the hits stayed on the radio, and most amazingly, STP followed Weiland's lead into weirdness, getting trickier and lovelier with every step. The lush tones and arrangements of Tiny Music reflected the dream-pop of Weiland's lifelong hero, David Bowie, and the underrated No. 4 and Shangri-La Dee Da branched out into artsy cabaret and lounge-rock, amidst some of the band's heaviest songs. Weiland's solo 12 Bar Blues would be on Pitchfork best-of lists if it had Wayne Coyne's name and face on the cover. But of course, what he did best was rock, and did he ever do that--"Vasoline," "Wicked Garden," "Big Bang Baby", "Lady Picture Show," "Sour Girl", "Creep", "Big Empty", "Unglued", both versions of "Plush" and of course the perfect "Interstate Love Song" will dominate the airwaves for as long as there's radio and streaming. They deserve to.

Weiland was no genius. His lyrics were average, and his stint in Velvet Revolver underscored the differences between great rock stars and transcendent ones. But in that humanity lies much of his appeal. STP didn't need a superhuman, they needed a guy, and as far as rock frontmen go, Scott Weiland was one of the best.

Last weekend, I sang "Interstate Love Song" at karaoke, to a bar full of Gen Xers. It didn't surprise me that the song connected--anyone born between 1975 and 1985 knows all the words, and loves it enough to overlook the vocal limitations of whomever's delivering. But I remembered, as anyone who sings STP karaoke does, how much room Scott Weiland carved out with a few octaves. His vocals soar and roar in the melodies, but never get too far out of anyone's range. Scott Weiland looked great and sang better, but his real talent was making everyone who sang along feel, for at least three and a half minutes, that we too, could be Stone Temple Pilots.

Foo Fighters, "New Way Home"

13 Days to Find a Home



Dave Grohl gets mocked for writing soft grunge, usually by people who forgot that Kurt Cobain wrote pop songs. But now that we've heard Torche we know that Grohl wasn't watering down heavy, he was reinventing it.

With the Foo Fighters, he's never written a front-to-back classic, but he's proven himself an expert tunesmith whose skills run deep. Case in point: "New Way Home," a soaring piece of power-grunge nearly buried at the end of The Colour and the Shape. We knew he could play, we knew he could write, we knew he could produce, but songs like "New Way Home" is where we learned that Dave Grohl could, as he told us, stick around.

Kiss, "Comin' Home"

20 Days to Find a Home



I love Kiss Unplugged. In as dazzling a stunt as any they ever pulled, Kiss latched onto the MTV Unplugged trend and not only didn't embarrass themselves, but came up with their best album since Alive II (and at this rate, their last great new album). Taking cues from the best MTV Unplugged appearances, like Nirvana and Alice in Chains, Kiss eschewed a greatest hits set to focus on their songs that sounded best on acoustics. One wouldn't think that any of their songs (save for "Hard Luck Woman," which they don't even play here) would sound best unplugged, but Kiss took the opportunity to show how suprisingly rich and diverse their catalogue is, from the bizarre, tender and creepy "Goin' Blind" to the relaxed "Sure Know Something" to a song from the concept album everyone wanted to forget ("A World Without Heroes", co-written by Bob Ezrin and Lou Reed??). Kiss didn't have much to prove in 1995, but they were still hungry, and they proved that they didn't need fire, blood, flying, grease paint or explosions to put on a great show.

They opened with "Comin' Home", a deep cut from Hotter than Hell, which probably seemed strange at the time but now looks prescient. Kiss were comin' home to their place as being the biggest band in the universe. A few minutes after "Comin' Home," Ace and Peter would be back onstage with Gene and Paul, each singing their own verse of "Rock and Roll All Nite," and over the next two years they'd be back onstage together, headlining the highest-grossing world tour of 1996 and 1997. The underdogs on Kiss Unplugged evaporated, but thankfully we got a great picture of them on "Comin' Home."

Krist Novoselic in World's Greatest Dad

Maybe the best scene in the movie.

Back to School

Back to School

1. Brownsville Station, "Smokin' in the Boys Room"
2. Van Halen, "Hot for Teacher"
3. Joan Jett & the Blackhearts, "School Days"
4. Chuck Berry, "School Days"
5. The Replacements, "Fuck School"
6. Nirvana, "School"
7. Kanye West, "School Spirit" 
8. Otis Redding, "Stay in School (Radio Spot)
9. "MC5, "High School"
10. James Brown, "Don't be a Dropout"
11. Lulu, "To Sir With Love" 
12. Rockpile, "Teacher Teacher"
13. The Smiths, "The Headmaster Ritual"
14. Fela Kuti, "Teacher Don't Teach Me Nonsense"
15. Cheech and Chong, "Sister Mary Elephant"
16. Pink Floyd, "Another Brick In The Wall (Part II)"
17. The Ramones, "Rock 'n' Roll High School"
18. Alice Cooper, "School's Out"

The Jesus Lizard, "Boilermaker"

The Jesus Lizard will never win a Grammy, a gold record or a Rock and Roll Hall of Fame induction, but now they've got something better than all three combined, a book. Better yet, it's a brilliantly-compiled collection of photos, essays, recipes and more from the band and several of their music industry fans. Like the band itself, Book was meticulously prepared but feels thrown together. Naming your printed tome Book seems lazy until you realize it falls in line with the band's album titles (Pure, Head, Goat, Liar, Lash, Show, Down, Shot, Blue, Bang and Inch).

Chris Weingarten, now of Rolling Stone, contributes two pieces, including three paragraphs on the first second of "Boilermaker" on Liar. I hope to write about music as well as he does someday.

"The opening second of Liar is hands down the greatest opening second of any album ever recorded. It makes the introductory chord of A Hard Day’s Night sound like a chorus of wet farts. It makes Bobby Gregg’s snare crack on Highway 61 Revisited sound like a cat coughing up a paperclip. If rock music is inherently about sexual energy, 'Boilermaker’s' inaugural second is the shock and shame of premature ejaculation.

Part of its charm is how hilariously self-defeating it is to put the climax of your album within its first second. To compare, note that the bridge to Nirvana’s 'Drain You' comes like twenty-eight minutes into Nevermind—what are you guys, Genesis? If Liar were a splatter flick, it would start with the woodchipper scene. It’s getting cold-cocked without even seeing the face of your attacker. No matter what volume your stereo is at, it’s too loud.

Best of all, this onomatopoetic spittle-sprayer is barely a bark. It’s like walking in midbark. Bark as suffix. It’s opening the door to find the Jesus Lizard rehearsing (or worse) in your living room. Their first album released after the 'alternative gold rush,' and here’s an abrupt jolt coming in midsentence, seeming to send the message, Uh, the party’s already started, where the fuck have you been?"

Pantera, "Cowboys from Hell"

"I love heavy metal. Are you serious? I fucking love it," indie-pop songwriter St. Vincent recently told an interviewer while promoting her new album. "I love Pantera. I fucking love Dimebag Darrell, love his guitar playing. There’s a song on the record called 'Bring Me Your Loves,' that--I probably shouldn’t reveal it--but I was listening to a lot of Turkish folk music and Pantera, and there’s a riff in there that is a little tip of the hat to 'Cowboys From Hell.'"



It's a riff that would stand out anywhere, even when a dynamic artist re-imagines it as much as St. Vincent does. As much as I enjoy the exclusivity of metal, sharing a cult brother/sisterhood with a community that enjoys music at its most extreme, I'm even more awestruck by how far it can reach. For all the brutality of "Cowboys from Hell," there's no denying that Pantera could write a killer melody.

Not since the days of the World's Greatest Rock 'n' Roll Band had a musical group treated themselves to such a badass honorific nickname and earned it on record. "Cowboys from Hell" must've blown every mind it touched in 1990--the conventional hard rock of Pantera's self-released '80s records had vanished. They weren't even calling it "thrash metal," or "extreme metal." This was just Metal all the way through, purer and heavier than the rest. It took years for most of the world to catch up, which is why nobody gives "Cowboys from Hell" credit for stomping hair metal out of the mainstream a year before Nirvana, Pearl Jam and Metallica. But in any context Pantera stands tall. Nobody touches them at all.

Kurt Cobain: About a Son

One certain thing about nearly every posthumous Kurt Cobain tribute is that he would have hated them. For a guy who didn't care much for himself or his own art, the recent sight of the horrendous statue memorializing him in the town he detested would probably have appalled him at least as much as Fred Durst's chest tattoo, or Cobain's private journals on display at every Barnes & Noble in America. At the bottom of it all, Cobain's opinion doesn't matter--he's not around to express it, and we shouldn't judge a About a Son on his standards any more than we should judge Raging Bull on how much Jake LaMotta agrees with it. Still, Cobain was possibly the most famously sensitive artist to ever strap on a guitar, and it's hard to not take that into consideration when reviewing the art he inspired.

Possibly the most respectful tribute to the man is Kurt Cobain: About a Son, a documentary made up of Cobain's interviews with Michael Azerrad for Azerrad's book Come as You Are: The Story of Nirvana. Set to footage of Seattle and Aberdeen, with a mostly ambient soundtrack, About a Son goes the 2pac: Resurrection route by letting its deceased subject tell the story. As a narrator, Cobain doesn't offer much insight into his music, but he's also revealed to be the sweet, unassuming and even confident man you hoped he'd be when you first heard Nevermind. He doesn't seem like the kind of guy that would inspire more devotion than any other rock star of the '90s, but maybe that's part of how he did it.

Hole on MTV Unplugged

If you've cared at all about popular music in the past 20 years, you've probably had at least one argument about Courtney Love.



My favorite Courtney arguments are the ones about Live Through This, her best album by a landslide, which turns 20 this year. Fans and detractors, often the same people in her case, like to bicker over who wrote the songs, Courtney Love and Eric Erlandson or the late Kurt Cobain, whose voice can be heard on "Asking for It" and "Softer, Softest." Nirvana fetishists want to believe that Live Through This is another feather in Cobain's cap. Courtney haters (and yes, sexists) don't want to believe that she was capable of something this enduring without much of her husband's help. Realists note that songs like "Violet," "Jennifer's Body" and "Plump" sound eerily like Nevermind outtakes, and that the Hole records where everybody fights about the songwriting credits (Live Through This and Celebrity Skin) are far better than Pretty on the Inside.

Fun as it is to argue about Courtney, it doesn't really matter who wrote what on Live Through This. It's a terrific album by any measure, and it's a Courtney Love album, period. Profiles in Courage loses nothing if it turns out that Ted Sorensen wrote it for John F. Kennedy, and Live Through This would be one of the best albums of the 90s even if its performers didn't write a note of it.

By revisiting Hole's 1995 performance on MTV Unplugged, I was reminded that with Courtney Love it's about more than the songs. When she's having a good night (something that anyone who discovered her after 2000 might not think possible), she is a fantastic interpreter. Melissa Auf der Maur, new on bass here after the overdose of Kristen Pfaff, is clearly a better singer and musician, but Courtney is the rock star, born with that intangible quality that makes you want to watch her every move and sing along with her parts, even as she waltzes out of key.

Like a true punk rocker, something she doesn't get enough credit for being, Courtney spent much of her MTV Unplugged session playing songs that nobody was going to know, like the unreleased "Best Sunday Dress" and "Sugar Coma," or the b-side "Drown Soda." Shoving up a middle finger to everyone who claimed she couldn't write her own hits (or, just a likely, completely unaware that this was happening), Courtney performed two of her husband's unreleased songs, "You Know You're Right" and "Old Age," rewriting the lyrics and moods from the Nirvana versions that would eventually make it to CD stores. If she covered any of Cobain's songs this way on Live Through This, his versions are probably almost unrecognizable.

Hole also performs two 60s songs that I'd never previously liked, Donovan's "Season of the Witch" and the Crystals' "He Hit Me (And It Felt Like A Kiss)." The former is creepier than the original (which just sounds stoned), and the latter rips the Crystals out of Phil Spector's hands and destroys the song's ambiguous angle. "Nice feminist anthem," declares Love, from a time when she addressed issues that people wanted to ignore and hadn't yet become one.

Near the end, the band rips into "Hungry Like the Wolf," and it's as great as you can imagine it could be. Courtney doesn't change the gender in the lyrics. Nobody harmonizes with Courtney on the "do-do-dos," because they're afraid to or because they don't know how. Courtney loses her pick and abandons the song entirely. She makes up for it with "Doll Parts," wanting to be the girl with the most cake, faking it so real she is beyond fake. "Someday you will ache like I ache" is the line that American teenagers tattooed on themselves for the next 20 years, and as versatile and talented as Kurt Cobain was, I don't believe that he could have written it.

Foo Fighters: Back and Forth

Call it Even Dave Grohl Gets Band Drama. One thing that anyone who sees Foo Fighters: Back and Forth will take away from it is that you can be the coolest, funniest, most easygoing rock star in the world, and keeping a band together is still tough work.

Grohl's reputation as The Nicest Guy in Rock won't be tattered by Back and Forth, where you see him struggle to keep Taylor Hawkins, Nate Mendel and Pat Smear in a band together. There's a reason why it's not called Dave Grohl: Back and Forth. But this is not a side of Grohl that we're used to seeing, when he goofs around with Jack Black or Josh Homme in public. Here he turns down a cushy gig with Tom Petty (on the Wildflowers tour, no less) because it's more important to him to try out his own untested songs. He overdubs his own drums on The Colour and the Shape at the risk of hurting his original drummer's feelings, which it does. Grohl may be an uncharacteristically sweet rock star, but he's still a rock star, and he demonstrates the kind of focus and professionalism that one would expect from a guy who's led one of the biggest rock bands in the world for almost 20 years now. He's been many things to many different people, but he's still nobody's monkey wrench.

Yet Back and Forth has one thing that's even more fascinating than watching Grohl be a boss, and you know exactly what that is. "It's all about the music" is a cliché in any rockumentary, but Grohl says it here without ever uttering the words. Watching him explain how he wrote the bass line to "Enough Space" while jumping up and down to get the rhythm of a crowd of people jumping at a rock show just right is even more spellbinding than the song itself. Maybe you think that's faint praise, but even if you're not a Foo Fighters, Nirvana, Probot, Queens of the Stone Age, Tenacious D, Them Crooked Vultures or Scream fan, there's no denying that Dave Grohl was born to make music.

Kurt Cobain on Identity

Interviewed by Jon Savage, animated by PBS's Blank on Blank.

Nirvana, "Scentless Apprentice"

In Utero turns 20 this week, and is getting a load of press and a schmancy, 4-disc reissue that would probably appall any band that once wanted to name an album Cash Cow.



It's being advertised as Nirvana's "difficult" album, which is fair, and probably why it's my favorite of theirs. But even its heaviest and most distorted, In Utero almost can't help but be hooky. Take "Scentless Apprentice," a sludge metal masterpiece that could have appeared on the Melvins album that Kurt Cobain co-produced in the same year.



It's an apt offering from a guy who wanted to be a rock star but hated himself for wanting it, the type of guy who'd wear a hand-scribbled "CORPORATE MAGAZINES STILL SUCK" t-shirt on the cover of the corporate magazine he agreed to talk to. It's got a raw, abrasive tone and one of the scariest screams that I've ever heard on record, but was meticulously reworked from Dave Grohl's initial riff into the final product--rehearsal demos and concert performances went on for over ten minutes and tried out several different stanzas. The working title was "Chuck Chuck Fo Fuck," because the progression that drives most of the song sounds like Shirley Ellis' "The Name Game."



Pretty clever, Kurt Kurt Bo Burt.

Nirvana for Virginia Tech

Margaret Eby had a funny piece earlier this summer about a Virginia Tech student who wrote to Sub Pop this year, asking if Nirvana (yes, that Nirvana) would record a message for her school's homecoming week. Check out the article here, and see if anyone looks familiar in the video below.

Patterns

Patterns

1. The Replacements, "I Will Dare"
2. Big Star, "The Ballad of El Goodo"
3. Guided by Voices, "Game of Pricks"
4. The Kinks, "David Watts"
5. Nico, "These Days"
6. Sam Cooke, "A Change is Gonna Come"
7. The White Stripes, "Hotel Yorba"
8. Nick Cave & the Bad Seeds, "There She Goes, My Beautiful World"
9. Jimi Hendrix, "Crosstown Traffic"
10. Nirvana, "Lake of Fire"
11. The Cure, "In Between Days"
12. The Who, "Pure and Easy"
13. Ben Folds Five, "Boxing"
14. Pulp, "Common People"
15. The Coasters, "Along Came Jones"
16. The Rolling Stones, "Mixed Emotions"
17. Nina Simone, "Pirate Jenny"
18. Cream, "I Feel Free"
19. Roy Orbison, "You Got It"
20. Stevie Wonder, "Don't You Worry 'bout a Thing"

For my dad's birthday.

Back to School

Back to School

1. The Smiths, "The Headmaster Ritual"
2. Van Halen, "Hot for Teacher"
3. Joan Jett & the Blackhearts, "School Days" 
4. The Mountain Goats, "Fall of the Star High School Running Back"
5. John Lee Hooker, "Teachin' the Blues"
6. Chuck Berry, "School Days"
7. The Replacements, "Fuck School"
8. Kanye West, "School Spirit"
9. The Dubliners, "Schoolday's Over"
10. Nirvana, "School"
11. Venom, "Teacher's Pet" 
12. Otis Redding, "Stay in School (Radio Spot)"
13. James Brown, "Don't Be a Dropout"
14. Paul Simon, "Me and Julio Down by the Schoolyard"
15. Elvis Costello & the Attractions, "Chemistry Class" 
16. The Red Hot Chili Peppers, "Catholic School Girls Rule"
17. Jerry Lee Lewis, "High School Confidential"
18. Muddy Waters, "Good Morning Little School Girl"
19. Jethro Tull, "Teacher"
20. Leonard Cohen, "Teachers"
21. The Ramones, "Rock 'n' Roll High School"
22. Pearl Jam, "Jeremy"
23. Deftones, "Pink Maggit"
24. Pink Floyd, "Another Brick in the Wall, Part 2"
25. Gwar, "School's Out"

Opinions vs. Observations

I could give you dozens of reasons as to why metal is better than reggae or techno. I'm happy to tell you why Death is better than Dååth, or why Suicidal Tendencies are better than Suicide Silence. At Governor's Ball last month, I watched Guns N' Roses utterly blow away Animal Collective and Kings of Leon. But in my heart of heart and brain of brains, I know that it's all just my opinion.

Then again, I don't. Consider, for example, that Trent Reznor is a better composer than Winds of Plague. This doesn't seem arguable. Understanding why something like The Downward Spiral is better than Decimate the Weak signifies an intelligent grasp of music, not an opinion. Who could argue that W.A.S.P. is better than Metallica? It would be like claiming that Dan Brown is a better writer than Kafka. I'm sure that some people actually believe it, but I'd hope that someday they'd mature enough to change their minds.

My concern about opinions and observations is where they start and where they end. There's a wide, blurry line between thinking that Nine Inch Nails is better than Animal Collective and knowing that they're better than Winds of Plague. Where does that line start and end? Is it when one artist stands the test of time? If so, how long is that? What constitutes as enough sense to decide what is an observation and what's an opinion? What gives me the authority to decide? Can observations change over time, as standards do?

The answer, my friend, is just your opinion.

Dave Grohl at SXSW

One of the best keynote speeches that you'll ever see.

Nirvana Night

I Hate Myself and Want to Die is a film of lovingly compiled Nirvana footage that played last week at "Nirvana Night" at the Spectacle Theater in Brooklyn. You can skip the segment from the Unsolved Mysteries Kurt Cobain conspiracy doc, but other than that I Hate Myself and Want to Die is a thoroughly enjoyable portrait of an unfairly great band. Your favorite moments from Live! Tonight! Sold Out!! and the With the Lights Out DVD are funnier than you remembered, and getting several of the band's best interviews in one place should save you a few hours on YouTube. The film is also commendable for giving Krist Novoselic and Dave Grohl their due as bandmates, and for remaining objective about Cobain until the terrific end credits, which you'll have to stick around for.

Here's a trailer for Nirvana Night below.

Song of the Day: Sugar, "If I Can't Change Your Mind"

Sugar's Copper Blue is having its best year ever. A sweet 20th anniversary reissue and a tribute tour from frontman Bob Mould, in which he's playing the album front to back, are both making the case that his penchant for the supermelodic didn't stop with Hüsker Dü. Watching him perform Copper Blue last Friday, much of it sounded as strong as his renditions of "Something I Learned Today, "I Apologize" and "Makes No Sense at All."

Is there anyone who likes rock music who can dislike this song?



Copper Blue is often thought of as Mould's stab at commercial success. Released post-Nevermind, when alternative rock had taken over the airwaves and Mould was maturing into a more tuneful and less belligerent songwriter, it almost seems surprising that it didn't go gold. But if Sugar can't change your mind...