Houston Music Blog

Speaking of the early days of the Warped Tour, let's talk about Quicksand. Along with Helmet, Quicksand developed and popularized a particular type of post-hardcore that took the metal-influenced hardcore punk of 1980s New York, cut the tempo in half and filled up the resulting space with melody and atmosphere. Quicksand frontman Walter Schreifels had previously been the creative force behind Gorilla Biscuits, one of the most important bands of the NYC youth crew scene (he also played bass for a while in Youth of Today, who wrote the song "Youth Crew").

This would be the scene that transformed straightedge from Ian Mackaye's teenage sidestep into a youth movement and strict code of conduct that, ever since, has inspired near-religious zeal from its devotees and exasperation and annoyance from nearly everyone else. I've also heard Gorilla Biscuits described as "posi-core," because of the themes of uplift and morality that pervade its music.

Unfortunately, thematic content almost always takes precedence over musicality for GB, and though Schreifels pushes against the limitations of the hardcore box with nimble leads, octave melodies and clever harmonic shifts, his work is undercut by preachy and awkward lyrics. The Biscuits' single album, released in 1988, has not aged well, with the exception of their legitimately great anthem "Start Today."

One hot morning in August of 1997, my little brother and I hopped on MARTA (Mom wouldn't let me use the car) and moseyed on down to the Lakewood Fairgrounds in Atlanta for the third-ever Warped Tour. Should the writer of a column about experimental music be ashamed of having gone to the Warped Tour as a kid? Yes, clearly he should have burst from the womb reading Henry Miller and listening to Mission of Burma (oh wait, that was my brother). But in my defense, sample the lineups from some of these early years of the festival:

1995- L7, Seaweed, Swingin' Utters, CIV, Quicksand (that's right- the first Warped Tour had both ex-Gorilla-Biscuits bands! Beat that, Coachella!)

1996- Beck, Dance Hall Crashers, Fishbone (!), Dick Dale (!!!), Mighty Mighty Bosstones, Rocket From the Crypt

1997- Amazing Royal Crowns, Descendents, Murder City Devils, Social Distortion, the Bouncing Souls

OK, true, the 1997 Warped Tour also featured blink 182 (bleh), Sugar Ray (ick) and Limp Bizkit (barf). Wow, I totally do not remember seeing those last two bands, thank God. But luckily, I did see the Descendents, which is the point of this story. And pretty soon afterwards, I went out and bought the album they had just released: Everything Sucks.

Voodoo Gearshift was a little-known and surprisingly not-that-short-lived ('87-'97*) grunge band, originally from Iowa City but mostly active in Seattle. VG's claim to "fame" is Glue Goat, a 1992 CD on influential Seattle label C/Z. Unlike Sub Pop or Touch and Go, C/Z probably didn't put out any of your favorite records**, but they did put out the first records by some of your favorite bands, including the debut LPs by the Melvins and Built to Spill, the first Silkworm record to see wide (for Silkworm) release and the first available recordings by Soundgarden, Green River and Nirvana.

Apparently they also discovered the Presidents of the United States of America; I guess you can't win 'em all. Then again, I shouldn't talk, since I owned that record when I was 15.

Primus circa 1998, Copenhagen, Denmark

As the title of this feature might suggest, '90s nostalgia is in full swing, and one of the orders of the day is reexamining the aesthetic reputation of bands we liked when we were teenagers but of whom we subsequently became embarrassed, swapping them in our esteem hierarchy with the once-cool dads they originally supplanted.

The rehabilitation of '90s alt-rock has begun to pick up steam in the past year, yielding such phenomena as both MTV.com and the Onion's A.V. Club lionizing Stone Temple Pilots, and Slate's Jonah Weiner trying very hard to convince himself that Limp Bizkit was not actually that bad.

As a proud representative of the most irony-challenged large city in America, Rocks Off has enthusiastically embraced this trend that I just made up, running gleeful reevaluations of such Clinton Decade critical punching bags as Dave Matthews Band, Creed and Nickelback. Well, maybe "gleeful" is too strong a word in that last case.

And so, into the fray. The popular-yet-uncool band that seems to me to be most overdue for a second (third?) look is Primus.

In my last Flannel File entry, I talked about March's big reissue of Pearl Jam's Ten. This time, I want to look at a "little" reissue set from January: Swervedriver's Raise and Mezcal Head.

Like Jawbox or Sloan, Swervedriver had a pretty low profile among suburban youth of the early '90s, despite having (at least theoretical) major-label backing. I was familiar with them in name only when they played in Austin last June, an state of affairs that the concert itself did nothing to rectify since I skipped it.

Happily, I later ended up with a copy of A.M., a record from Swervedriver frontman Adam Franklin's new project, Magnetic Morning. Bush-league band name notwithstanding, it ended up being one of my favorites of 2008; the first two Swervedriver records were reissued just a month or two later. No doubt the timing was more synergistic than serendipitous, but all the same I was excited to be able to get full copies of the records, from which I had previously heard only excerpts.

When I heard about a Creed reunion in the offing - set to hit Houston September 25 - I didn't cringe angrily or go into music-snob convulsions, clicking through my iTunes looking for the new Bon Iver EP or feverishly dialing up the new Yeah Yeah Yeahs. Nor did I commence making scatological apoplectic posts to my Twitter, Facebook, MySpace profiles.

And why should I?

What did Creed ever do to me? Besides give my friends and I hours of enjoyment, playing ironic air guitar and dressing up in leather pants and a wifebeater, placing a high-powered fan one of our garages as we bellowed "With Arms Wide Open" like Creed singer and amateur porn star Scott Stapp.

In my last Flannel File entry, I asked if there was any file more flannel-y than that of Screaming Trees. Well, embarassingly enough, that rhetorical question has an answer: yes, and that file belongs to Pearl Jam. Let's step in the time machine and go way, way back to one month ago, March 2009, when Pearl Jam's debut album, Ten, was released in a new edition.

It included not just the mandatory remastered version of the original LP, but, more curiously, a remixed version courtesy of Atlanta's Brendan O'Brien, producer of the other albums in the first and second parts of Pearl Jam's career, from 1993's Vs. to 1998's Yield.

This is what really interested me about the reissue. It's not very common for a middle-aged band to revisit the artistic decisions they made when they were first starting out, and when they do, the result is that, surprise, when you mess with perfection you don't usually improve it. I'm looking at you, Gang of Four.

Today marks the fifteenth anniversary of a Seattle electrician discovering the dead body of Nirvana frontman Kurt Cobain in a small room above the musician's garage. The man who busted indie and punk out of their respective undergrounds had killed himself days prior, with a shotgun that Earth frontman and doom legend Dylan Carlson had bought for him.

Cobain's death on April 5, 1994 put an end to a chapter in the nascent national grunge scene and laid the groundwork for almost a generation of corporate imitators seeking the secret to Nirvana's magic formula. What could very well be decades of tributes and cultural canonization continues unabated to this day.

As the years pass and all of us of that generation age, our memories of Nirvana and Kurt Cobain grow fonder and ever more vibrant. We've begun to lose our cynicism about the band's legacy and sickening afterlife. We start to forget the batshit widows and awful "modern rock" bands trying to pilfer Nirvana's sonic blueprint.

Is there any file more flannel-y than that of Screaming Trees - a hard-rock band with long hair from Seattle, influenced by the sounds of the '70s and '80s, whose career began to take off in the early '90s but was brought down by substance abuse and infighting? Tom Moon, in his very cool book 1000 Recordings to Hear Before You Die, calls 1992's Dust "the most underappreciated classic of the Seattle rock revolution." I've been familiar with the two most successful ex-members of Screaming Trees for some time, but never gotten into the band, so that was good enough for me.

I discovered drummer Barrett Martin first. I saw him with Tuatara, Scott McCaughey's The Minus Five and Mark Eitzel in Atlanta back before the turn of the century, at a show where Martin and the members of Tuatara backed up not just McCaughey and Eitzel, but also, in a surprise encore, R.E.M., who played a cover of Suicide's "Ghost Rider." What does that have to do with Screaming Trees? Nothing, really, but it was a really awesome show.

[Note: Flannel File is an offshoot of Retro Active, focusing on the new hot nostalgia decade - the '90s, of course.]

As Retro Active expands its purview from the '80s to the '90s, it's somewhat appropriate that this post remarks on some folks who became massively popular in the '80s but who, oddly enough, didn't truly find their voice until the next decade.

Prince cohorts Wendy & Lisa have just released their first new album since 1998's Girl Bros. LP. Written and recorded as a form of creative catharsis after the death of Wendy's brother Jonathan Melvoin (Smashing Pumpkins), Girl Bros. had a spare, unfussy approach that, despite the pallor of despair that hung over it, managed to finally bring the essence of W&L's popcraft genius into focus.

Of course, it was released under the name "Girl Bros." not Wendy & Lisa, and was distributed through World Domination, a label whose name was more reflective of its endless ambition rather than its capabilities, so it generally escaped notice.

Which was truly unfortunate.