Imperial Teen "You're One"

At the same time Imperial Drag was out, so was Imperial Teen. I always thought that was unfortunate. It's so damn hard to pick a band name---it sucks when a band with a similar name comes out at the same time.

Roddy Bottom was in Faith No More, and left to form this sweet quartet. A great 90s pop tune about his late friend, Kurt Cobain.


Hear the song on Youtube.

Nirvana "Heart Shaped Box"

It was some kind of amazing teenage Rock N Roll fantasy come true. I was on the radio.

Better yet, after only a couple of weeks on the air, I was getting my own specialty program, and it started tonight! It was April 8th, 1994.

I'd been hired to work at a small, independent radio station near the Virginia/Tennessee border, as a part-time evening DJ. They needed someone to cover their nightly 2-hour call-in request program. But in the interview, I pitched the idea of having an Alternative specialty show.

It's kind of hard to imagine this, but in 1994 much of the country still didn't have radio stations for Modern Rock. Classic rock station were playing Soundgarden and Pearl Jam, but as "Alternative" got punkier and/or weirder, there wasn't a place for it on the radio dial yet.

And in Southwest Virginia, there was nowhere on the radio to hear Beck or Smashing Pumpkins or this up-and-coming little band called Green Day. But that was about to chance.

I was positively giddy at the notion that I'd be sharing this great music with an audience that (I believed, anyway) hungered for it. So I spent the week preparing and refining the playlist for my first program, Friday, April 8th.

Unfortunately, the pickings were pretty slim at the station. WABN was a Top 40 station, so the CD selection for Alternative tracks was limited. I used a ton of my own CDs, but there were still gaping holes between what we had, and what we needed.

Still, I had crafted a playlist for an amazing tour-de-force of a debut program, and bounded into the station Friday evening, ready to set the world on fire.

Rita, one of the station owners, stopped me dead in my tracks.

"PJ, Kurt Cobain is dead. I'm sorry."

She said "I'm sorry" with a seriousness that made it feel like I had known Cobain personally. That this loss was real and profound and near.

The wind was definitely taken out of my sails.

Instead of hitting the airwaves like a gleeful pirate, spreading musical anarchy to southwest Virginia, I now had the unpleasant duty of being the guy who came on the radio and told you about a terrible human tragedy.

Worse, we only had one Nirvana song in the building: "Heart Shaped Box." It had crossed over to Top 40, so the station owned a copy of that, and nothing else.

In the ensuing years, I would do a Cobain tribute on April 8th, and play songs from throughout the band's career: "Lithium," "About A Girl," "Sliver."

And I would play that one song that I had played (and replayed) on that sad day in 1994, that represented a small and feeble gesture in the face of incomprehensible sadness.

R.E.M. "Let Me In"

Here's another Weekend Post:

I didn't have a chance to write about the anniversary of Kurt Cobain's death this week, but I'll do a longer post on Monday. This weekend I'm just posting a couple of "lost in the 90s" Cobain tributes.

This one was buried deep into R.E.M.'s "Monster" record. As usual, it's pretty hard to decipher what Michael Stipe is talking about, but you have to appreciate that this is a tribute done by someone who truly was a friend of Kurt's, who knew him and cared about him.



Weekend posts are a chance to revisit songs that have happy memories, not of anything in particular, other than just hearing the tunes.

Many of these songs were tracks that I played during my 90s stint as an Alternative/Modern Rock radio show. They're tunes that I hardly hear these days, but are wonderful to revisit.

Click on the "Weekend Posts" label below, to see other posts like this.

For Squirrels "Mighty K.C."

Here's another Weekend Post:

I didn't have a chance to write about the anniversary of Kurt Cobain's death this week, but I'll do a longer post on Monday. This weekend I'm just posting a couple of "lost in the 90s" Cobain tributes, including this one from a band that had it's own tragic story.



Weekend posts are a chance to revisit songs that have happy memories, not of anything in particular, other than just hearing the tunes.

Many of these songs were tracks that I played during my 90s stint as an Alternative/Modern Rock radio show. They're tunes that I hardly hear these days, but are wonderful to revisit.

Click on the "Weekend Posts" label below, to see other posts like this.

Led Zeppelin "Over The Hills And Far Away"

If you were to ever hear stories about the biggest Rock song of the 90s, "Smells Like Teen Spirit," invariably, the name of The Pixies is invoked.

Kurt Cobain said it himself:

"I was basically trying to rip off the Pixies. I have to admit it."

The Pixies cool trick of quiet chorus, loud verse became a popular motif for Nirvana, in songs like "Come As You Are" and "Heart Shaped Box." And the connection reinvigorated an interest in The Pixies, who'd long since broken up.

But I always wondered, What about Led Zeppelin?

The quiet/loud dynamic wasn't exclusive to The Pixies (though it was deployed quite expertly by them). There had been other bands who used it.

What about Led Zeppelin?

Kurt Cobain? A suburban West Coast teen growing up in the 80s? He HAD to be a Zeppelin fan.

Maybe at that time it wasn't cool to admit you liked classic rockers Led Zeppelin if you were in the 90s Punk Rock/Seattle scene.

But when I hear "Over The Hills And Far Away" I think, Kurt Cobain had to have had this song in him, at least in his subconscious, when he wrote his songs, right?



I got my answer, in part, with the Nirvana Boxed Set "With The Lights Out" which contains these Zeppelin covers.

R.E.M. "Crush With Eyeliner"

I was in the car, flipping through stations, and I hear a familiar riff.

I'm sure this happens to you all the time. You catch a portion of a song on the radio, and the familiarity bells ring, even if you don't have the artist and title right away. And a lot of times, from the feel and the style and the instrumentation, you can hazard a guess as to who the artist is.

I heard this rockin' feedbacky jangly guitar, that screamed mid-90s, and my first thought was Nirvana.

And I laughed a few seconds later when the vocals came in, and I recognized R.E.M.'s "Crush With Eyeliner."

On the surface, it's hard to imagine confusing the two. "Everybody Hurts" would never be mistaken for "Rape Me."

But for 1994's "Monster," R.E.M. DID go loud and rockin' and Nirvana-y, almost as if to remind the world, "Hey, we were alternative long before 'Smells Like Teen Spirit' came out."

Two other Nirvana connections---"Let Me In" on "Monster" was Stipe's song to Cobain (with whom he'd become friends) after Cobain's death. And Courtney Love claimed that SHE was the "Crush With Eyeliner" that Stipe was singing about (though Stipe has since said the song was a tribute to The New York Dolls).

Hear clips of all songs mentioned in this post: