CHAPTER 9

OUTSIDERS AND WANNABES

Hitting Poses, Cashing Checks

Anybody who ever played organized sports should be familiar with a cliché that typically goes like this: “The team is only as strong as its weakest link.” This sort of catchphrase is always thrown around by coaches during team meetings in order to give the kid at the end of the bench a sense of self-importance and to make him feel more involved in the production of the squad (especially if a team is successful). In reality, the whole concept is crap, because sports teams don’t rely on their worst players to do much of anything. During Michael Jordan’s legendary run of six championships with the Chicago Bulls in the nineties, Phil Jackson never drew up clutch plays for journeyman sharpshooter Jud Buechler, mostly because Michael Jordan was on the team. In fact, the “weakest link” concept is unfair to great performers, as it suggests that the less talented will bring them down to their level, rather than be elevated by their greatness.

Unfortunately for grunge bands, the cliché is truer than most would like to admit. Certainly the first bands that everyone remembers are the legends: Nirvana, Pearl Jam, and Soundgarden. The greatness of those acts has been well established and will likely compound with time. But defining the era based on the work of those bands is useful only to a point. Their sounds did establish and define what it meant to be a rock band during that particular era, but at the same time they have been put so high on a pedestal that it is almost impossible to process them as bands, as they are greater than simple rock groups. They are icons that represent not only music but also fashion, philosophy, and a greater social aesthetic. Nevermind ceased being simply “a great album” years ago when it became a lightning rod for an entirely new and specific set of attitudes that mean more than simply twelve guitar-based songs.

So without the cornerstones to judge, the burden of history falls on the me-toos, the also-rans, the Johnny-come-latelies, and the wannabes. It’s unfair to go through this exercise, mostly because these albums are generally inferior by design (if they were better, the bands would have transcended their status and joined Nirvana and Pearl Jam as icons), and history will likely correct this over time—after all, who remembers the lesser painters of the Renaissance? The only guys still mentioned are the legends—nobody ever brings up the fifteenth-century Italian equivalents of Candlebox, whomever they may be.

But as terrible (or at least as less inspired or less transcendent) as many of these albums are, they are still important. They might not have a great deal of sway over the greater annals of rock history, but they did contribute a great deal to the story arc of grunge. It’s also interesting to note that not only have a handful of these bands survived to the current day, but several have remained successful, as illogical as that may seem. History rewards greatness, but as Amadeus has taught us, sometimes the mediocrities are the ones who shape things in greater ways than anybody is willing to admit. This is their story.

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ASK ANYBODY who has a knowledge of grunge to describe the archetypal early-nineties front man, and a few recurring themes tend to arise. They will likely describe a white guy in his twenties who had a rough childhood. He will be moody and sensitive and prone to fits of self-involvement, and he’ll sometimes be bitingly sarcastic and achingly sad, and all he really wants to do is rock. People who describe this particular guy will assume they are describing Kurt Cobain or Eddie Vedder, but really they are describing Billy Corgan. Though Corgan’s band was from Chicago, sounded almost nothing like the bands coming out of Seattle, had no real punk-rock roots, and actively sought out to become huge rock stars, the Smashing Pumpkins’ front man was one of the greatest and most influential icons of the alt-rock era.

Smashing Pumpkins began in Chicago as a collaboration between Corgan and his guitar-playing friend James Iha. The Pumpkins were influenced heavily by the Cure, and their early songs channeled the sad-eyed goth rock of bands such as Bauhaus and New Order. They were joined by bass player D’Arcy Wretzky, and the group began gigging around the Chicago area playing shows with a drum machine, which was later replaced by jazz drummer Jimmy Chamberlain, whose bombastic style would shape what Smashing Pumpkins would sonically evolve into.

Buzz grew after getting an early rub from Jane’s Addiction, and the band was signed to Virgin Records in 1991. Butch Vig, who had produced Sonic Youth and who would later go on to produce Nevermind, sat behind the boards for the band’s debut album, Gish. An accomplished but confounding debut, Gish is a collection of fuzz-filled, dreamy, driving rock songs that didn’t sound like anything that was being played on the radio yet still seemed like it was arena-ready (mostly due to Chamberlain’s absolutely massive drum sounds). In the pre-Cobain indie era when Gish was released, it was deemed a massive success. Smashing Pumpkins toured America and saw their popularity rise exponentially. Their video for “Siva” was getting spins on MTV’s 120 Minutes (later they would become staples on the early-nineties MTV cornerstone Alternative Nation), and there was talk of Smashing Pumpkins being the band that could really break through and redefine the rock landscape.

Gish was released in May of 1991, but when Nirvana broke in September of that year, the spotlight shifted to Cobain and the rest of his Seattle brethren, leaving Corgan and the Pumpkins temporarily on the outside looking in. Corgan felt slighted; he felt even more slighted that Nirvana had taken Butch Vig, the same producer who helmed Gish, and catapulted him into the stratosphere. Suddenly Vig was an alt-rock tastemaker, and with Nevermind storming the charts, Gish never got the sort of attention it deserved.

After ending their tour on a bit of a whimper, Corgan and the Pumpkins set about making their follow-up, the album that would truly tattoo their name on the mainstream consciousness. The record would solidify Corgan as a genuine genius, blow the doors open for what sounds were acceptable on an alternative-rock album, spawn countless imitators, and become one of the most successful albums of the grunge era. Corgan called the album Siamese Dream.

Siamese Dream is a stunning collection of thirteen songs that took Vig’s crisp, clean, arena-ready production on Nevermind and elevated it to the nth degree. It took the basic sounds of Gish and filtered them through a pristine seventies rock sensibility. It’s a record full of tracks that are meant to be heard in stadiums. “Rocket,” “Cherub Rock,” and “Today” all became modern rock radio staples, and it is not hard to see why: Each of those songs has the quiet verse/loud chorus dynamic that all grunge exploited, plus a killer hook and Corgan’s whiny, wistful vocals that still commanded a great deal of attention despite their obvious shortcomings.

But the Pumpkins weren’t just crafting perfect arena anthems—they were also experimenting. Though its pop sheen has become its dominant trait as time went by, Siamese Dream actually contains several experiments and risks that were pretty amazing and outside-the-box circa 1993. Most notably, the heavy orchestration of “Disarm” was indeed disarming, as its strings and bells swelled and crashed over a simple acoustic loop while Corgan intoned the ominous refrain: “The killer in me is the killer in you.” In fact, “Disarm” represents the pinnacle of a type of song that was not necessarily birthed during the grunge era but certainly found its home: the Creep Rocker.

Creep Rockers didn’t always have similar sonic characteristics, but they did always share thematic elements—namely, the lyrics always discussed what a jerk/freak/creep the singer was, and always in the first person. Sometimes they were ballads, like Stone Temple Pilots’ “Creep,” but sometimes they were loud, distorted rockers, like Silverchair’s “Freak.” Before they became humanized versions of music-making robots, Radiohead broke out during the grunge era with their Creep Rocker, which was also called “Creep.”

These songs all seemed to draw inspiration from the first generation of creeps: Morrissey, Robert Smith of the Cure, and Trent Reznor, all of whom had goth leanings and pretty bad self-esteem problems. It was a match made in heaven, as most of these musicians either were prone to self-flagellation (like Corgan) or at least realized that self-flagellation was an excellent marketing tool (like Scott Weiland; see elsewhere in this chapter for more on the horrors of Stone Temple Pilots). Creep Rockers were definitively grunge (most of Hole’s Live Through This is made up of them), and they were even passed on to the next generation, as Creed’s breakthrough hit was about Scott Stapp condemning himself to a self-made cell in “My Own Prison.” In an era of profound self-loathing, the Creep Rocker found its home among the unwashed slackers of the nineties. Since nobody was allowed to have fun anyway, everybody figured they might as well figure out what their problems were, and wouldn’t you know it? They often found those problems inside.

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RELEASED IN the summer of 1993, Siamese Dream was the third alternative album to truly transcend traditional classifications. While Nirvana and Pearl Jam claimed various classic and underground rock influences, Siamese Dream had no interest in sounding “underground.” Rather than channeling Pixies or the Melvins (as Kurt Cobain often claimed), Billy Corgan seemed to be channeling Boston and Journey, bands whose historical significances are not entirely dismissed but certainly in question. Corgan took a lot of heat at the time, and historically the heat appears to have only gotten greater, as Siamese Dream is often dismissed as a lesser album than it actually is. Plenty of people branded Corgan a sellout, but he absolutely made the album he set out to make, and considering the climate of rock circa 1993, it’s possible that the most “alternative” thing a band could do was make a naked bid to be on the radio.

Siamese Dream was not without other controversies. Stories surfaced that Corgan had played every note of the album himself, or he had rerecorded D’Arcy Wretzky’s bass lines, or he had exiled the rest of the band from the studio. The stories still conflict, but Corgan does insist that every band member was playing on the album every day in the studio. The idea that Corgan does not play well with others certainly stuck, though, as his relationships with Wretzky and James Iha deteriorated, and Corgan’s post-Pumpkins band Zwan also apparently broke up because of personality issues between Billy and other band members. But Corgan was the same moody perfectionist as Kurt Cobain—the only difference is that Corgan’s band was given time to fall apart.

Also like Cobain, Corgan never really did the same thing twice. The follow-up to Siamese Dream was a tremendously ambitious two-disc concept album called Mellon Collie and the Infinite Sadness. There were some classic Pumpkins rockers present, such as “Zero” and “Bullet with Butterfly Wings,” but it was predominantly made up of epic art songs like the treacly “Tonight, Tonight” and synth-heavy workouts like “1979.” When Corgan fired Jimmy Chamberlain after his drug habit got out of control (and led to the death of Smashing Pumpkins’ touring keyboardist Jonathan Melvoin), he decided he didn’t need a drummer and made a Depeche Mode album, which he called Adore. Reaction to it was mixed at best. He welcomed back Chamberlain for the Pumpkins’ swan song, MACHINA/The Machines of God, which got back to their early roots but put more of a Kissesque metal tinge on the songs. MACHINA was largely ignored and represented Smashing Pumpkins’ ultimate demise.

Corgan’s solo work and his pseudoreunion of the Pumpkins may sully his personal legend status, but the legacy of Smashing Pumpkins cannot be denied. They released one of the most important albums of the era, and though it flew in the face of the indie-first conventions at the time, it still made its mark and was the sort of mainstream rock album it was still okay for smart, sensitive people to like, and that’s because the band had a smart, sensitive front man in Corgan. Their commercial success was nothing to sneeze at, either, as Smashing Pumpkins managed to pull off stunts that no band today would even think of attempting, never mind managing to succeed. In 1996, in the wake of the massive success of Mellon Collie and the Infinite Sadness, Corgan put together a box set of all five singles from that album (“Bullet with Butterfly Wings,” “1979,” “Zero,” “Tonight, Tonight,” and “Thirty-three”), gave each of them a couple of b-sides, and sold it as a rarities set. It was a five-disc batch of leftovers from a single album, and it nearly went gold. Who else can claim that level of absurdity?

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IN 1992, the familiar strains of a deliberate, distorted guitar riff could be heard coming across radio waves and cascading all over MTV. The song was clean and intense and was anchored by the heavy baritone of a soulful front man. It sounded like Pearl Jam’s second album would be just as good as—if not better than—their first one, especially considering the newfound sexual energy they seemed to be exuding.

Vs. did end up being great, but the song that everybody heard wasn’t Pearl Jam—it was “Plush,” the debut single from a group from San Diego called Stone Temple Pilots.

Stone Temple Pilots was formed when singer Scott Weiland met bass player Robert DeLeo at a Black Flag concert. The two began making music together as Mighty Joe Young. Drummer Eric Kretz and guitarist Dean DeLeo, Robert’s brother, joined soon after to make up the only lineup STP ever had (how very un-Seattle of them!). The band settled on the name Stone Temple Pilots after discussing favorite decals from their youth, when Weiland came up with a play on the old STP motor oil logo (though the first idea was Stereo Temple Pirates). The band quickly gained buzz around Los Angeles and San Diego and signed to Atlantic Records in 1991.

Up until Bush showed up to ape Nevermind, Stone Temple Pilots were the definitive wannabes. Journalists and media critics were absolutely ruthless with them and derided them for their old-style rock-and-roll swagger and their single that sounded exactly like Pearl Jam. Whether or not STP’s intentions were good is irrelevant, but their debut album, Core, was victimized a bit by the single-selection process. While the whole record does sound a little too close to a Southern California band trying to sound like a Seattle band, “Plush” is by far the worst offense. STP would have likely met with the same sort of judgment no matter what their first single was, but they were certainly dealt a bum hand when the record label chose “Plush.”

It hardly mattered, of course. The will of the people was not to be denied, and people went absolutely apeshit for STP. Core sold over 8 million copies in the United States alone on the strength of five singles, and “Plush” won a Grammy for “Best Hard Rock Performance.” If rock writers were ever looking for evidence of their absolute irrelevance, they had to look no further than Stone Temple Pilots, who were absolutely raked over the coals and managed to conquer the world regardless.

MTV went especially nutty for the boys in STP. With Pearl Jam shunning videos and Nirvana becoming more difficult, Stone Temple Pilots provided a straightforward, visually interesting rock solution that lit up the airwaves. MTV gave the band their own MTV Unplugged special and aired countless news pieces about how they had formed and what they were up to. The videos for “Plush,” “Sex Type Thing,” and “Creep” were all in heavy rotation throughout 1992 and 1993, and they featured front man Weiland looking not very grungelike at all. He was a theatrical, pose-heavy lead singer—a true rock-and-roll front man in the tradition of Jim Morrison. Weiland was moody and esoteric, yes, but he also knew how to command a crowd and knew the power of his genitalia.

Core is a pretty derivative album that doesn’t just rip off Pearl Jam but also borrows from sources as far-reaching as the Psychedelic Furs and Blue Oyster Cult. The singles are the whole story—there’s the slow grind of “Plush,” the definitive Creep Rocker “Creep,” and the possibly misogynistic, definitely confusing “Sex Type Thing.” Weiland came under a lot of fire for the lyrics of “Sex Type Thing.” He claimed that it was meant to be a story song and that he was inhabiting a character. That’s a lazy way for rockers to pawn off controversial lyrics on fictional people, but Weiland meant it, going as far as sometimes wearing a dress onstage when the band performed the song. Retrospectively, the lyrics to “Sex Type Thing” are so deliberate and over-the-top that you have to hope that Weiland didn’t actually mean them, lest he need serious professional help.

After collecting their Grammy and their Rolling Stone reader’s poll award, both for “Best New Band,” they returned in 1994 with Purple, supposedly written and recorded in under a month. Stone Temple Pilots had gone through a magical transformation that saw them truly come into their own as a band. The songs on Purple have little to no connection to the grunge scene, as STP’s new sound was equal flashy glam and edgy psychedelic rock. There were still a couple of Pearl Jammy moments—most notably the riff on “Meat Plow” and the changes on “Pretty Penny”—but Purple also delivered “Interstate Love Song,” an Eagles-esque blast of juiced-up California rock that has zero relationship to anything Pearl Jam or Soundgarden ever produced. It’s an airy, smooth rock song with an unbelievably catchy hook and Weiland’s affected rasp in top form. Though the Seattle rockers ruled the roost, “Interstate Love Song” tops everything else from the entire alternative universe not called “Smells Like Teen Spirit.”

Just because Stone Temple Pilots were emancipating themselves from their grunge influences didn’t meant they didn’t still indulge in some bad grunge ideas. They were constantly on the verge of being completely derailed by the drug problems of their singer, Scott Weiland. Like his colleagues from the Pacific Northwest, Weiland’s poison of choice was heroin, and his troubles began in 1995 when he was arrested and charged with posession (his first of many arrests while in STP). Fearing their singer’s legal troubles would ruin the band, Stone Temple Pilots separated for a while before Weiland rejoined the band in late 1995 to record its third album.

Tiny Music … Songs from the Vatican Gift Shop from 1996 is as weird as it’s title suggests. Though it was produced by Brendan O’Brien (who had also produced STP’s first two albums), it sounded like an entirely different band at work. The heaviness in Dean DeLeo’s guitar was almost gone, replaced by a sort of aggro jangle that chugged along on the uptempo rockers and eased up to create atmosphere on the slow stuff. The first single, “Big Bang Baby,” is one of the glammiest tunes STP ever produced, with a robotic riff over hand-clappy drums and Weiland’s high-fashion vocals. The singer’s drug problems were peaking during the recording of this album, and it’s readily apparent in the songs, as this is the druggiest-sounding record the band ever produced (even more so than their next album, No. 4, which seemed to be actively attempting to be druggy).

Though STP was evolving, they still were wholly dismissed by critics but generally endorsed by fans. Rock writers were apparently completely unforgiving of the “Plush” transgression, as every permutation of Stone Temple Pilots was panned and sent packing as unimaginative dreck.

Weiland’s drug problems continued and the band parted once again, allowing Weiland to record the superweird solo album 12 Bar Blues and the rest of the band to collaborate with Ten Inch Men singer Dave Coutts as Talk Show. The one Talk Show album is one of the most laughable side projects in history, with uninspired cookie-cutter tunes that seemed to send the STP concept backward several steps in the evolutionary process. Coutts was especially embarrassing, as his attempts to avoid sounding like Weiland resulted in him sounding like he was trying to sound like Weiland. The whole album is a mess, and the brothers DeLeo are probably relieved that it has gone out of print.

Stone Temple Pilots reunited in 1999, but things were never the same. Their fourth album, No. 4, sputtered commercially because (1) Weiland was in rehab during the time the band should have been touring and (2) it’s not very good. The band went for Beatle-esque simplicity on their fifth and final album, Shangri-La Dee Da, in 2001, but it was the sound of a band trying to fulfill their contractual obligations. They disbanded shortly after, and Weiland joined Slash and a bunch of other Guns N’ Roses castoffs in Velvet Revolver, one of the worst hard-rock bands of all time, especially considering the pedigrees of the members. The brothers DeLeo worked on other people’s albums before forming Army of Anyone with Filter front man Richard Patrick, while Kretz runs a recording studio in Los Angeles.

Stone Temple Pilots probably never deserved a fair shake, but people seemed especially eager to go out of their way to make sure STP never got one. While Weiland rarely stayed out of trouble long enough to tour properly, there was rarely a band that was better at giving the fans what they wanted than Stone Temple Pilots. In that respect, they are sort of like grunge’s version of Cinderella or Ratt—nobody every took them seriously, but they made a handful of more-than-competent records and always gave the audience what they were looking for. Stone Temple Pilots may have been wannabes, but they were tremendously conciliatory wannabes.

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WHILE Stone Temple Pilots could be forgiven for their transgressions, there is no forgiving Gavin Rossdale’s band Bush. Debuting in 1994 with their album Sixteen Stone and the tremendously Nirvanaesque single “Everything Zen,” the Bush band members were ridden mercilessly as the posiest of all the posers. They were art school students from England—what did they know about the Seattle rock they were so accurately aping?

But once again, the populace spoke with their wallets, and Bush was a massive hit, selling millions of albums and becoming modern rock staples in the post-Cobain era. The funny thing was that everybody seemed to process Bush as a Nirvana clone—nobody ever acknowledged the band without bringing it up. In fact, it was the first thing their fans would readily admit. Bush became an extremely meta-experience, where everybody was in on the joke but played along with the game anyway.

Sometimes it seemed like even Bush was in on the joke. Though Rossdale constantly deflected the criticism with his chiseled cheekbones, Bush occasionally came across as a very elaborate art experiment. For example, the single “Little Things” was probably the most naked aping of “Smells Like Teen Spirit” ever written, but Gavin liked to deflect that observation by claiming that the song was a lift … of the Pixies’ “Gouge Away” (which, consequently, was the same riff that Kurt likened “Smells Like Teen Spirit” to).

Or a better example: In 1996, Bush went into the studio to record their second album, titled Razorblade Suitcase, with Steve Albini, the same gentleman who had produced Nirvana’s In Utero. With all of the accusations of Nirvana-aping that Bush received, you would think that they would want to create a bit of aesthetic distance between them and Kurt Cobain for their second album, but you’d be horribly wrong. There’s no possible way that Rossdale did not consider at some point in the process that the news of Albini’s production would cause a massive backlash and even more name-calling and dismissing, so Rossdale was either (1) unbelievably self-confident in his wishes to work with whomever he wanted to work with, the rest of the world be damned, (2) calculated in his attempts to make Bush into less of a band and more of an art experiment (where the experiment was apparently “do what Kurt did”), or (3) unforgivably stupid and naïve. It’s hard to tell what was the case, but Albini took the job, and his production style makes Razorblade Suitcase sound a lot like In Utero. Rossdale may have been able to replicate Cobain’s vocal style but could never mimic his sense of pathos. But if the whole thing was meant to be a joke, Albini seems exactly like the type of maladjusted guy to help a too-clever British dude carry it out.

Razorblade Suitcase became a hit, spawning a couple of singles and a handful of weird videos, but grunge was already fading and making way for a more aggro brand of rock. But in 1997 the whole world assumed that electronic music would be the next big thing and that kids the world over would trade in their guitars for samplers. This is how desperate people were to crown rock stars and icons in the post-Cobain world—they were going gaga over DJs. The Chemical Brothers were being played on MTV on a specially designed show called Amp, and the Prodigy graced the cover of Spin Magazine, who crowned them the next big thing. It was an incredibly overblown time that saw very little good music, and none of the so-called stars of the electronica movement did much in the way of actually delivering a new electronic rock hybrid.

That didn’t stop Bush, however. They released an album of remixes titled Deconstructed in the fall of 1997 to a mostly apathetic response, and they followed that album up with a somewhat aggro, somewhat electronic The Science of Things in 1999, which met with a similar response. The Science of Things contains elements of electronic music but hints at a nü metal influence as well, bridging the gap between the two predominant next big rock things at the time. Bush’s career wrapped up in 2001 with Garden State, an album that was somewhat well received but fell on mostly deaf ears (though it got a bit of attention when the band changed the title of the first single from “Speed Kills” to “The People That We Love” after the September 11 terrorist attacks). Bush was unbelievably guilty of bandwagoneering, but was it all intentional? It’s hard to decipher, but judging from the subsequent work Rossdale has done with his new band, Institute, it seems as though all of his moves with Bush were legitimate.

It is doubtful that any band will ever be as derivative of another band as Bush was of Nirvana. That fact alone makes Bush’s existence remarkable. While the music may have been unoriginal, it’s hard to deny the nastiness of some of Bush’s hooks, and even Courtney Love admits that “Machinehead” was one of the better rock songs of the nineties (even though it is the least grungy-sounding track on Sixteen Stone, sounding much more like a wussed-up Judas Priest cover than anything Nirvana ever did). Gavin Rossdale shouldered the burden of a lot of things he shouldn’t have had to, like the death rattle of the music we call grunge. He might not have killed it off for good, but he certainly didn’t help the cause. But in a time when grunge was dying anyway, why not grab the last scraps left before the ship sank? The nineties were supposed to represent ideals greater than that, and therein lay the big problem with Bush: They were opportunistic in a time when that was considered crass and horrible. If only Gavin had been born fifteen years earlier and joined Def Leppard—then he’d be remembered as a rock god.

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THERE WERE plenty of other bands besides Smashing Pumpkins, Stone Temple Pilots, and Bush that scored big-time success while getting a shine from the grunge movement, even though none of those bands had a whole lot of association with the Seattle rock heavies. The breakthrough of those bands really marks the transition from the concept of grunge to the broader genre of alternative rock.

But there were countless other groups that popped their heads above water and got a bit of one- (or two-) hit-wonder love from the grunge masses and then dipped back down below, likely never to be heard of again. Candlebox was probably the most notorious of these groups. Their debut album was prototypical grunge: quiet verses, loud choruses, and an anthemic sense of self-loathing. The guys even wore flannel and looked like auto mechanics. Candlebox’s two singles, “Far Behind” and “You,” are the type of songs that will pop up on nineties retrospective compilations until the end of time, because they are immediately recognizable when they begin and absolutely forgettable once they end. Candlebox came under a bit of fire because a story came out that suggested that Candlebox had been an L.A. band that had moved to Seattle specifically to cash in on the grunge scene. That story proved to be untrue, as Candlebox played the same Seattle clubs in the late eighties and early nineties as Soundgarden and the members of Pearl Jam. But the amazing thing is that once that perception was out there, people were unwilling to believe anything else. It is for that reason that unless their front man finds a universal cure for cancer during a reunion show, Candlebox will go down in history as “that band who moved to Seattle so they could be grunge.” Anybody looking for evidence that grunge fans were an unforgiving sort need look no further than the Candlebox parable.

Another band that was nakedly derivative of grunge (and Nirvana in particular) was Silverchair. Made up of three teenagers from Australia, Silverchair might as well have been a Kurt Cobain tribute act, as they had it all: the song structures, the Kurt vocalization—even their name was a reference to a Nirvana lyric. Their debut, Frogstomp, is one of the worst albums of the nineties. It makes Bush and Stone Temple Pilots look like the Beatles and the Stones. The songs are cookie-cutter and boring, and it’s not even produced well, despite knob twiddling by Aerosmith producer Kevin Shirley. Critics rightfully hated it.

Against all odds, Silverchair managed to improve on their subsequent albums, where they morphed into a tougher, heavier alternative band, even gathering some critical praise for their trippy, sorta-metal 1999 album, Neon Ballroom. Silverchair is a perfect example of how bands seemed to leap over each other in an attempt to become more like the breakout bands from Seattle. It wasn’t just a matter of making the same sounds so they could sell the same records and make the same money. Nirvana, Pearl Jam, and others carried themselves with a sense of integrity that remained intact despite the commercial windfalls. It was as though every rock band on the radio had also figured out how to be U2, staying classy and cashing checks with minimal questions or interference. For young rock bands, that sort of success is the holy grail. It’s having your cake and eating it, too. That carrot must have seemed far too great an opportunity to pass up, especially to an eighteen-year-old with a distortion pedal.

The irony is that by aping somebody else these bands had no shot at ever attaining any kind of integrity, mostly because grunge audiences were too smart (and too vindictive). Silverchair managed to dust themselves off and grow into the band they would have become anyway, while others had mixed results.

Rock radio was littered with wannabes, which are a necessary evil in any cultural movement. After all, somebody had to flesh out the playlists when the Nirvana tunes fell out of rotation. Bands like Sponge, Better than Ezra, and Collective Soul had to exist, even if they didn’t really offer anything new. Ironically, the benign groups might have been able to extend their careers because they were so benign, but it’s the spectacularly derivative bands that gained a place in history. People will always have a hard time remembering whether it was Dishwalla or Our Lady Peace who sang “Counting Blue Cars,” but the tales of Gavin Rossdale’s artistic indiscretions will be told as long as there is rock music. After all, if you can’t be the best, why not fail spectacularly?