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The stuff that doesn't make it to YouTube.
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PART ONE OF TWO
What's up everybody — Beau here.
I've been bringing up the big grunge bands a lot on the podcast lately. Soundgarden, Alice in Chains, early Pearl Jam, even Nirvana. And it got me thinking that I owe you the bigger story — what that music actually meant to me, why I keep circling back to it, and how it eventually led to a friendship I never could have imagined as a kid. This is part one. It's the personal half. Part two, coming in a few days, is where I get into my friend Dave Hillis, the man who was in the room for a lot of these records, and the two episodes we did together.
But to get there, I have to take you back to where it started for me.
Vs, Vitalogy, and Jar of Flies were all release day purchases, and are first pressings. The Candlebox album is a double record set, with Lucy on the other side. Everything else are reissues, sanctioned by the bands and their labels. I had them all on CD as well. Still do, but the vinyl is cooler, obviously.
I'll admit something first. I wasn't the biggest Nirvana fan back in the nineties. I always appreciated them and respected what they did, but they weren't my band at the time. These days though, I find myself listening to them more and more, and I'm becoming a bigger fan than I ever was. And I think that says something about this whole era of music. After all this time, the fact that I'm still discovering new depth in it is proof of how timeless nineties Seattle really is. Those albums sound like they were recorded yesterday. Strip away a few of the late-eighties studio effects lingering on some of the earlier records and the production holds up completely. But that's not even the point. The point is the songwriting. The compositions. That stuff hasn't just withstood the test of time, it's gotten better as it ages.
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I doubt the mainstream music industry will ever see a revolution that meaningful and authentic again. But the influence lingers and the legacies carry on. Newer bands are heavily influenced by those records, and lately the music media has been pushing this idea of a "second coming of grunge." Whatever. Good luck with that, guys. As long as these newer artists chase authentic songwriting in their own voice and cadence, with genuine personal expression, then that's all that matters. Chasing a sound will only get you so far. But anyway — that's a tangent. Let me get to what I actually want to tell you.