----- Original Message ----- From: "William Rabeneck" > Nirvana were also kind of a curse, because after them, most bands > seemed to feel that everything had to be so damn serious. Hell, > look what it did to Cobain! Give me a cocky old live fool, trying > to recapture his glory, like David Lee Roth, over a dead Kurt Cobain > any day. > > The move away from the previous music, toward the Grunge thing, is > also just emblematic of the way the music industry has usually been > run. You've got suits gambling on what the kids are going to like, > and putting all of their eggs, usually in just one or two baskets > genre-wise. If the suits (radio and recorded music industry) ever > got wise, and promoted more variety at the same time, I think that > they'd actually be pleasantly surprised with their sales. In > general, radio is probably gonna have a better play list, if they > promote the ten best songs from five Rock sub-genres, rather than > the twenty-five best songs from two Rock sub-genres. I see what you're saying, and that's probably how the history books are likely to shape that era, but that's certainly not how I remember it! My personal background of 1991 is that I was 21 years old and stuck in a small town on the Texas/New Mexico border (quite literally stuck, actually, because my mom had had a massive stroke the previous year and I'd had to quit school temporarily and become her in-home health care provider) where the closest record store was the Hastings in Clovis, 30 miles away, and the closest decent record store was in Lubbock, 100 miles in the opposite direction. My only musical lifeline at the time was a college radio station out of Amarillo, KACV, that was very much on the commercial end of alternative, but way the hell better than the other options. So I listened to this station (and KTXT, Lubbock's college station) constantly in '91 and '92, and my memory of these stations is that NEVERMIND definitely had a *huge* impact on the playlists, but it was in no way an overnight change from pre-grunge into grunge. It wasn't suddenly all Pearl Jam, Soundgarden, Stone Temple Pilots and the increasingly crap imitations of same. No, my memory is that NEVERMIND was roughly equivalent, in an industry sense, to the explosion of MTV nearly a decade before. It caught the big labels by surprise, and for at least a couple of years, they had no idea what exactly The Kidz were responding to or why, and whenever that happens, their first instinct is to basically throw everything at the wall and see what sticks. So yeah, there was the po-faced post-Nirvana crowd in one corner, but think back at what else suddenly emerged over the next few years (roughly the period between, say, NEVERMIND and the Apples In Stereo's FUN TRICK NOISEMAKER, to pick a totally arbitrary end point that demarcates the rise of "indie" as opposed to "alternative")! Think about it -- all these records were not only released on major labels, I remember hearing them on the radio and seeing the artists in magazines and on MTV: Teenage Fanclub's BANDWAGONESQUE (remember when they were on SNL in '92, doing "The Concept" and that mash-up of "What You Do To Me" and "Satan"?) The Pooh Sticks' THE GREAT WHITE WONDER and MILLION SELLER Juliana Hatfield's BECOME WHAT YOU ARE Letters To Cleo's AURORA GORY ALICE American Music Club's MERCURY The Wedding Present's HIT PARADE 1 and 2 Barenaked Ladies' GORDON Beastie Boys' CHECK YOUR HEAD and ILL COMMUNICATION Eugenius' OOMALAMA and MARY QUEEN OF SCOTS Green Day's DOOKIE PJ Harvey's DRY and RID OF ME The High Llamas' GIDEON GAYE Stereolab's TRANSIENT RANDOM NOISE BURSTS WITH ANNOUNCEMENTS and MARS AUDIAC QUINTET The Lemonheads' IT'S A SHAME ABOUT RAY Luna's LUNAPARK Shonen Knife's LET'S KNIFE Sloan's SMEARED and TWICE REMOVED The Spent Poets' THE SPENT POETS The Breeders' LAST SPLASH Lisa Germano's HAPPINESS Kirsty MacColl's TITANIC DAYS Mazzy Star's SO TONIGHT THAT I MAY SEE The Muffs' THE MUFFS Redd Kross' PHASESHIFTER Liz Phair's EXILE IN GUYVILLE and WHIP-SMART Saint Etienne's FOXBASE ALPHA and SO TOUGH The Ass Ponys' ELECTRIC ROCK MUSIC Beck's MELLOW GOLD Massive Attack's PROTECTION Portishead's DUMMY Sonic Youth's DIRTY and EXPERIMENTAL JET SET TRASH AND NO STAR That Dog's THAT DOG and TOTALLY CRUSHED OUT Matthew Sweet's 100% FUN Elastica's ELASTICA Ben Folds Five's BEN FOLDS FIVE Aimee Mann's WHATEVER and I'M WITH STUPID The Sixths' WASPS NESTS This was actually a period of surprising vitality and variety for the big labels: the shutdown that you're talking about, when "alternative" started to mean only "flannel-clad dick-swinging," didn't really happen until well after. My theory is that when Kurt Cobain died, the A&R lemmings decided that the primary search was for a "new" KC, a search that they got entirely wrong, as they're wont to do. S