APPENDIX

The Great Grunge Discography

It’s true that history has not been kind to many of the bands from the nineties that carried the banner of alt rock. The albums put out under the grunge header made much more of an impact on a sociological level than on a musical level, so setting the parameters for the relative importance or impact of any particular album is difficult. The normal rules for rock albums simply don’t apply.

Choosing the best rock records ever made is relatively easy. Typically, some combination of popularity and level of influence helps to determine whether or not a rock album is worth remembering. This is why almost every Beatles and Led Zeppelin album can be considered an all-time great, as those albums were both incredibly commercially successful and copied by an incredible variety of other groups (which still continues today). Grunge albums are a tougher nut to crack: Only a handful of albums had the kind of wild commercial success that makes true legends, and there were very few albums that had the sort of influence that helps minor records transcend the exposure barrier. For example, while Pavement’s Slanted and Enchanted still has yet to go gold, it’s agreed that it is a great record because of its far-reaching sphere of influence on several aesthetic levels.

Most grunge albums lacked that middle ground—they were either runaway hits with no substance (like most of the catalog of Stone Temple Pilots) or artistically committed albums that nobody cared about (like most everything Mudhoney ever put out).

That being said, the following albums are not necessarily records that need to be kept precious for future generations. They are simply the best representations of the grunge era. Many of these barely existed outside of their immediate context, but therein lie the details of the story of grunge. The broad strokes are taken care of by the huge releases, but the tiny, forgotten notes are handled by the albums that fell into the margins, were critically dismissed, or were entirely misunderstood. In fact, the vast majority of the albums on this list are by bands that were absolutely slammed by critics, at least at first. The grunge era was a time for extremely vitriolic rock criticism, because for a time it seemed like all writers had to do was scream loud enough and suddenly their favorite bands would get noticed. Conversely, critics wanted to work hard at suppressing things that they deemed worthless. Ironically, a bunch of those bands and albums initially dismissed by critics at large ended up becoming legendary, or at least are the things still remembered from that era.

So here are the most necessary selections for constructing the musical representation of what it was like to be a grunge fan in the early nineties. It should be duly noted that the criteria for inclusion on this list are relatively loose; sonically, at least, there is a great deal of discrepancy between many of these releases (which only makes sense, as there is barely any uniting line between Nirvana, Pearl Jam, and Soundgarden, outside of the fact that they were all from Seattle). The selections are in order of importance, from lesser to greater, as decided by a very complicated scientific process involving many beakers of blue bubbling liquid.

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THE VERVE PIPE, Villains (RCA, 1996): This is a perfect example of the alt-rock mentality run amok. When dirty-sounding bands started getting on the radio, the natural reaction was to make all songs sound a little dirty, which is why there was a glut of bands that had excellent songs but were presented as wannabes or postgrunge hangers-on and given short shrift. The Verve Pipe was one of those bands. Front man and songwriter Brian Vander Ark is an incredible crafter of tunes (in addition to having an overly complicated name—science has yet to prove whether or not these two phenomena are related). When the Verve Pipe made their major-label debut, they were paired with producer Jerry Harrison, the former Talking Heads member who had produced a great many alternative-sounding albums for bands such as Live and had curated the ultra-alt Empire Records sound track. The result became Vander Ark’s catchy songs dressed in shabby T-shirts and presented in slacker fashion.

The song that everybody will always remember from Villains is “The Freshmen,” a dopey ballad about regretting things you did in college and the death of innocence. It’s acceptable, but the rockers on Villains are far more convincing, like the moody “Photograph” (which has a great organ line that gives it a slightly creepy funhouse feel) and the blustery “Cup of Tea.” The Verve Pipe will forever be remembered as simply a one-hit wonder, and their album makes it onto this list mostly as an example of the type of crowbarring that many bands faced in the grunge and postgrunge eras. A couple of months after Villains was released, Matchbox 20 came along and essentially put out the exact same album and usurped Villains’ audience, but Matchbox front man Rob Thomas always seemed like a douche bag, so Vander Ark’s forgotten opus gets the nod.

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GIN BLOSSOMS, New Miserable Experience (A&M, 1992): When hip-hop began to slowly take over the pop airwaves later in the nineties (spearheaded largely by the success of P. Diddy and his ilk), the sonics of rap music began to bleed into other genres on the pop landscape. For a while, it seemed like you couldn’t turn on a radio without hearing a bit of hip-hop influence in just about everything (except maybe in country music; the whole “hick-hop” movement didn’t start until a decade later). Pop groups suddenly employed tough break beats, and the genre known as “rap-rock” or “rap-metal” bubbled up from under with the success of bands such as Limp Bizkit.

Though grunge didn’t have the same kind of staying power as hip-hop has proven to have, it did influence the greater pop landscape in very profound and immediate ways. As with the Verve Pipe, Gin Blossoms was simply a pop band that had an excellent songwriter at the helm. All it took was a little dirtying up of their guitars and a handful of angsty-sounding vocals and suddenly they became “edgy.” By today’s standards, New Miserable Experience is the sort of milquetoast album that your mom likes listening to when she wants to get a little crazy. Actually, it sounded sort of wussy even in 1992, but the songs were so catchy that nobody seemed to notice. Gin Blossoms was so huge but burned out so quickly that the track listing on their debut reads a lot like a greatest hits compilation: “Until I Fall Away,” “Hey Jealousy,” “Mrs. Rita,” and “Found Out About You” are all pop gems that well outlasted their time in the sun (it seems like “Hey Jealousy” will never, ever die). If Gin Blossoms’ music wasn’t that intense, their biography was: Their main songwriter and original guiding force killed himself after being kicked out of the band for his alcohol problem, seemingly right at the peak of New Miserable Experience’s exposure. It’s the sort of story that can make a bunch of boring white guys seem really heavy. All their songs seemed to be sad, and since all those guys in flannel were sad all the time, too, being forlorn suddenly made you “alternative.” It doesn’t take much to fool pop music audiences, really.

Gin Blossoms should not be remembered as a grunge band (or an indie band or even a good band), but without the power of alt rock ruling the radio, they probably would have remained simply another bar band from the desert who happened to dress like convenience store clerks.

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PRIMUS, Sailing the Seas of Cheese (Interscope, 1991): One of the big reasons people get nostalgic for the early nineties is because it seemed like such an open-ended time, when just about anything and anybody could be a breakout hit. Primus is a prime example of that attitude. When they first came along in 1990, nobody knew what the fuck Primus was, or how they should be listened to, or what to do with them. When Sailing the Seas of Cheese came out and “Jerry Was a Race Car Driver” became an MTV hit, nobody had the energy to come up with a genre for them, so they were thrown in the “alternative” bin, even though they sounded like a supercaffeinated car crash between Frank Zappa and Yngwie Malmsteen, two guys rarely mentioned as grunge influences. Fifteen years later, people still don’t know what the fuck to do with Primus (or with any of front man and bass virtuoso Les Claypool’s many side collaborations and solo projects), but the recognition and success of Sailing the Seas of Cheese proved that 1991 was a great year to be a band that nobody understood.

Musically, Sailing the Seas of Cheese is not Primus’s most accessible work (that would be 1993’s Pork Soda), nor does it have the most accomplished songs (1995’s Tales from the Punchbowl takes that crown), but it does offer a complete picture of what Primus represents, which is to say aggressively complex bass riffs offset by jagged guitar squeals and Claypool’s sorta-dark, sorta-goofy sense of humor. “Jerry Was a Race Car Driver” had an off-kilter storytelling quality that perfectly complemented the band’s visual sense (in reality, the video for the song was probably more popular than the song itself), and “Those Damned Blue Collar Tweakers” does exploit the quiet verse/loud chorus dynamic that was so prevalent among the alternative-rock scene. It’s a difficult listen and sounds pretty dated today, but it’s an amazing artifact that acts as a representation of just how adventurous and/or confused listeners (and MTV) were circa 1991.

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BUFFALO TOM, Big Red Letter Day (Beggars Banquet, 1993): Boston has always been a weird town for rock and roll. Aerosmith and the Cars are both from Beantown, but there never seemed to be anything definitively Bostonian about Steven Tyler and his band of merry men or Ric Ocasek’s crew (they never sang about the Red Sox or referenced the chowder at Legal Seafood, for example). When grunge hit, the Boston scene got a little recognition because there happened to be a lot of bands in the city at the time that were playing vaguely “alternative” music, but there was never really a definitive Boston band that scored big during the alt-rock heyday. In fact, the band that got the most success during the alternative era was the Mighty Mighty Bosstones, who were a goddamn ska band. Though one of grunge’s forefathers came from Boston in the form of the Pixies, no Boston band broke through the way the bands from Seattle, Los Angeles, and Chicago did.

Of course, there were plenty of also-rans that enjoyed smallish careers making excellent songs for a devoted audience. Buffalo Tom began as a noisy Replacementesque sorta-punk band, but eventually their sound evolved into a very mature-sounding rootsy alt rock that would later inform breakout acts such as Counting Crows and the Wallflowers.

Big Red Letter Day is sort of a transition album from their former selves to what they would become. Their previous effort, Let Me Come Over, is arguably the better album (and was more popular); this record contains the finest moment in Buffalo Tom history and is the reason that they will be remembered by pop culture historians. In what was probably their largest bit of exposure in the United States (they were always much larger in Europe, a trait they shared with many grunge bands), the group guested on an episode of My So-Called Life, a moody show about a teenage girl named Angela Chase and her many moods. Critically adored but unloved by the TV-watching masses, My So-Called Life became a massive cult hit and probably offers the most accurate representation of what it was like to be a teenager in the early nineties. In the show’s best episode, Angela (played by Claire Danes) is jilted publicly by her crush Jordan Catalano (Jared Leto) at a Buffalo Tom concert. However, the next day at school Jordan makes the save by holding hands with Angela, representing the first time he’s publicly displayed his affection for her. The song that underscores that entire sequence is Buffalo Tom’s “Late at Night,” a gorgeously lilting, melancholy ballad from Big Red Letter Day made immortal by its inclusion on My So-Called Life. By itself, it’s simply a great song, but when paired with such an incredibly important moment in the grunge zeitgeist, it became totally transcendent.

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EVERCLEAR, Sparkle and Fade (Capitol, 1995): It’s sort of amazing that Everclear didn’t break out until 1995, when this album was released, as front man Art Alexakis had a perfect grunge pedigree: He was from the Pacific Northwest (Portland), he was a recovering junkie, and his band played shambling, angst-ridden punk songs that owed as much to the Replacements as they did to the Sex Pistols. Still, the formula didn’t break out until ’95, when “Santa Monica” became a huge radio hit. The career trajectory of Everclear got very strange after this album, as Alexakis decided to make his whole catalog into midtempo rocks songs that recalled seventies AM radio hits (going as far as writing a song called “AM Radio”). But Sparkle and Fade has everything a good post-Cobain alternative album needed: a big single (the aforementioned “Santa Monica”), a conscientious rocker (“Heartspark Dollarsign,” a song about a white guy dating a black girl), and a lot of songs about drugs (“Heroin Girl,” “Electra Made Me Blind,” “Strawberry”). Alexakis also had a world-weariness about him that was palpable, which was probably due to the fact that he was already thirty-three years old and was married with a daughter by the time his band finally started being successful. Even the title suggested a knowing wink to the fleetingness of fame—a theme that continued, as the follow-up was titled So Much for the Afterglow. By grunge standards, Alexakis was grandfatherly by the time he got famous, and he fully embraced his role as alt-rock elder statesman. Sparkle and Fade remains his most raw and most definitive contribution to the rock landscape.

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LIVE, Throwing Copper (Radioactive, 1994): It’s lazy to simply call Live “the alt-rock U2,” a moniker that chased them since their debut and only disappeared after the band became irrelevant (any avoidance of shark jumping was officially put to bed by front man Ed Kowalczyk’s appearance on American Idol in the spring of 2006). But there is no greater moniker, as Kowalczyk is just as preachy as Bono and the band’s devotion to spirituality greatly informs their arena-ready rock tunes. Though they got a bit of attention for their debut, Mental Jewelry, this sophomore record represents Live at the height of their powers. Kowalczyk wails like a grungy preacher while the band pulsates and explodes behind him, leaving mostly a fine white ash. Released during an era when self-importance was not only encouraged but also sometimes required, Live was the sort of band that teenagers always thought was profound—and perhaps they would be if they didn’t constantly remind us how profound they actually were.

Still, if you can get past Kowalczyk’s heavy-handedness and enjoy these songs as overpowering stadium anthems, Throwing Copper is a pretty excellent album, and even the baldfaced pretense is at least interesting. Live used the quiet verse/loud chorus dynamic as well as anybody, as shown in “Selling the Drama,” “All Over You,” and “I Alone.” It’s a testament to the power of the band’s melodies when Kowalczyk can sing a lyric like “The beauty of this vision alone just like yesterday’s sunset has been perverted by the sentimental and mistaken for love” (on “Iris”) and it still somehow sounds like a pretty awesome rock song.

Most of Live’s crossover success came from the ballad “Lightning Crashes,” a song about the cycle of life that actually contains the lyric “Her placenta falls to the floor.” It was always the slow song that grunge kids requested at middle school dances, which was strange because just like Pearl Jam’s “Black”(the other most requested grunge ballad at sock hops), you absolutely cannot dance to it, in any capacity, at all. Plus, there’s a line about a placenta, for chrissakes. Not even Bono ever sang about that. Still, Throwing Copper remains an important and influential album, because it was one of the last times a band was this brainy and also this loud and this popular. It’s since been an elusive combination.

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LOVE BATTERY, Dayglo (Sub Pop, 1992): Not a whole lot of people have heard of Love Battery, but it is one of those bands that always get mentioned when you talk to people who were in Seattle during the grunge explosion. Love Battery got absolutely no love outside of the confines of their home city, but inside the Seattle clubs they were treated like the Second Coming. It’s no mystery as to why, as Love Battery was made up of members of other well-respected bands in the area that were considered seminal (most notably the U-Men and Skin Yard), making them the least illustrious supergroup in the history of rock and roll. They must have been the most logical signing Sub Pop ever made.

Honestly, it’s surprising that Love Battery didn’t break out at least a little bit, as this, their second and best full-length, is a roundly excellent introduction that well utilizes the psychedelic elements among the noisy McCartney-meets-stoner-rock riffs and melodies. The songs (especially the opening triptych of “Out of Focus,” “Foot,” and “Damaged”) have a lovely, delirious, churning quality, as though the guys from Pearl Jam suddenly got really into the “Norwegian Wood”–era Beatles. This sort of grunge-cum-psych-cum-roots sound was done much better by Screaming Trees, and in all honesty the record loses a bit of momentum toward the end, veering off into druggy noise a little too easily. But the bottom line is that everybody who ever hung out with a bunch of bearded guys at the Crocodile Club swore by Love Battery, and that’s why it makes this list. The songs are pretty good, but its reputation carries it.

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GREEN RIVER, Come On Down (Homestead, 1985): Arguably the first real “grunge” album, Come On Down falls behind 1987’s Dry as a Bone as far as sonic quality goes, but these songs are a fascinating study in two worlds being pulled apart in one band. On one side were Mark Arm and Steve Turner’s crazed, noise-centric, wailing songs about restlessness. On the other side were the riff-based seventies rock influences of Stone Gossard and Jeff Ament. Since Arm is the front man and handles the singing and is the only band member with writing credits on all the tracks on Come On Down, it ends up sounding a lot like the early Mudhoney recordings, albeit with a little more metal influence (mostly due to Ament’s very metal-sounding bass playing—it’s low and thick and always seems to want to pull the songs into a groove, which Turner’s guitar constantly resists).

“Swallow My Pride” is the best track on this album, and it also ended up being Green River’s only minor “hit,” at least within the confines of the early Seattle scene (Pearl Jam occasionally drops it into their live sets, and it’s often the track dusted off for Green River “reunions,” whenever PJ and Mudhoney tour together). On it, Arm moans, “This ain’t the Summer of Love,” and that lyric not only predicted a pattern of lyricism for the next decade, but also predicted an overall attitude toward everything, because (1) that is a completely hopeless line in the sense that it predicts misery in the face of assumed utopia, (2) it represents a longing for days gone by, at least one of which we can never know as a people, (3) it references Blue Oyster Cult, which fulfills the need to pay homage to the seventies, and (4) that reference might be a completely ironic mention or an in-joke between Mark Arm and one of the dudes from the Melvins (and it’s impossible to tell exactly). Arm managed to give birth to the mentality of every twentysomething man (and most twentysomething women) for more than ten years—it’s a shame he was never able to capitalize on it. Come On Down remains necessary because it’s a good starting point for the rest of the scene (though the next definitive album wouldn’t appear until Soundgarden dropped Ultramega OK almost three years later) and because it laid the groundwork that all the bands after it stayed surprisingly loyal to. Of course, most of the bands that followed actually contained former members of Green River, so perhaps they were just spreading the disease by acting like themselves. In any event, it’s still a pretty great record.

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REALITY BITES sound track (RCA, 1994): It should be duly noted that this is absolutely, positively not a grunge album in any capacity. In fact, it’s not even an alt-rock record, an alt-pop album, or an example of any of the other odd monikers used to qualify sounds that people really didn’t understand circa 1994. Again, its vitality isn’t so much defined by the songs included on it but by what those songs represent, as it highlights a number of odd sociological occurrences. Reality Bites was a mostly uninteresting romantic comedy (just like Singles!) that accidentally became a cultural touchstone (again, like Singles). In spite of its insipidness, it got a lot of things right: Ben Stiller’s square music exec was a perfect grunge-era villain, Ethan Hawke’s moody hipster represented the tortured artist/slacker to a T, and it starred Janeane Garofalo. Moving forward, the movie will be represented more for its sound track, and rightfully so, because it takes a whole bunch of songs that have almost no relationship to one another and creates an “alternative” mix tape that makes no sense and every kind of sense simultaneously. It’s got a bunch of bands that could actually be considered alternative, such as Dinosaur Jr., the Juliana Hatfield 3, and the Posies, a handful of artists who probably seemed alternative but turned out to be lame (all eyes are on you, Lenny Kravitz), and a bunch of seemingly throwaway tracks that don’t seem to have anything to do with anything. (What was World Party doing there? What the hell is Me Phi Me?) But that level of eclecticism (and the willingness to have an “anything goes” attitude) is wholly emblematic of rock fans in the nineties. The perception is that the grunge era was actually a very narrow time for music because fans were using an indie-kid mentality to judge music. In all actuality, it opened up doors for a lot of bands not necessarily because they were great but because people were desperate to stay on the cutting edge. Suddenly, knowing about a band before anybody else meant something on a pretty large scale. People who are serious about rock music have always felt that way, but in the nineties the mainstream wanted to feel that way. It led to a lot of false positives, but it also kept people’s minds open (for a short time, at least).

The sound track to Reality Bites will forever be known as the launching point for the career of Lisa Loeb, whose song “Stay” went to number one before she even had a record contract. “Stay” remains an excellent little slice of folk-pop, but her greatest contribution will forever be the video for “Stay,” where she wanders through an apartment, sings to a cat, and wears those sexy librarian glasses that became the accessory that still drives Ethan Hawke–esque guys wild. In that one three-minute clip, Loeb became a grunge sex symbol—consider her the alt-rock Tawny Kitaen (though Lisa has never knowingly humped a car).

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STONE TEMPLE PILOTS, Purple (Atlantic, 1994): Was there ever a band as hated as Stone Temple Pilots? A better question: Was there ever a band that was as hated and more or less deserved it as Stone Temple Pilots? When they first showed up in 1992, everything about them seemed contrived: Weiland sounded just like Eddie Vedder, their breakout single, “Plush,” seemed like a b side from Vs., and STP was from Southern California, home of Mötley Crüe, Guns N’ Roses, and the majority of the trashy bands that grunge was supposedly killing off. Weiland even tried to diffuse some controversy about misogyny (the song “Sex Type Thing” was considered sexist) by wearing a dress, a practice that Kurt Cobain was a fan of. There didn’t seem to be anything genuine about the guys from Los Angeles who sounded like Pearl Jam and looked a little too rock-and-roll to really be alternative.

Then a funny thing happened on the way to Stone Temple Pilots’ up-and-down career: They made a great album. 1994’s Purple, released only a handful of weeks after Cobain’s suicide, managed to bridge the same gap between grunge, metal, and stadium rock as Soundgarden did, and STP even managed to do it more artfully. The opening dirge, “Meat Plow,” has an amazingly heavy low end, and while Weiland does channel Alice in Chains’ Layne Staley a little too acutely, it’s still an excellent little rock song. Weiland does manage to find his own voice on the best parts of Purple, namely on the massive hit “Interstate Love Song,” which is the best track of the entire grunge era not called “Smells Like Teen Spirit” (and since “Smells Like Teen Spirit” is less a song than a cultural milestone, STP sneaks into number one). “Interstate Love Song” sounds like exactly what it feels like to drive down the highway in California, and if there’s a sentiment that is any less grunge than that, it would be remarkable.

Elsewhere, there are hints of psychedelia (“Lounge Fly,” “Vasoline”) that would be explored more thoroughly on later albums with mixed results. Weiland also revealed himself to be grunge’s best balladeer, continuing the trend that began with “Creep” on the fuzzed-out, tortured torch songs “Big Empty” and “Still Remains,” a pretty fucked-up love song on which Weiland sings, “Take a bath—I’ll drink the water that you leave.” That’s a level of devotion that might only be topped by “I wish I could eat your cancer.” These guys had issues—no wonder everybody was on Prozac.

After Purple, STP never really had a great album (though their Purple follow-up, Tiny Music … Songs from the Vatican Gift Shop, was largely excellent), and they ended up indulging in their psychedelic tendencies and devolving into a very boring version of the Doors, only to break up very passively when Weiland joined the Guns N’ Roses castoffs to form Velvet Revolver, which might be the most logical career choice in the history of man. Purple remains Stone Temple Pilots’ masterpiece, and though they seemed like pure evil at the time, STP was a pretty excellent rock band that wrote some of the most killer tunes of the era. If anything, this album will always be underrated because the band was so easy to hate. It’ll never be all that important, but it will still rock.

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TEMPLE OF THE DOG, Temple of the Dog (A&M, 1991): Considering its members were the best parts of Pearl Jam and Soundgarden, Temple of the Dog should be the best band of the grunge era and the greatest supergroup of all time. Of course they only got together for one album, and that album didn’t gain recognition until well after Pearl Jam broke out, so its cultural relevance is somewhat suspect. But Temple of the Dog remains a fascinating landmark that would make this list based on personnel alone. Created as a tribute to deceased Mother Love Bone front man Andrew Wood, Temple of the Dog acts as a sort of eulogy for the group’s fallen friend. There’s a sort of “Irish wake” quality to the record, which is mostly midtempo tunes played with surprising energy. Despite the fact that Chris Cornell handles most of the vocal duties, the album bears a much greater resemblance to Pearl Jam’s classic rock leanings than to Soundgarden’s arena metal, and it has a looseness that makes it clear it was written and recorded pretty much on the fly. Because of that looseness, there’s probably only enough quality stuff here to make up a pretty great EP and nothing more, and some of the songs are bloated and meandering. However, the chemistry between the band members cannot be denied, making Temple of the Dog one of the best illustrations of the true sense of community and brotherhood that many of the grunge-era musicians had—especially those actually living in Seattle.

The best-known songs from Temple of the Dog are the two that made it onto rock radio: “Say Hello 2 Heaven,” an epic about the afterlife, and “Hunger Strike,” a pretty rocking song that features an amazing back-and-forth vocal between Vedder and Cornell and a music video that had Jeff Ament playing in a tree in one of the silliest images of the nineties. The album also acts as a pretty excellent tribute to Wood, as it shares so much sonic quality (and actual band members) with Mother Love Bone that it sort of seems like the final, unreleased MLB album. Wood would have been proud.

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MATTHEW SWEET, 100% Fun (Zoo, 1995): Every generation needs their own Alex Chilton: a guy who doesn’t really belong to any one genre but manages to make very pretty records playing in just about everybody’s backyard, and who does all this in a fairly controlling, vaguely maladjusted fashion. Elvis Costello kind of became the Chilton of the eighties, and the seventies had the real Chilton. Matthew Sweet, for better or for worse, acted as the nineties Chilton (the twenty-first century Chilton would probably be Jack White or DJ Danger Mouse). Sweet’s early albums were the same kind of stomping, anthemic power pop that Chilton perfected in Big Star twenty years prior, and the sound was tweaked and made just dirty enough where Sweet was associated with the grunge guys. “Girlfriend,” from his 1991 album of the same name, was a huge modern rock hit and was about the most genuine love song of the era. Sweet was devoted to traditional, Beatlesy pop-rock songcraft, but he was more than happy to turn it on its ear once in a while. 100% Fun represents his most balanced and hardest-rocking work. While “Girlfriend” is still his most important and best-known track, 100% Fun featured some great songs that showed off guitarist Richard Lloyd’s (of Television fame) twisting, spiraling guitar style. The awesomely fuzzed-out Creep Rocker “Sick of Myself” was a hit on modern rock radio and features some tight guitar noodling, something that was always considered off-limits in grunge circles. Other highlights include the Neil Young–channeling “Super Baby,” the shimmering “We’re the Same,” and the intense, stuttering wash of “Lost My Mind.”

Sweet’s croon isn’t very dynamic, but it does the job, and lyrically he wavers between being a hopeless romantic, a manipulative creep, and a self-loathing slacker, somehow combining an emo guy, Weiland, and Beck into one incredible front-man package. He never made another great album after this one, as he jettisoned Lloyd and ended up playing almost every instrument on the 1997 follow-up, Blue Sky on Mars. Subsequent Sweet material has veered into layered California pop—perhaps he’s trying to become more Brian Wilson and less Alex Chilton (neither seems like a great role model). But Sweet’s work on 100% Fun has stood up, which says a lot for his songcraft and his ability to write melodies. Perhaps the best aspect of 100% Fun is its title: It’s one instance of jubilation from the grunge era that doesn’t seem at all ironic, so at the absolute worst, Sweet will be remembered as the guy who smiled and said, “I love you,” amid all the shrugging and brooding.

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VERUCA SALT, American Thighs (Minty Fresh/DGC, 1994): Named after the infamous “I Want It Now” character from Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory, Veruca Salt came out of Chicago and fashioned themselves as a dirty, scratchy midperiod alternative force that picked up right around where the Breeders had left off. Veruca Salt also had a serious Beatles fixation: Co–front women Louise Post and Nina Gordon operated in a Lennon/McCartney model, with the sweeter, infectious pop songs of Gordon mixing with Post’s more jagged, outside-the-box take. American Thighs also opens with a song called “Get Back,” and their sophomore album, Eight Arms to Hold You (itself a Beatles reference), even contains a wacky White Album in-joke where they echo the “walrus was Paul” line from “Glass Onion.” Of course, American Thighs doesn’t have the same sort of staying power as a Beatles record, but it does rock pretty hard. The album has a raw, open-wound quality that makes it sound like it was produced by Steve Albini. The guitars sound claustrophobic, the bass is floaty and metallic, and the drums are shallow but imposing. On top of it all are the harmonies of Post and Gordon, whose gorgeous vocal lines often mask the siren wails of the songs beneath them. There isn’t a whole lot of wiggle room with these songs—Veruca Salt figured out what their sound was and basically didn’t waver from it for the length of their existence. But there are some subtle variations among the tracks, from the Zeppelinesque “All Hail Me” to the grinding push-pull of “Spiderman ’79.”

People often forget that grunge was pretty much a boys club; outside of Hole, Veruca Salt was basically the only female-led band that played this type of music and actually got a bit of recognition for it—“Seether” was a huge hit, and American Thighs sold gold. It probably helped that “Seether” was as ubiquitous as it was and that both Post and Gordon were superfoxy, but the hard-charging, metallic sexuality of American Thighs stuck to the ribs of post-Cobain rock and roll just fine.

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RAGE AGAINST THE MACHINE, Rage Against the Machine (Epic, 1992): Musically, aesthetically, and philosophically, Rage Against the Machine has never been like anybody. Plenty of people had experimented with adding the chocolate of rap music to the peanut butter of hard rock, but Rage was the first band that made it sound good, and they also made it sound important, and that had little to do with front man Zack de la Rocha’s political leanings. Even a decade and a half later, Rage’s self-titled debut still sounds as raw, as desperate, and as heavy as ever. In truth, they don’t belong anywhere on this list—outside of the fact that Rage was booked on Lollapalooza, the band had pretty much no relationship to the alt-rock world. They were played on modern rock radio, but this album was originally absorbed as a metal album (and rightfully so). The three non–de la Rocha members of Rage later joined forces with Chris Cornell to form Audioslave, but that band sounds like the most talented seventies cover band in history—it seems like they should be releasing a very faithful version of “Don’t Fear the Reaper” at any time (perhaps drummer Brad Wilk is perfecting his cowbell). Wilk was friends with Eddie Vedder—that’s about the best anybody can do for a grunge link.

In a continuing theme, it’s more important that Rage Against the Machine became big when they did rather than how they did. Had grunge never happened, Rage would have been treated like a very esoteric metal band (like Anthrax, who had also experimented with hip-hop) rather than cultural icons. After all, rap-rock didn’t properly break until years later when Fred Durst showed up to break stuff. But because of the grunge-era openness, Rage Against the Machine was elevated to pop-star level. In any other time, they might have been ghettoized for being difficult to place in a bin at the record store, but during the early nineties, they stood out as another band that was thinking outside the box. They couldn’t have come at a better time, as their combination of socially aware altruism and fiery metal angst was fully understood in the musical climate of 1992. Rage was just like Pearl Jam, except taken to the nth degree—they were more concerned with worldly affairs than family drama, and they did it with a far more aggressive sound.

De la Rocha screaming, “Fuck you, I won’t do what you tell me,” will forever represent all the grunge kids who fought with their parents or had a party that was broken up by the cops. Of course, “Killing in the Name” was about police officers who were also members of the KKK, but that disconnect between their intentions and their audience was always a cornerstone in Rage Against the Machine’s charm.

Rage was known first for de la Rocha’s wailing about Zapatistas and second for guitarist Tom Morello’s six-string theatrics, but Rage’s secret weapon was always their rhythm section, who could play plodding metal, jumpy funk, and soaring anthemic rock with equal aplomb and make it all sound logical and badass. Rage flamed out at the turn of the millennium after two more spectacular studio albums. Most of the band became Audioslave, and de la Rocha went into an Axl Rose–ish state of seclusion, supposedly working on a high-profile album with multiple producers that may never get released (again, just like Axl). Though they’ll likely be blamed for setting the precedent that allowed for the rise of Limp Bizkit and countless other rap-metal bands that seized airwaves around the turn of the millennium, few bands made the sort of impact that Rage did across so many boundaries and with such little musical output—ten years, three proper studio albums, and only thirty-some songs.

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SCREAMING TREES, Dust (Epic, 1996): Led by the bluesy, gravelly voice of front man and chief songwriter Mark Lanegan, Screaming Trees was a band from Seattle that had more or less found their sound by the time the rest of the universe started noticing the Pacific Northwest, and though they had a couple of big singles (most notably “Nearly Lost You,” from their 1992 album, Sweet Oblivion), they were never able to break out the way that their peers did. Screaming Trees’ vision was unwavering, but they improved slightly in both sound and songcraft, which is why Dust, their final studio album, is their greatest achievement.

Screaming Trees was probably the most psychedelic of any of the Seattle bands. While groups like Stone Temple Pilots trafficked in theatrical, Doorsian psych sounds, Screaming Trees had more of a garage psych sound, dragging in low-fi spindles of Eastern influences and trippy backyard keyboard effects that meshed nicely with Lanegan’s haunting, otherworldly voice. Dust is an impressive culmination of a career’s worth of development. “Traveler” is an excellent example: Rugged acoustic guitars swirl around distorted strings and flute noises while Lanegan moans about getting “halfway there.” Lanegan also has a penchant for dusty biblical imagery—he mentions the Lord making him stay in “All I Know” and cries with Mary during “Dying Days.” When these are combined with the epic quality of the music, Dust creates an incredible mood of things being over, as though it’s being played live at the end-times. It’s as though the band knew this would be their last album together—or as though they knew that the scene they were a part of was slowly turning to dust.

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MUDHONEY, Every Good Boy Deserves Fudge (Sub Pop, 1991): Of all the post–Green River grunge bands, Mudhoney was absolutely the purest. Front man/songwriter/mad scientist Mark Arm was responsible for coining the term “grunge,” and later constructing the sort of sound that grunge would represent. Arm came close to his vision of sonic purity with Green River, but the guys who ended up forming Pearl Jam dragged the band too far in the arena-metal direction. Mudhoney represents Arm’s idealized rock band: equal parts punk, noise, metal, garage, and a whole lot of wailing and sweat.

Though it doesn’t contain “Touch Me I’m Sick,” the one song Mudhoney is best known for, which was released as a single on Sub Pop in 1988 and was later folded into the rerelease of their Superfuzz Bigmuff EP, Every Good Boy Deserves Fudge represents Mudhoney’s best-sounding and most consistent album. Ironically, it’s probably also their least “grunge”-sounding album, as the whole thing feels slightly faster and tighter than their other recordings and thus gives them a slightly more polished sound. But that’s a sliding scale, as this record still sounds wild, raw, and sort of filthy. Opening blast “Generation Genocide” acts as a wonderful warm-up for “Let It Slide,” a speedy garage freak-out that deftly showcases Arm’s nasal, snotty delivery. Elsewhere on the album, the band sounds as though they’ve been listening to a lot of Thirteenth Floor Elevators records, as an organ and a harmonica both creep into the mix, and both have the tossed-off quality that says, “Hey! We found this lying around the studio!” That’s not to say the Mudhoney band members were lazy or not accomplished musicians, but they have the energy of a pack of punk-drunk teenagers—amazing considering Arm was already pushing thirty by the time Every Good Boy Deserves Fudge came out.

Mudhoney later signed a major-label deal with Reprise Records and their sound devolved back into the Superfuzz Bigmuff era “classic grunge.” Though they never sold a ton of records and usually got their greatest exposure as an opening act for their friends in Pearl Jam and Soundgarden, Arm’s influence still ran deep, as it seemed like everybody in Seattle was constantly seeking his approval. Eddie Vedder was constantly talking in the press about how much more famous Mudhoney should be, but Arm’s band acted as a great equalizer among modern rock fans in that era, because if you were down with Mudhoney, it meant you were a more serious rock fan than other people. When looked at that way, Mudhoney just becomes a less successful version of Tool, and there are certainly worse fates (like being a less successful version of Interpol, for example).

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LEMONHEADS, It’s a Shame About Ray (Atlantic, 1992): No matter how weird your 1992 was, there’s no way it could have possibly been more odd than Evan Dando’s. The Lemonheads front man went from relative obscurity writing vaguely punkish doe-eyed love songs in Boston to being named one of People’s sexiest men alive, all on the strength of a twenty-five-year-old song. Suddenly that summer when you ate nothing but cheese Danishes while trying to figure out how e-mail worked must seem a little tame.

Dando’s band first gained major exposure with a cover of Simon and Garfunkel’s “Mrs. Robinson,” which was recorded in association with the anniversary video release of The Graduate. Initial pressings of It’s a Shame About Ray did not include the track, but when it started getting radio play and people started noticing Dando, it was tacked on as a bonus track (it’s now hard to find a version that doesn’t contain it). Breaking into the mainstream with a cover is usually a recipe for disaster (just ask the guys in Alien Ant Farm or Orgy), but luckily the cover was associated with Dando’s most fluid, heartfelt, powerful album. The title track is the sort of dreamy, strum-heavy dirge that twentysomethings used so they wouldn’t freak out while getting high, and it was delivered with Dando’s tossed-off “I’m just a bummed-out guy with a guitar” feel. He represented slacker nation to a T. There’s no doubt that had he used his songwriting skills with any sort of commitment, he could have been the Goo Goo Dolls.

Still, even with his why-bother demeanor, Dando became an accidental icon, something that only could have happened in the grunge era. While he never scored a hit as big as “Mrs. Robinson” (“If I Could Talk I’d Tell You,” from 1996’s Car Button Cloth, was probably the next closest), Dando did make a permanent mark on the generation’s music, and his rise to almost ubiquity is a perfect encapsulation of how incredibly open-minded the populace was at the turn of the nineties. Dando didn’t do much to capitalize on his fame—he let his songs speak for him, and with angsty suburban gems such as “Confetti” and “My Drug Buddy,” it’s no wonder that people are still attached to the very idea of the guy in the sense that his subsequent solo albums have been mostly forgettable, but there is still a buzz around every single one of their releases—more proof that both fans and critics have a hard time letting go.

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FOO FIGHTERS, Foo Fighters (Roswell/Capitol, 1995): People have never really known how to absorb Dave Grohl. When he sat behind the drum kit in Nirvana, he was just a manic explosion of hair and limbs that never seemed to talk. Once that band went kaput, he stepped in front of a microphone and fronted his own band, Foo Fighters. Through more than ten years and several million albums, people have always given Grohl not nearly enough credit (many of his best songs, such as “Everlong” and “Learn to Fly,” have been written off as “soft”) or entirely too much credit (Grohl was looked upon to “save” rock and roll on several albums, never really fulfilling that potential). The only time he ever got the correct, rational amount of props was when he sat in on drums for Queens of the Stone Age’s Songs for the Deaf, which was a wonderfully dynamic record that Grohl really left his mark on.

In truth, Grohl’s career is pretty remarkable, and for a guy whose iconic band had just fallen apart, the self-titled debut from his new group, Foo Fighters, is nothing short of miraculous. Most of the songs contained on Foo Fighters were written while Grohl was still in Nirvana, so many of them have an In Utero–ish feel to them (though the production on Foo Fighters is way cleaner than Steve Albini would have wanted it). This is especially evident on primal screams such as “Watershed” and “Weenie Beenie,” but the fuzz on tracks such as “Exhausted” and “X-Static” has Kurt’s fingerprints on it as well. That’s not to say Grohl was just making a lesser Nirvana album, as songs such as “Big Me” (which birthed the legendary Mentos-spoofing video that made Grohl an MTV staple) and “For All the Cows” have a breeziness about them that keeps the overall tone way less angsty. Grohl wasn’t a total goofball, but he did realize the dangers in taking himself too seriously.

Because Grohl plays every instrument on every song (save for some guitar noodling on “X-Static” care of the Afghan Whigs’ Greg Dulli), Foo Fighters is best absorbed as a solo album. Lyrically and sonically it works better that way, as this album has a certain claustrophobic feeling that never really showed up on subsequent Foos releases. When Grohl did put his band together, he chose former Germs guitarist and sometimes Nirvana touring axman Pat Smear, along with the rhythm section from Seattle emo quartet Sunny Day Real Estate, and though that lineup didn’t last long, it was the ideal group of musicians to carry out Grohl’s vision, which was a little bit gutter punk, a little bit glam, and a whole lot of heart-on-sleeve longing. Just about any single Foo Fighters has put out is better than any of the songs on this debut, but Foo Fighters acted as an amazing transition album between what we knew of grunge and what it would become. After all, if one of the guys in Nirvana didn’t want to sound like Nirvana, what chance did anybody else have?

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DEEP SIX (C/Z Records, 1986): There are two compilations that helped to plant the seeds of the grunge sound and began creating the lines that linked otherwise disparate noise bands. The more notable of the two is Sub Pop 100, the first compilation release from the then-brand-new Sub Pop Records. It featured at least one legendary band (Sonic Youth), a smattering of grunge forefathers (U-Men, the Wipers), and a couple of bands that would later appear way, way out of context (Skinny Puppy, Shonen Knife). It’s a record that gets better with age, considering the quality of the tracks and the incredibly low production values at the time, but it better illustrated what Sub Pop would later become (and what it currently is)—a catchall indie label whose philosophy is to have no philosophy.

But Deep Six came first, beating Sub Pop 100 by a handful of months. More important, it had a much more cohesive structure and a relatively singular approach to what sorts of bands were on it. The “Six” in question were Green River, Malfunkshun, the Melvins, Skin Yard, Soundgarden, and the U-Men. Each of those bands was absolutely seminal and influential to the grunge sound.

It gets by on history alone, but the quality of the tracks on the compilation has actually stood the test of time. Green River was a brand-new band, yet “10,000 Things” already shows them knee-deep in their push-pull between noisy metal screeching and arena-rock boogie. “Stars-N-You” is by far the best song Malfunkshun ever put out (which is not saying all that much, but it remains true). The two songs by Skin Yard, “Throb” and “The Birds,” are awesome slices of trippy, sludgy psychedelic mumbo jumbo. It’s a sound that Skin Yard would quickly grow out of (the band later rerecorded both songs, and the new versions have almost no relationship to these original tries—though they certainly rock a little more), but it does provide a good jumping-off point for the production style of Skin Yard guitarist and “Godfather of Grunge” Jack Endino, the producer who would later produce breakout work by Soundgarden, Nirvana, Mudhoney, and most everybody else living in Seattle with a guitar between 1988 and 1995.

Of course, the charms of this document (which is quite hard to find nowadays) are the same as the detriments: The production values are cartoonishly low, and the record revolves around four middle-of-the-road Melvins songs, which are a bit of an acquired taste. But the history remains, and it’s worth noting for the Soundgarden songs alone, as they are unbelievably heavy.

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BUSH, Sixteen Stone (Trauma/Interscope, 1994): Before the music media got ahold of him, Gavin Rossdale was just a slightly pretentious art student from suburban England. By the time everybody had taken a shot at him, he might as well have been one of the four horsemen of the Apocalypse (probably famine, considering his chiseled body). In reality, while Gavin’s band Bush didn’t totally undo everything Kurt, Eddie, and the rest of the Seattleites had built, it certainly represented the beginning of the end. After all, Bush did take a sound that was pure and visceral and managed to break it out into its simplest form. If four arty Englishmen can do it, who’s to stop anybody from picking apart the scraps?

Actually, when viewed as a sociological experiment or an art project, Sixteen Stone might actually be one of the finest accomplishments in Western history. Its grunge distilled to its purest form, to a point where it almost ceases to exist as a whole. The pieces are so clearly separated out and then combined together into songs that the entire record is almost wholly incoherent. That does not sound like a compliment, but it is. The twelve songs on Sixteen Stone sound exactly like what grunge is supposed to sound like, while the whole point of grunge was that it didn’t really sound like anything, including itself. Just consider how many different bands and styles of music have been shoved under the “grunge” header in this discography alone, and you realize that grunge is probably the most ill-defined genre of music in history. But one guy actually went ahead and established a definition, and that guy’s name is Gavin Rossdale. By this measure, Sixteen Stone is the only truly perfect grunge album, and that’s its greatest achievement but also its greatest flaw—its a stunning feat of execution of a genre that was all about imperfection.

Though many people won’t admit it, the songs on Sixteen Stone are pretty awesome, especially the singles “Everything Zen,” “Little Things,” and “Comedown,” which stole the bass line from Bon Jovi’s “Livin’ on a Prayer.” Actually, the Bon Jovi metaphor works fairly well: Bush was always desperate for attention and critical recognition but settled for having the more popular songs and selling more records. Like Jon Bon Jovi, Gavin Rossdale always seemed too pretty to be singing about the things he sang about (although his lyrics were always fairly incoherent, so who really knows what he was singing about). Gavin never wrote a batch of songs better than these, and the rest of Bush’s albums ended up floating from genre to genre (their sophomore release was a Steve Albini–produced arena noise album called Razorblade Suitcase, which was followed by a sort of futuristic-sounding robot rock record called The Science of Things). Sixteen Stone represented Rossdale’s Slippery When Wet. If only he had come ten years earlier and wore more denim—he could have been a star!

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MOTHER LOVE BONE, Apple (Polydor, 1990): The universe works in very odd ways, and rock and roll is as subject to its random machinations as anything. Mother Love Bone was designed to be a Great (capital G) rock band. They had a hard-rocking sound. They had a will to succeed. They had a unique, dynamic front man. They had epic, killer songs. Yet the album that was supposed to be their coming-out party ended up acting as their funeral march, as front man Andrew Wood died before Apple could hit store shelves. Mother Love Bone’s music never really made an impact until after Pearl Jam broke (and really not until people heard Temple of the Dog). Whether or not Mother Love Bone would have had any sort of breakthrough is up for debate, but there is no denying this record. Like any good album that aspires to be the perfect arena record, Apple is all about the ballads. Certainly the Aerosmith-channeling boogie rock of “Stardog Champion” and “This Is Shangrila” is both infectious and inventive, but Apple’s strengths lie in the epic scope of “Crown of Thorns.” A true lighter burner, it begins quietly and slowly builds into a deafening crescendo as Wood wails like a preacher on fire—think of it as a nineties’ “Dream On.” It’s that good.

Apple is a remarkable little artifact because it was clearly written and produced to be played on the radio, which cast it in an entirely different league from any of its contemporaries (such as Nirvana’s Bleach or Soundgarden’s Ultramega OK). When taken in the context of other great grunge albums, Apple sounds almost entirely out of context, as the only thing “indie” about it is the production quality. At the same time, Apple did express all of the possibilities that Pearl Jam would later transform into greatness—consider it a warm-up for Ten. Even as a rehearsal, it’s still impressive.

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PEARL JAM, Vitalogy (Epic, 1994): Released toward the end of 1994, Vitalogy is not only one of the best albums of the grunge era but also one of the most interesting albums of the twentieth century. Whether it was intentional or not, Pearl Jam managed to distill everything that was remarkable about them and everything that was making them frustrating all into one spectacular package. The band released Vitalogy on vinyl a few weeks before it was released on CD, ostensibly to reward fans who were purists and still listened to their turntables. Unfortunately, the gambit didn’t pay off, as all it did was flood the market with scratchy, popping bootleg versions of the album before anybody could buy their clean CD copy. It was another prime example of Pearl Jam really going out with the best of intentions and shooting themselves in the foot (see also: Ticketmaster).

But all stunts aside, Vitalogy represents Pearl Jam at their rawest and most unhinged, which is a strange thing to say considering the sheer number of ballads present. That’s okay, because even the ballads have an exposed-nerve quality, as though Pearl Jam managed to find their most basic essence, but every minute it’s exposed is painful. Midtempo rockers “Last Exit” and “Not for You” see Eddie Vedder at his angriest and most loathsome. He lashes out at people who would take what’s his, and he’s not interested in compromise. It often seems like Vitalogy represents what Pearl Jam is actually like, as if they somehow figured out how to be totally honest as people for exactly one album. They didn’t sound this up-front before and haven’t since.

Of course, all that transparency does lead to goofy experiments such as Vedder’s accordion solo, “Bugs,” and the eerie-but-listless collage “Heyfoxymophandlemomma, That’s Me.” Credit is due, though, as Pearl Jam felt so emboldened that they let all their whims hang out, which was a rarity in the hyper-self-aware nineties.

But the big story on Vitalogy is the slow jams, which float up and weave in and out and fade away and flash forward in the most gorgeous, raw ways possible. “Better Man” describes the profound sense of loss that accompanies giving up on aspirations and settling for comfort. “Immortality” muses on death with the help of some awesomely sad slide guitars, and “Nothingman” just about sums up the length of the grunge era and Pearl Jam’s entire career in about five minutes. “Caught a bolt of lightning,” sings Vedder. “Curse the day he let it go.” Since this was the first Pearl Jam album to hit the street after the death of Cobain, Eddie Vedder should have rightfully taken his place as the spokesman for a generation’s rock fans, but he (gracefully) bowed out of the position, mostly by being distracted by his fight with Ticketmaster (there was nothing especially “rocking” about warring with a gigantic corporation, and kids actually felt slightly betrayed that Pearl Jam concentrated more on fighting their regulations than on actual touring). Since the release of Vitalogy (generally agreed among Pearl Jam fans to be their finest hour), Pearl Jam has flirted with excellence but mostly has come up short one way or another. Vitalogy tells a loose story about death and loss and sacrifice, yet it is by far the most energetic and “up” of all the Pearl Jam albums. While their latter-day experiments tend to err on the side of garagey rocking, their talent still lies in crafting heartbreaking songs of sadness and loss. “He who forgets,” sings Eddie in “Nothingman,” “will be destined to remember.” Pearl Jam never figured out how to be as good as Vitalogy, so perhaps they will one day come around back to it.

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NIRVANA, Unplugged in New York (DGC, 1994): Issued a mere eight months after Cobain’s suicide, Unplugged in New York initially seemed like an odd forum for Nirvana to fully participate in, but over time it’s shown that it was a perfect marriage of sound and substance. Spin magazine once projected that “folktronica” would be the next big thing, and it’s hard to imagine that this live recording didn’t have a huge effect on that particular prediction. It’s hard to blame them—Cobain was a tastemaker, and he had decided that he was getting into solo acoustic songs, Leadbelly covers, and the farm punk of his friends in the Meat Puppets. The world never got the chance to see what Kurt would do next (at least musically), so nobody ever has to worry about Kurt’s Pete Seeger tribute album. But the passion with which Kurt attacked the songs on Unplugged in New York made it seem like the world was dealing with a whole new Kurt, a Kurt who could joke and cope. A Kurt with a voracious appetite for melody and simplicity. It’s no wonder this guy recorded with Steve Albini.

Actually, it’s strange to talk about this album as a Nirvana project, considering how many covers are included in the performance. Kurt’s own songs sound enlightened, as though he rescued them from exile and needed to nurse them back to health. This is especially true on In Utero tracks such as “Dumb” and “Pennyroyal Tea.” But the album is truly notable for the songs Cobain didn’t write. The trifecta of Meat Puppets tunes are all excellent and certainly feel like Nirvana songs (especially “Plateau”), and the Leadbelly cover (a version of “In the Pines” titled “Where Did You Sleep Last Night?”) is an amazing four minutes of music. It ended up being Cobain’s last recorded song, but it made absolute sense in more ways than one. The obtuse lyrics, the esoteric voice, the careerist tendencies, the general sense of malcontentment—Cobain was evolving into a next-generation Bob Dylan right before the alt-rock audience’s eyes, except Kurt went electric first, then tried acoustic.

Much like Mother Love Bone’s Apple, Unplugged in New York acted as both an exciting new chapter and an ad hoc tribute to a fallen icon. It mostly displays Cobain’s skills as a songwriter and arranger, but it also illustrates how varied the influences were on grunge, a genre that was the bastard son of a thousand subcultures.

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HOLE, Live Through This (DGC, 1994): All of Courtney Love’s career will forever be wrapped up in that of her late husband, Kurt Cobain, but even if she released a Nirvana covers album, nothing will ever live in the shadow of Kurt quite like Live Through This. This album’s very existence had some people convinced that Love had Cobain murdered, as its tone and release date seemed a little too convenient at the time. Even the title suggests that the widow Love is daring anybody else to survive what she was in the process of surviving. Mention Live Through This, and most people will think immediately about the Cobain connection.

The other accusation that Courtney had to fend off was that she wasn’t responsible for the songs on the album and that her husband had written them for her. Again, the circumstantial evidence is pretty profound, as Love’s band Hole went from sounding like an amorphous noise rock outfit on their debut album, Pretty on the Inside, to sounding exactly like the arena-ready screamers that were clogging the airwaves circa 1994. Whether it was Cobain’s influence or she was just capitalizing on a sonic trend, there was something about Live Though This that seemed disingenuous, and it’s unlikely that the truth will ever fully come out.

None of that matters, however. The more time passes, the less important the details of this album become. In the end, it’s about the songs, and even if Courtney didn’t write them, they still sound absolutely amazing. Hole’s command of the quiet verse/loud chorus dynamic was unmatched by anybody, including Nirvana. Album opener “Violet” is a prime example: It begins with a jagged muted guitar strum and some simple woodblocks, then explodes into a fireball of a guitar riff as Love screams, “Go on take everything!” over and over again. It’s a perfect storm of a song and one of the best radio tunes from that era.

Elsewhere, the band tears through raw, unforgiving bludgeon jobs such as “Asking for It” and “Softer, Softest” with reckless abandon. There is very little letting up on Live Through This—“Doll Parts” is probably the closest thing Hole gets to playing a “ballad”—but the unbridled rage is quite a thing to behold. Some people complain that the album sounds too slick, but it’s the sort of slick that worked for Nirvana—when you don’t have to worry about making something sound messy and chaotic, you can just allow it to be messy and chaotic.

Live Through This is a great record taken out of context; given its history, it morphs into an Important (capital I) album. Time will tell whether or not it was remembered for the right reasons, but like it or not, Hole dragged the riot grrrl movement into the spotlight and gave a mainstream voice to angry girls everywhere (if nothing else, Love inspired Alanis Morissette, though Alanis was equally inspired by Dave Coulier). Though Kurt was always talking about female empowerment and the music certainly seemed less sexist than hair metal was, grunge was still mostly a boys club. For one album, Courtney Love had bigger balls than anybody, and she wasn’t afraid to show them off.

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SOUNDGARDEN, Superunknown (A&M, 1994): Though it’s the most traditional and most esoteric-sounding Soundgarden album, Superunknown is the album that made Chris Cornell and company into superstars, and perhaps at no time in history was a band’s sound ever so functional. In 1994, Soundgarden was the total package: They looked like heshers, they played like giants, and they wrote songs that sounded like well-groomed mastodons plowing through the countryside.

Superunknown is undoubtedly the least metal-sounding album Soundgarden ever produced, but they still wear their Sabbath on their sleeves, as evidenced by the opening riff to just about every track here (but most notably on “Black Hole Sun,” which sounds like what the Beatles would sound like if they were turned up superloud and then forced to drink nothing but absinthe for eight straight days). But unlike Badmotorfinger, Soundgarden isn’t afraid to play around with grunge’s goofy sense of humor, hence tracks such as “Spoonman” and “My Wave.” Soundgarden never sounded like they listened to a punk album, but they certainly sped the pace up and introduced a new speed to co-opt their heavy plod on tracks such as the feisty “Kickstand.” And of course there was the ever-present darkness of “Fell on Black Days” and “The Day I Tried to Live,” both of which are incredibly depressing sorta-suicide ballads that still manage to sound like arena anthems. Eat your heart out, Rob Halford.

If anyone ever asks for a really good example of how unbelievably popular grunge was circa 1994, lay this story on them: That year, when this album came out, the song “Spoonman” became a pretty big hit. “Spoonman,” which is a song about a guy playing spoons that was written as a joke, featured a video that was just a guy playing spoons, and contained a goddamn spoons solo, was a pretty big hit (said video was in very heavy rotation on MTV, back when that actually meant something). “Spoonman” is probably the most ridiculous song to ever reach the top of MTV’s video chart. Grunge was so huge that the populace not only allowed for that to happen but encouraged it to come into existence. It’s likely looked upon as a big joke now, but the fact remains that for at least a while “Spoonman” was pretty ubiquitous, marking grunge as the world’s most powerful delivery system for just about anything.

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SMASHING PUMPKINS, Siamese Dream (Virgin, 1993): One of pop music’s all-time great “The Chicken or the Egg” debates is whether Billy Corgan had a persecution complex because nobody liked him or nobody liked him because he had a persecution complex. Corgan was one of the most prolific and successful songwriters of the nineties and commanded legions of adoring fans, but it always seemed like everybody just hated the guy. From journalists to other musicians and even (or especially) bandmates, Corgan was clearly a hard gentleman to know. He’s mellowed since his Smashing Pumpkins heyday, but that doesn’t take away his history of being difficult.

One could imagine that one of the reasons people might have turned on Corgan was the monstrous success of Siamese Dream, the second album from Smashing Pumpkins. It’s a remarkable record because it sounds like an alt-rock record (the guitars are fuzzy and detuned; Corgan’s lyrics are generally melancholy) but also separates itself from the pack (the production, by Gish and Nevermind knob twiddler Butch Vig, sounds absolutely massive, and there are a lot of nonironic seventies rock flourishes such as guitar and drum solos). Siamese Dream wants nothing to do with being cool, as Smashing Pumpkins had already done that on Gish. Rather, Siamese Dream wanted to sound epic, like the greatest album of all time.

It falls short of that goal (it’s not even the greatest album on this list), but it certainly makes a hell of an effort and clears a lot of hurdles along the way. The album opens with “Cherub Rock,” a song that perfectly defines the Pumpkins’ style and how Siamese Dream was to be defined: big-sounding, rolling drums, alternately humming and screaming guitars, and, most important Billy Corgan, he of nasal vocal qualities and interesting phrasing. It sounds like an outtake from a Boston album, but the chorus is pure 1993—over a hook so expansive you could fly a 747 through it, Corgan wails, “Let me out!” With that combination of a pedigree, it’s no wonder “Cherub Rock” became a modern rock radio staple and will likely make a very smooth transition into “classic rock.”

Another amazing thing about Siamese Dream was the fact that it was really, truly an album. Mainstream rock records that were actually constructed as long players and not just a string of singles were common in the early nineties; before that, the metal albums of the eighties were mostly anthems surrounded by throwaways (with a handful of major exceptions, obviously). Grunge rockers took most of their cues from seventies rockers, so they knew the value of a CD that plays like an LP—a full, focused, hour-plus experience that rewarded faithful listeners with subtleties and quirks. Siamese Dream almost plays like a concept album, or is at least paced like one, as “Cherub Rock” is followed by the buzzsaw-esque rocker “Quiet,” then the band launches into three straight epic anthems (“Today,” “Hummer,” and “Rocket”) before settling into a theatrical ballad (“Disarm”) to end act 1. The story arc of Siamese Dream basically boils down to “Billy Corgan is complicated,” but Siamese Dream is one of the few long players from the grunge era that still sounds reasonable as a full-length today.

Of course, Corgan took that concept to the extreme with his next record, the double-disc Mellon Collie and the Infinite Sadness that is actually a concept album (its story arc is “Billy Corgan is really complicated”), but the Pumpkins will be remembered for Siamese Dream, and rightfully so. Years from now, it will probably sound slightly out of place among its contemporaries (compared to In Utero or Superunknown or Dirt, it sounds kind of wussy or at least overtly commercial), but in reality Corgan did the only thing that was truly “alternative” in 1993: He wrote an album in an attempt to be a rock star. While everybody else was hiding, Corgan said, “Look at me”—no wonder everybody turned on this dude.

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SINGLES original soundtrack (Epic Soundtrax, 1992): It’s sort of unfair to have compilations on this list (and so high up to boot), but this is a stunning collection that perfectly personifies the rock-and-roll landscape circa 1992. Singles covers just about all the bases, and if there was a Nirvana song on this album, it would probably catapult itself to number one. As it stands, it’s still pretty impressive.

Cameron Crowe’s movies are essentially mix tapes that happen to end up on film, and considering how close Crowe was with the bands involved (several of them appear in the film, most notably three members of Pearl Jam as the non–Matt Dillon members of Citizen Dick), it’s no wonder this record sounds so good. But just as Singles accidentally defined a generation, the sound track to the movie ended up defining a great deal of grunge’s musical aesthetic by showing audiences exactly what (and who) was involved. Ironically, the most vital contributions to Singles came from Paul Westerberg, whose “Dyslexic Heart” and “Waiting for Somebody” were the first songs he released as a solo artist after the breakup of the Replacements, a band considered to be an essential influence on the grunge sound (Kurt Cobain often threw Westerberg props in interviews). Westerberg’s contributions showed listeners where some of this grunge stuff was coming from, so it made the transition to a song such as Pearl Jam’s “State of Love and Trust” (probably the second or third best song in the band’s catalog and a dead ringer for a sped-up version of a midperiod Replacements track) seem smooth and logical. The album also featured songs by Mother Love Bone and the Lovemongers (who were really just an acoustic version of Heart), bands that not only contributed kick-ass tunes (Lovemongers even covered Zeppelin!) but also gave grunge a context. It was a disorienting and confusing one, but it was a context nonetheless.

Alice in Chains probably owes Cameron Crowe their entire success. While Facelift was getting attention, it was the appearance of “Would?” on this sound track that really put them on the map. It also contains the best Mudhoney song ever written in “Overblown” and first showed the world both sides of Soundgarden, on the heavy-as-Thor’s-hammer “Birth Ritual” and on Chris Cornell’s acoustic “Seasons.” It even invites Billy Corgan to the party, as Smashing Pumpkins’ dirgey “Drown” closes out the record—it can even be argued that the inclusion on Singles allowed Corgan to be embraced by the greater alt-rock community, as Smashing Pumpkins was one of the first non-Seattle bands to really capitalize off of the scene and be met with a shred of critical respect.

So Singles is essentially a perfect storm of an album: It has incredible songs by a group of artists who were relevant but whose importance was increased a hundredfold by their inclusion on the sound track itself. Singles may not represent the down-the-line grunge aesthetic, but it does represent the eclecticism of the grunge header. These bands sound logical together because they don’t sound at all logical together. There’s a reason they also called this college rock, as you needed a Ph.D. to really deconstruct this stuff. Could Cameron Crowe have known how important his sound track would be? Judging from Vanilla Sky, not likely.

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ALICE IN CHAINS, Jar of Flies (Columbia, 1994): In the wake of the brutal sonic assault that was the heroin-heavy album Dirt, Alice in Chains reportedly wrote and recorded this entire EP in a week. When it was released, it shot straight to number one on the Billboard charts, making it the first EP to ever debut at that position. As has been made clear, a lot of grunge bands embraced a certain amount of dichotomy, allowing them to be more than one thing at a time. Jar of Flies absolutely lives at both ends of the same spectrum—it doesn’t sound like Alice in Chains (or even like grunge), and yet it is the album that defines them (and will define them over time).

Jar of Flies is a largely acoustic-based album (though some people do incorrectly identify it as an “unplugged” album—there are plenty of electric guitars on the album, most notably on “Nutshell”). The songs are quiet meditations that still manage to rock. It’s all in the intensity of the delivery—it’s clear that Alice in Chains really loved these songs. But they’re not ballads by any stretch of the imagination. While they do tend to slow things down and soften things up, they still sound like they are delivered from the edge of sanity. In short, you’d have a hard time slow dancing to these songs, which often take turns into minor keys that throw everything into a sort of controlled chaos. This is clearest on “I Stay Away,” a song that begins as an airy ballad but then shifts into an off-kilter, doomsday-foretelling riff before the strings and horns show up. For a band whose previous albums were as raw and as base as grunge albums got this side of Mudhoney, it was an incredible and jarring reversal for the band.

One thing that Jar of Flies does very well is highlight the stunning voice of Layne Staley, who began his unfortunate downward spiral shortly after Jar of Flies was completed (the band never really toured again, and they only released one more original album, a disappointing self-titled record released in 1995). Staley definitely peaked on Jar of Flies, as his voice shifted from the psychotic wail he had used on Facelift and Dirt to an otherworldly moan that was filled with sadness, anger, self-loathing, and regret. His layered vocal lines on “Rotten Apple” and his harmonizing with Cantrell on “No Excuses” are some of the downright prettiest sounds made on any rock album in the nineties, grunge or otherwise.

Obviously, as the album is only seven tracks long (and one of those is an instrumental), it’s easier to get it right when you don’t have as many chances to fail. Also, album closer “Swing on This” still sounds out of place, as though it was written as an afterthought or written separately from the rest of the album. Even so, “No Excuses” will likely be the lasting legacy from Jar of Flies and possibly for Alice in Chains as a band. This is extremely bizarre, because the band never made anything else that sounded remotely like “No Excuses” (except for when they tried to rip themselves off on their own self-titled album with a song called “Over Now”). The rolling, lighthearted drums, the singsongy verses, the pretty harmonies, the bubbly bass sound—all of that sounds only vaguely like the band that also produced “Rooster.” But that’s one of the beautiful things about the grunge era (and this happened all the time): In what other time in pop music history could you be remembered for something you’re not and still have it be pretty good?

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PEARL JAM, Vs. (Epic, 1992): If Eddie Vedder was really smart, he would have broken up Pearl Jam right after the release of Vs., stepping away from the spotlight and retreating to a beach to become the world’s richest and most esoteric surfer for the rest of his life. Had Pearl Jam exited on top, they would have been the goddamn Beatles—everybody would still be speculating about what their third album would have sounded like and whether or not Crazy Eddie would ever get the band back together. It would have been a genius move (and it likely would have saved us the horrors of Binaural).

That’s how unbelievably epically fucking huge Vs. was in 1992. Still riding the overwhelming crest of success the band received from its debut (and even more notably for the video for “Jeremy”), Pearl Jam did the incredible—they dropped an album at the exact moment when not only were they close to the peak of their fame but also grunge was reaching critical mass (the release of Vs. got Vedder on the cover of Time). Vs. was more than just an album—in 1992, it was validation that rock music could simultaneously exist outside the mainstream and absolutely conquer that same mainstream. The lead-up to the album was huge, and it sold nearly a million copies in its first week of release, an absolutely unheard-of number that broke a record that stood for eight years.

The amazing thing about Vs. is that despite its hype, its actually a compelling, difficult album that adhered to Pearl Jam’s established sound while throwing in a handful of elements that had to have weirded people out. It opens with a manic, stuttering track called “Go” that no song on Ten could have anticipated. It’s played with the reckless abandon of a garage band and owes a debt to some punk influences that had yet to appear in Pearl Jam’s music. “Go” is followed by another scorching rocker in “Animal” before the band turns to the moody, wistful “Daughter,” which saw Vedder deliver one of the gentlest vocal lines he had yet recorded (until he tops himself on side 2 with “Elderly Woman Behind the Counter in a Small Town”).

Vs. managed to foreshadow the rest of Pearl Jam’s career, as the album’s strongest tracks are its ballads, though the molten late-album rockers “Rearviewmirror” and “Leash” are pretty useful. Vs. also gave rock fans the first real taste of Pearl Jam’s strangeness, as “W.M.A.” is an extremely odd, atmospheric, hollow-sounding experiment that laid the groundwork for later sonic adventures such as “Stupid Mop,” and “Rats” is a funked-up workout in the tradition of Ten b-side “Dirty Frank.”

Pearl Jam didn’t release any official singles for Vs. and never made any videos, yet the album still eventually sold 7 million copies. Though it didn’t match the sales power of Ten, it was still a phenomenon, and for a brief time it made the rock universe forget about Kurt Cobain and his little band. Vedder and company had lightning in a bottle with Vs., and though it sounds a little bit dated when heard today, it still retains its necessity, if only because it’s amazing to think about an album that sounded like this topping the charts and breaking sales records. When history looks back on grunge, Vedder will always be the bridesmaid, but for Vs. he was king of the world.

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NIRVANA, Nevermind (DGC, 1991): So much has been written about Nevermind since well before it was released, it’s almost impossible to think about it simply as an album of twelve rock songs (plus one hidden track). But the bottom line is that no matter what becomes of any of the other grunge bands over time, no album will ever be as absolutely indispensable as Nirvana’s sophomore release. Even without the surrounding story, it would still be an incredible album of kick-ass protopunk; with its story, it’s become a legendary icon in rock history, ranking up there with anything the Beatles or Dylan or the Stones ever put out. In fact, if context was considered when ranking the most vital rock albums of all time, a very convincing case could be made for calling Nevermind number one, more vital than Meet the Beatles or Exile on Main Street or Blonde on Blonde. It meant that much, not only to rock fans and those in the grunge community but also to the universe at large. Without hyperbole, Nevermind changed the course of history.

Sonically speaking, it’s weird to even discuss Nevermind as a grunge album. If you asked somebody to describe grunge to you, they would probably talk about a band that sounded more like Soundgarden or Mudhoney. But whenever you mention the word “grunge” to somebody, the first band they think of, whether they like it or not, is Nirvana, and they usually think of that picture of the naked baby in the pool right after that. Kurt Cobain often complained that Nevermind was overproduced and “too slick,” and he’s right—it’s by far the cleanest-sounding punk album of all time. But the immaculate production quality aids Nevermind immensely, as it really highlights the band’s secret weapon in the mix: Dave Grohl. Nirvana would still be a great band even if they had Meg White drumming for them, but the fact that Grohl makes his skins sound like Godzilla stomping Tokyo really gives the songs on Nevermind the size and the edge that they need. Just think about “Smells Like Teen Spirit” for a second. Everybody knows that opening jangly guitar riff, but when does the song really explode? When Grohl’s drum fill comes in and drags the bass along with it. The second Grohl hit that snare the first time, eighties metal was officially dead and grunge, for better or for worse, would change the rock landscape forever.

“Smells Like Teen Spirit” is one of the all-time great album openers, perhaps one of the greatest rock songs ever written, despite the fact that it has one of the goofiest lyric sheets in the history of man. It certainly seemed like Cobain was getting at something, but what exactly is less dangerous when the lights are out? And what about that “A mulatto” line? But it was his delivery that absolutely sold it, because even though nobody knew what Cobain was talking about, what they did know was that this guy felt passionate about it. It wasn’t just anger, either, as Cobain’s voice on Nevermind sounds equal parts angry, morose, jaded, and optimistic. Again, Butch Vig’s too-slick big rock production helped, as it threw Cobain’s voice way up in the mix and brought out all of the subtleties he was capable of (though Steve Albini’s capturing of Cobain’s vocals on In Utero is technically a more accurate representation of Kurt’s voice, and it’s more impressive as well).

Nirvana proved itself to be a very dynamic group on Nevermind, as they could work with atmosphere (“Come as You Are”), unbridled noise (“Territorial Pissings”), mournful ballads (“Something in the Way”), and combinations of all three (“Drain You”). In fact, there are a lot more variations on Nevermind than on any other Nirvana release, especially the interesting but somewhat monochromatic In Utero. Again, Vig’s overproduction, which Cobain viewed as dishonest, probably saved the day.

But ultimately Nevermind won’t be remembered as an album and not even as a cultural phenomenon but as a representation of what it was like to be young and restless in the nineties. In fact, Nevermind has taken on a number of roles in several archetypal tales: It’s what happens when a young band is so good the mainstream comes to them; it’s what happens when you have too much success too fast; it’s what happens when you believe in yourself; it’s what happens when you become too committed. When Kurt died, Nevermind became an example of the burden of genius. Today it acts as all of those things. Pearl Jam ultimately ended up being the more popular band simply because they stayed together and Soundgarden might represent the grunge sound better, but Nirvana stands alone as the icons of grunge. Fans might not like it, musicians might not like it, and Kurt himself might not have liked it, but it’s the truth, and honestly, things could have ended up a lot worse, you know?