Tag Archives: 1994

The Boston Years Continued: Slacker Central, Part XV

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As I’d mentioned earlier, JA played matchmaker between me and D in March of 1994. It was a strange whirlwind of a relationship and, as I’ve also mentioned in the past, we inspired both the best and the worst in each other. In retrospect we probably could have been great friends if we hadn’t hooked up. I see now that my then circle of friends weren’t the best fit for me but I was just too emotionally desperate for connection to find anyone else. Both D and JA might have had the best of intentions, but they’d also frequently pushed me out of my comfort zone when it was obvious that I needed to be there for my own mental and emotional sanity. My friendship with them was very similar to one I’d had back in the late 80s with two neighborhood kids that were also not the best influences for me but they were all I had. It was like living that constant discomfort all over again. [And this is why I’ve never completely dissed social media: nearly all my closest and dearest friends are elsewhere in the world and I’m blessed and happy that I can easily talk to them at any time.]

I’d also started that new project while Nocturne continued to simmer on a backburner. Two Thousand was to be my Gen-X coming of age story, grown out of my college friendships and how distinct our generation was from previous ones. It was full of Gen-X tropes: snark, nihilism, music, frustration, and absurdist humor. It focused on a self-inserted character name Stephen (my fallback name for years) trying to figure out what the hell he wanted to do with his life now that he was no longer a student; his circle of friends is splintering off into Real Life Day Jobs and Points Elsewhere and he’s not sure how to process that. He’s also a musician trying to keep his band from falling apart, and frustrated at how fucking hard it is to be creative and still afford to live in a city like Boston. [Stephen’s band Billow would get a cameo years later in my novel Meet the Lidwells.]

Luna, Bewitched, released 1 March 1994. Dean Wareham’s first couple of albums under this moniker sounded very similar to his previous band Galaxie 500: very quiet, almost delicate, and nearly lo-fi. By this album they’d gotten bolder and stronger in sound, but they never quite lost their delicateness.

Beck, Mellow Gold, released 1 March 1994. Beck’s big breakthrough was a huge hit, thanks to having signed to Geffen and getting a giant promotional push with “Loser”. This can pretty much be considered his first professional-sounding record as it’s cleaner and beefier than his previous indie releases, many self-produced.

Blur, “Girls and Boys” single, released 7 March 1994. My favorite Britpop band dropped a teaser single for their next album, Parklife, and it’s one of their finest moments. Addictive, danceable, and a track you need to listen to loud. Definitely a change from their moodier and lighter Modern Life Is Rubbish, that’s for sure.

Failure, Magnified, released 8 March 1994. I loved their first album Comfort, even though they’d been dismissed as Nirvana wannabees, and this one had also been unjustly ignored by most radio stations as well (partly due to the release of the next two albums listed below), even though they’d dropped a video for the single “Undone”. They’d finally achieve critical success a few years later with Fantastic Planet, but at a steep cost. I always recommend anything from this band, to be honest!

Soundgarden, Superunknown, released 8 March 1994. This album won me over immediately. This is one of those ‘they’d done their homework’ albums for me: they had a clear vision and refused to let anything stop them from achieving it, and the result is a damn fine album of brilliant alternative rock. This wasn’t grunge anymore; this was alt-rock meets epic metal with a dusting of their psychedelia roots. Highly recommended.

Nine Inch Nails, The Downward Spiral, released 8 March 1994. I’ve posted about this one recently, in that I haven’t sat down and listened to it from start to finish for quite a few years, but at the time of its release it was on extremely heavy rotation on my Walkman. It resonated heavily with my feelings of frustration and uselessness and I was fine with letting myself simmer in those moods for a bit while this blared through my headphones.

Morrissey, Vauxhall and I, 14 March 1994. On the other side of the mood spectrum was everyone’s favorite Mancunian curmudgeon recording…somewhat of a lighthearted and fun record? It’s true, when he’s in a great mood he can be quite chipper, even silly at times, and this was a fun change of pace when I was too exhausted to continue dealing with my growly moods.

Alison Moyet, Essex, released 21 March 1994. Alf has consistently been a brilliant singer and songwriter, and “Whispering Your Name” remains one of my favorite tracks of hers. She embraces more of the British dance beats with this album, which may have helped her win more fans in the clubs.

Collective Soul, Hints, Allegations & Things Left Unsaid, released 22 March 1994. Sure, they were Grunge Lite with hints of hippie jam band leanings, but they were catchy as hell and this album was super enjoyable. [Noted, if you want to know what I might have looked like hair and fashionwise in the early 90s, see singer Ed Roland. Heh.]

Phish, Hoist, released 29 March 1994. These semi-local guys from Vermont had always had a strong following in New England, even though you’d rarely hear them on the radio. “Down with Disease” did get a bit of play though, and even got a rare music video out of them as well. WBCN used to play this band when they were feeling more adventurous.

Soundtrack, The Crow, released 29 March 1994. I saw this movie in the huge Loews theater that used to be on the ground floor of the Revere Hotel in Boston. I’d been a fan of the original comic book and while it didn’t quite live up to my high expectations, it was nonetheless an enjoyable film. The soundtrack was amazing, featuring songs from The Cure, Nine Inch Nails, Violent Femmes, Stone Temple Pilots and more, and this too got a lot of play on my Walkman.

Pink Floyd, The Division Bell, released 30 March 1994. It took me a few years to get around to buying this record, but I loved hearing the lovely and moody “High Hopes” on WBCN. I felt it wasn’t quite as cohesive as A Momentary Lapse of Reason, which I absolutely loved, but I’ve grown to enjoy it.

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Somewhere in all of this, I ragequit a job. Not the best of ideas and I dug my own hole here, but I’d had enough. It had all come to a head one morning when we’d gotten a huge shipment in and the floor manager for the book section had gotten pissed at me that I hadn’t gotten to his stuff yet. My immediate manager — the one who thought I was simple — literally pulled a weak ‘yeah, what’s wrong with you?’ while giving me a look of better you than me. That was the breaking point and I quit within the hour.

Not the best of ideas when you’re already skint and barely making enough to feed yourself. I let myself cool down for a day or so, and started looking for another job. I’d find it a week or so later at a Brigham’s Ice Cream on Cambridge Street. A closer commute, about the same pay, and I could surreptitiously ‘forage’ (heh) as a way to subvert that ‘affording to feed myself’ problem I’d been having lately. Not the most glamorous of jobs…but one that put me in a better frame of mind.

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Coming up: A creative nudge and a return to…reading?

The Boston Years Continued: Slacker Central, Part XIV

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The other day I found a chronology spreadsheet that mentions this era and puts a few personal things in their proper order, and I see that I didn’t meet up with D until March of 1994, which makes sense. [I hear you: why the hells do you have a spreadsheet of your past? What kind of weirdo are you? Well, a) I’m a writer, and b) it was initially built up for the Walk In Silence book project and thus laid out what I wrote at the time as well as personal and public events that went on at the time. Simple as that.] It does clarify things a bit, as I know my final months at the Shoebox were just as exciting as they were tense.

ANYWAY. Things were about to change pretty soon, but not just yet. February of 1994 wasn’t entirely without incident, as I’d been focusing on multiple writing projects: more examination of Nocturne and the possibility of finally working on the long-delayed Two Thousand project. Now as then, I didn’t always start from the beginning but wrote and gathered up several notes over several days (or months, or years) to see what I could make of them. At least something was going in the right direction!

Green Day, Dookie, released 1 February 1994. The breakthrough heard ’round the world dropped almost quietly and unassumingly with the “Longview” single. It was immediately picked up by WFNX and WBCN and you’d hear it several times over the course of a week. WFNX was a bit more adventurous and would pull out some of the deep cuts as well. A few months later they’d storm the Hatch Shell and cause chaos throughout the city.

Pavement, Crooked Rain, Crooked Rain, released 2 February 1994. I wanted to like this band but something about their deliberatelly half-assed slacker delivery didn’t quite gel with me. Still, “Cut Your Hair” was just as ubiquitous as Green Day on the airwaves.

Cake, Motorcade of Generosity, released 7 February 1994. I wouldn’t get into this band until their 1996 album Fashion Nugget, but I do remember hearing “Rock and Roll Lifestyle” on WFNX every now and again.

The Greenberry Woods, Rapple Dapple, released 8 February 1994. This band came and went rather quickly but I remember really liking the “Trampoline” single at the time. I bought the cassette for this at Tower and would listen to it at the Shoebox during my downtime.

The London Suede, “Stay Together” single, released 14 February 1994. A single-only release that often gets overlooked, but it shows where the band was headed, already evolving away from their glam swagger and more towards heady indie rock. I remember hearing it every now and again but it really didn’t do much here in the States.

Soundgarden, “Spoonman” single, released 15 February 1994. I’d been a passive fan of this band since first hearing them my freshman year, but even with this song I could tell they were taking a detour into a style that was less prog-meets-grunge and heading into darker post-punk territory. Its super-tight production and dense tension made everyone eager for the album that would come the next month.

Stabbing Westward, Ungod, released 15 February 1994. I initially lumped this band in with the industrial-alternative genre that was certainly out there but not quite making a dent, no matter how loud they might be. And this band was LOUD. “Nothing” got considerable airplay and the album would eventually become a favorite, leading them towards more popularity in the latter half of the decade.

Low, I Could Live in Hope, released 18 February 1994. This amazing duo’s debut dropped almost without notice in the early half of the year, hidden amongst the louder and more dissonant grunge and hard rock. They were hard to pin down but they had loyal fans from the beginning.

The Grays, Ro Sham Bo, released 22 February 1994. Jason Falkner’s group after leaving Jellyfish was with Jon Brion and it was unfortunately a one-and-done project, but it’s one hell of a fine indie pop gem. It’s out of print and hard to find, but it’s definitely worth checking out if you can find it.

Nine Inch Nails, “March of the Pigs” single, 25 February 1994. Speaking of teaser singles, this was Trent Reznor’s first since the dense and angry Broken and Fixed EPs and a handful of disturbing related music videos. And it’s one hell of an introduction to his next project, considering that it was both a bit more listenable than the EPs and a bit more terrifying in its moods.

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Coming up: Disconnects and reconnects, unknowns and spirals

The Boston Years Continued: Slacker Central, Part XIII

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Why am I continuing this particular series, you ask? Especially since it’s no longer part of the Thirty Years On? To be honest, I felt I’d left the last entry up in the air, and the full story of what was going to happen within the next two years while I lived in Boston hadn’t even really gotten started. There’s a lot more to go here than just leaving college and figuring things out.

Two things happened in January of 1994: One, I was excited about starting this new story idea, even if the style and genre were completely new to me. I hadn’t felt this excited about a project for ages and I wasn’t about to pass it by. Two, JA introduced me to a girl one evening at a restaurant we sometimes went to, and one thing of course led to another and we were going out. D and I were…well, let’s just say that in retrospect we were great for each other when it came to creativity, humor and a love of music, but emotionally we should not have been in the same room. A great friendship that became a rollercoaster relationship and an interesting co-writing team. That is, when we were both not falling into our own worst moods and habits.

Mixtape, Nocturne OST, created January 1994. My science fiction story idea had taken root and on my days off and in the evenings when I wasn’t out with friends, I would work on a bit of worldbuilding for what was now entitled Nocturne. A few name changes and a major change in setting — and eventually even a map drawn for reference — and I was rolling. I even made the first mixtape, initially on the backside of my Belief in Fate mixtape that I’d made in the summer of 1989 — of songs that were decidedly different from the bloated soundtrack of the Infamous War Novel. [This playlist is missing the first track, Curve’s “Fait Accompli”.] This story might have had its origins with the IWN, but it certainly wasn’t going to be the same one I’d been trying to revive and revise all these years.

Course of Empire, Initiation, released 18 January 1994. I remember WFNX playing the above remix of the “Infested” single as it did something most metal/industrial bands didn’t do at the time: throwing incongruous yet perfect samples into the mix. In this case, Benny Goodman’s “Sing Sing Sing (with a Swing)”. It’s a wild and bizarre track but it was a perfect example of the Gen-X absurdist sense of humor.

Beck, Loser EP, released 18 January 1994. This song just exploded everywhere when it dropped early in the year, partly because it was such a perfect Gen-X theme song and partly because no one knew what the hell he was even singing about. Beck had been around in one indie form or another for a few years by this time, but this one song broke him into the mainstream for years to come.

Soundtrack, Faraway, So Close!, released 24 January 1994. Wim Wenders’ sequel to his brilliant 1987 movie Wings of Desire may not have been as big of a hit — let’s be honest, it had a lot to live up to — but it is a lovely movie nonetheless.

Kristin Hersh, Hips and Makers, released 25 January 1994. The Throwing Muses lead singer finally releases her own first solo album and it’s so delicate and fragile and so much the opposite of the Muses’ chaos that you’re afraid to break it. And yet “Your Ghost” remains one of her best and most beloved solo songs ever. It was well worth the wait.

Alice in Chains, Jar of Flies EP, released 25 January 1994. I’d been a passive fan of AIC, but I loved this release and played it endlessly on my Walkman. It’s quite different from their previous grunge style, instead focusing on a style that’s not quite folk rock but not quite indie either. Every single song on this EP is a banger. And yes, this one ended up as a high-repeat player during my writing sessions, not only during these years but later during the Belfry Years.

Meat Puppets, Too High to Die, released 25 January 1994. This band never quite got as famous as, say, Nirvana, even though they were friends and the latter would cover multiple songs of theirs during their MTV Unplugged session. “Backwater” ended up in heavy rotation for a number of years on alternative radio.

Tori Amos, Under the Pink, released 31 January 1994. Tori’s second album wasn’t nearly as devastating as her first, but she wasn’t about to let go of her quirky piano style just yet. I kind of prefer this one out of her early records as she seems to be having more fun exploring different styles and lyrical avenues with this one.

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Coming up: Creativity sparked, story and poetry ideas bursting forth, and another job lost

Albums I Haven’t Played in Ages: The Downward Spiral

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KEXP played Nine Inch Nails’ “March of the Pigs” earlier today and it occurred to me that I have not listened to The Downward Spiral in ages. Which is surprising, considering I used to play the hell out of my taped copy (and later the cd) of it in the mid-90s during my last couple of years in Boston. It was even part of my Belfry writing session playlist for a significant time. I’m sure the main reason I’ve been avoiding it is that it reminds me a little too much of a not-so-happy time in my life. Very broke, very depressed, and very desperate.

I mean, “Closer” was everywhere on MTV and the alternative radio stations for months after it came out. [And I’m 99% sure it was because us Gen Xers were proud of the fact we could get a song with “I want to f*** you like an animal” as a lyric on commercial radio. When in doubt and you want to shock, might as well go all the way, right?] Mind you, it’s actually a step back from NIN’s previous EPs from 1992 (Broken and Fixed), though not by much. All three were extremely nihilistic and pissed off, but Downward Spiral seemed to step back just a little bit from the brink to be just this side of listenable.

I remember having a conversation with my then-girlfriend (the one I co-wrote True Faith with) about this album, how deliberate its production and construction was. It started with unbridled anger and violence with “Mr. Self Destruct” and only going…well, downard from there. The album does have a sense of resolution by its finish, however dire. By the self-titled song (the next to last track) the main focus is desperation and nihilism laid bare…followed by the damaged ascendance of “Hurt” as its final track. We’re not sure if the main character (so to speak) has reached the point of suicide or relief — or both — but it’s certain that the pain has finally gone away, one way or another.

I never got around to seeing Nine Inch Nails live except that one time, back in late 1989 when I won tickets to see them on Landsdowne Street in Boston, before their fame skyrocketed to arenas and music festivals. But by the mid-90s I was far too broke to go see any bands other than the free shows on the Hatch Shell anyway, so I made do with the music I could get cheaply. I followed the band’s progress through the years as I could, but I don’t think I quite connected with them as closely as I did with Pretty Hate Machine and The Downward Spiral.

I don’t remember the last time I actively gave this album a full spin, to tell the truth. I remember playing it in the stock room at HMV and in the Belfry when I was deep in writing The Phoenix Effect, but I rarely played it after that. It just struck a little too close to home.

I keep meaning to give it another play one of these days, now that time and age have intervened and the traumas of those years has faded, no longer equating those songs with personal and emotional hells. I can appreciate it as a fan and a listener and audiophile and not just a low chapter in my life.