Nice! Btw - that kid also recorded No Knife's set that night:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=33pkx7IDVVg
Jim jumps on stage and sings his parts on "Charming".
I saw so many amazing shows at The Point. Everytime I'm in L5P and see that vintage clothing store, it stings just a little bit.
That 10th anniversary tour came nowhere near me. I saw that No Knife (who opened that summer 1999 tour) was opening, so I flew cross country, just for that one show.
It was so so great. It was like everything that 1999 tour should have been for them in terms of finding success. The secret had finally gotten out. :D
It's hard to understate how stunning this band was at that time. I saw them three times in three months, and it was like being in on the world's biggest secret. (But kind of a shame that it felt like a secret, knowing that Capitol didn't get it.)
For anyone who hasn't seen it, the video from the Atlanta show in June of 1999 is worth the viewing, especially for that version of "Sweetness".
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=y0rrSYraq7o
(Full disclosure: my upload, not monetized, I was there that night, I didn't record it, I tracked down the kid with the gigantic newsroom camera and got a copy from him, one of my absolute favorite live recordings.)
I tried to clarify that in my second post. You're not exactly wrong, but it doesn't have a bearing on what happened between Ryan and his victims. It's not necessarily that Ryan was being across-the-board misogynistic (see: Jenny Lewis) or that a guy could have stopped it (see: Jason Isbell). Ryan was an abuser using his social status to control and abuse his victims.
It's too simple to say "guys have to do more". While power is overwhelmingly held by males, a majority of males do not have that power or access to it. Many guys who tolerate this behavior do so because they don't themselves have the power to do anything about it.
The real answer to this is exactly what's been happening - we're creating a culture that brings real-world consequences to this kind of behavior. Unfortunately, it is (and has to be) on the backs of victims telling their stories. And, yes, those victims are largely female and non-cis-identifying.
The fix here is to continue doing what the NYT did: bringing these stories to light. I don't care what the gender is of the person doing that work, but this is where the real fix lies. As soon as abusers (and others) see that they can't get away with this, it'll happen much less frequently.
It's sucks to say that, but it's true - that's the only way people in power stop abusing their power. No other person (male or otherwise) of power could have stopped Ryan from doing what he did - it's likely that no one in such a role knew it was happening.
I know I'm being mildly pedantic here. But I dislike broad-based "[generic group] has to do more" answers. The solutions are in the details.
If you're a guy and you hate this: donate to RAINN or a similar organization. Get an NYT subscription. Really listen to your friends and hear their stories if they share them with you.
But outing these assholes and undermining their power - demonstrating that others shouldn't follow their path - will bring the best answers.
Thanks - me, too. (Sadly, his next relationship was only marginally better - he eventually just stopped dating entirely.)
To be honest, I read antigone's comment more as an analogue to this particular situation. I mean, you're not wrong, but what you're describing wouldn't really change what happened between Ryan and his victims.
I'll admit I was also a little bit reacting to Phoebe's comment where she holds Ryan's friends partly accountable for validating him. I understand why she feels that way, and I 100% sympathize, but I think she's not really understanding their situations. She's assuming that they knew and allowed him to get away with it, or had any idea how to confront him.
I've been in a similar situation recently where a friend was mistreating his wife (I'll try to avoid another long story). I literally could not find a way to intervene.
His abuse was subtle when they were in company - none of our friends were aware, including the friend who lived at their house. (They thought his verbal abuse was just dry humor.) I accidentally witnessed the physical abuse first-hand when no one else was around. (She saw me, and signaled that she was okay. I think he knew I was there, but I'm not sure.)
I tried to talk to her about it, but it was impossible to get time with her away from him. I couldn't email or text her about it because I knew he had access to her phone. She would say she wanted to talk, but she would never set an actual time.
I knew I couldn't confront him directly - he would just deny it. (Even what I saw wasn't obvious as to what he was doing, and he could have passed it off as a "joke".) And given her reaction at the time, I was worried it would just make it worse for her.
I eventually stopped validating him (was civil, but stopped joking with him, and stopped engaging with his social media), and he eventually stopped inviting me over. I haven't seen them in months. (They're still together.)
These are almost always unique situations. People like Ryan (and my former friend) create their own worlds - there's not much that power and privilege can do.
(Apologies for the length of these - I'm either unusually surrounded by this, or I'm just hyper-aware of it. It really, really sucks.)
It's oversimplified and unfair to say that only "men" can fix this.
One of my closest friends spent the better part of two years being verbally and physically abused by his girlfriend. The overwhelming majority of it happened when they were alone. His local friends thought she was "off", but were mostly unaware of what was going on. He seemed to be okay with whatever little they saw going on, so they didn't see a reason to say anything about it.
I lived in another state at the time. During my lengthy phone conversations with him, he would wear down and concede some what was going on. I later found out his parents (also out of state) were aware of the abuse, and had spent months trying to get him to break up with her.
I eventually spent a few days visiting him. She refused to leave me alone with him. There was one evening that I had to spend alone with her, and she slowly started inflicting some of that abuse on me. I talked to him about everything after I got home.
I also spoke to another longtime mutual friend about my experience, and they visited him shortly thereafter. She did the same (if not more) to them, and they complained to him about it. It was only after seeing her be abusive to two of his closest longtime friends did my friend finally break up with her. (But he STILL tried to be friends with her for years afterward.)
In general, abusive relationships end only when there are major consequences for the abuser (like Ryan) or when the victim finally recognizes the abuse and leaves the relationship on their own (like Phoebe). Confronting an abuser generally accomplishes nothing - they either deny it, or inflict abuse on you, or eject you out their life. (And not every man is physically strong enough to be a physical threat to a male abuser.)
Confronting the victim rarely does any good, either - they deny it, and may even cut you off because your involvement risks what they perceive as their "safety". (Victims are often still in love with their abusers - they deny and rationalize what's going on.)
This kind of behavior is sinister. Victims are often separated from friends and family by their abuser. But, in reality, it's those friends and family that are best-equipped to get victims away from abusers. Not "men".
The Hot 100 was stacked pretty heavily against Alternative music during the early-to-mid 90s. The chart was based mostly on physical single sales and radio airplay. Until the late 90s, there were few Alternative radio stations, and Top 40 radio ignored all but the biggest Alternative songs, and barely played those. (Top 40 mostly favored R&B, which we'll see when we get there.) The majors saw Alternative as an album genre, so they pressed very few songs as singles. ("Teen Spirit" got one, but most people bought Nevermind.)
"Last Kiss" demonstrates this perfectly. It was only released as a single, and was non-Alternative enough to cross over. (By '96, Top 40 was starting to include lighter Alternative fare anyway, so it was ready for PJ-lite in '99.) So Pearl Jam's one big "song" was a minor one in their greater catalog.
Mendel noted that they worked on the album in Seattle and were recording it in Los Angeles, and I've long taken the assumption that it was happening at the Foos' home studio.
I agree with your thought - I don't think he's blaming Grohl at all. I think he's just acknowledging the frustration that the band gave up on the album before it was completed. That's the pain - his "voice" is being taken away because they didn't complete the album.
They didn't really do much with the song, but I've always liked Travis' cover of "Killer Queen". (From the "Sing" single, 2001.)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dYOmNiqGlDA
They really should have used the Up sessions as demos then gone out and re-recorded the album live. There's some solid experimentation going there, but it just sounds flat and a bit tepid on record.
By comparison, some of those songs sound brilliant live. For me, the hands-down best version of "Lotus" that exists is the one they played on Letterman that year:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZkSUTYMm6n4
Minor correction: they actually broke up before the album came out.
Timeline:
October 6, 1998 - Final show in Virginia
October 27, 1998 - Album release
June 27, 1999 - "New Noise" video debuts on MTV's 120 Minutes
I've often wondered what might have happened had they waited to tour until the album had been released and gained some traction.
The problem with this song is that the pre-chorus is a better chorus than the actual chorus, as demonstrated by that mashup with Paul McCartney's "Let 'Em In":
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jjpP6aFwJ3E
Late to this, but the linked YouTube vid isn't the 1967 version of "Kind of a Drag" - it's a slightly bland re-recording.
The original version has marginally more life:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jRaraRzQf9A
You're right. My brain has that song as something like the "Teen Spirit" of Disco - the song that pushed it (and the Studio 54 scene) over the hill into something ubiquitous. But I'm probably wrong about that, too.
But I stand by the rest of that comment. Disco didn't die as much as it was subsumed by modern dance/pop.
There might be some minor truth to that, but not in the bigger sense. It was more like "grunge" in the sense that it was everywhere all at once and there wasn't a whole lot of variety in it. By 1979/80, there wasn't anything really new to it - nobody was injecting creativity into the genre. Invention was going elsewhere. (As with grunge, the association with drug use didn't help, either.)
If you look at how Giorgio Moroder made "I Feel Love" - really the first major disco hit - he and a lot of other producers took those same techniques and pushed them into mainstream dance/pop. The NY dance scene that made disco is pretty much the same NY dance scene that made Madonna in 1983. Nile Rodgers took the Chic sound and gave David Bowie a new career. Disco didn't really die so much as it became part of something else.
Just because I love those mashups (and since "Uptight" peaked at #3, so it didn't get a writeup), here's a fave that happened because Motown put out those karaoke CDs:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XXdfKUbS-0c
"If you could somehow remove Stubbs’ voice from 'Reach Out I’ll Be There'...”
Ask and ye shall receive.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PYKpdNy3WGQ
(Motown released a batch of karaoke CDs in the mid-00s with the lead vox and music on separate tracks. A bunch of great Motown mashups came out of that collection.)
I think it's more about the expectation. If you're listening to those alternate takes as something more than what you already know, there's something worthy about it. But when all you're handed is those odd versions - it's jarring. And, for me, it was extra-disappointing since it was my first SP show.
For comparison - a couple weeks before that, I saw Soundgarden. Their opener was an Australian band called You Am I, and they absolutely blew me away. I knew zero of their songs going in (and I later thought their live set stomped all over Sound as Ever), but the set itself was shockingly great. Great energy, catchy songs - everything that SP set wasn't.
I later saw Viewphoria and was stunned by that version of "Quiet" from Atlanta '93. It's an absolute stone-cold killer. I kept wishing I could have gone to that show instead.
Btw - the surprise of this article is that, until today, I thought I was the only one who felt like this. Apparently not, especially if he's mentioning it in an interview.
From memory, it was more about him just being disrespectful to the material. I mean, reinvention is one thing, but it was like he tried to dial up the Corgan Sneer to 11, and just for the hell of it. I wouldn't even really call it "angry", per se. It just felt edgy to be edgy, experimental to be experimental, and almost completely empty. I like it when bands challenge themselves and reinvent their material, but not like that.
In fairness, I was totally fried from a day of hot weather and great music, and I know that was a factor. But I wasn't expecting a songwriter I admired to treat his own material with that kind of contempt, and that's what it felt like.
(I can't remember the setlist at all, but I think "Disarm" was like fourth in the set, and I left right after that. I had genuinely been looking forward to seeing that song live in particular, and was so bitterly disappointed.)
I almost want to hunt down a recording from a Lolla 94 set to see if it was anything like I remember. But only "almost".
I just got triggered.
I was not one of those jocks, but I am one of those people. I refused to ever see them again after seeing a bad Lolla 94 set out of them. The entire day had been so great - so many amazing bands (Beasties, Breeders, a new-ish Green Day), and here comes Billy. Song after song that sounded awful compared to the Siamese Dream that I loved.
Then came that version of "Disarm". Yeah, that one. I grabbed my shit and left. It was so entirely disrespectful to such a beautiful song.
(It was similar to this version from Earphoria, but I remember even more sneering out of Billy.)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bjZlGKVerW4
Afterward, I told everyone about how much I hated that set. The reaction was always one of surprise, especially from people who genuinely loved the band.
I've heard (and enjoyed) live recordings of SP sets after that, especially from the '98 and '00 tours. But I've quietly refused to give him another try after that.
However, I wouldn't bother to confront him at an airport about it.
Then there's Sam Kinison's take. The video features a truly impressive number of recognizable rock/metal celebs, especially considering how mostly-terrible the whole thing is.
This is the kind of thing that could only have been made in 1988.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gKboMhtEKoM
This guy was interviewed by an Atlanta TV station a couple of days before the service, and it was a total ego-trip. He bragged about how he was the one who brought together Aretha's family and his family.
https://www.wsbtv.com/news/local/atlanta-pastor-to-give-eulogy-at-aretha-franklin-s-funeral/819198029
Williams: "I ask you as humbly as I can, when you go down on your knees in prayer, that you will remember me in this hour."
Prayers for Aretha? Nope. Pray for me.
I mean, at least he asked "humbly", I guess.
Having said that, with maybe that exception, I consider Throwing Copper a masterpiece - those guys were on fire during those sessions. Even the unreleased outtake "Hold Me Up" is terrific. It's almost surprising how little traction that album has today, given that alt radio was playing like six or seven songs off of it by the end of '94.
But, damn, did they lose the plot on Secret Samadhi. (Especially with how great "Lakhini's Juice" is - listening to the CD the first time was a lot of a bummer.)
When "Lightning Crashes" was all over radio, there was a singer-songwriter in town who used to cover it, but every word of the song was "placenta". It worked.
Steve should remix and use the single greatest pizza jingle of all time - still on the radio 30 years later.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KGXpNpS9aTY
I mean, I remember a time (not that long ago) when it was weird to play "Smells Like Teen Spirit" in a place of business. And I think you're right, but we're not there yet, especially on a campus like Duke. Whole lotta white-bread adults in the area.
Everyone's ripping Moneta (who's an asshole), but it's entirely possible that Duke Dining made the call on the firing. As the article points out, Joe Van Gogh was already on "probation" - it's not out of the realm of possibility that the head of Duke Dining went, "ugh, not this shit again" and read them the riot act after Moneta reported what happened.
I think it's more that grunge bands were shitting on the 1991 version of GnR - the bloated drama queen version capable of writing eight-minute songs steeped in melodrama. I think most of those bands (excepting probably Nirvana) would have been on board with GnR in 1988.
I was in a band once that used to play some foos after each practice. The guitarist had hand-crafted his own foosball table that was like a solid piece of furniture.
The foosball was great. The band... we were terrible.
Amidst all the craziness, I somehow had never noticed the part where he's singing with/to the wrench. It's a call-back to their video for "We Close Our Eyes" (another favorite underappreciated 80s tune).
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=i4FtrKfZ0Lo
Goldsmith is/was one of the best drummers in the business.
Having said that, this is a weird article. He notes that he wasn't in it for money, but complains about the .01 cents he's not getting for TCATS b-sides. (Which he 100% deserves, btw - the credits on that 10th Anniv Edition of TCATS are garbage. What he should really get are royalties for two of the TCATS songs used in Rock Band, since they inexplicably used his takes instead of Grohl's.) It also mentions that he's on "hiatus from the band" but doesn't mention which one. SDRE died when they failed to complete their reunion album in 2010 (only completing one song) - no way they get back together again.
Btw - it's not a big secret that Grohl was a complete dick between '96 and '98. (There were very good reasons that Pat Smear quit the band in '97.) Whether he's still secretly a giant dick is anyone's guess.
I bought In Utero the day it came out. On that day, apart from "Heart-Shaped Box", I thought it was fucking terrible. I thought the production was horrible and the songs felt like practice jams.
It wasn't until the MTV Unplugged broadcast a few weeks later that I realized how much I actually liked those songs and how good they were. After that, I got it.
I wasn't alone - that's pretty much the story of that album. Very few people got it. It didn't sell. People really didn't appreciate In Utero as a masterpiece until after Kurt's death. But it was of their own design - in 1993, people knew Nirvana for what Nevermind was, not as this weird, abrasive thing. There's a sizeable number of Nirvana fans now who see them solely as the band found in In Utero. But, back then, that wasn't the case.
By comparison, Pearl Jam's Vs sold a million in its first week. Unlike In Utero, a lot of people thought Vs was *better* than Ten - it seemed bigger and bolder, with much better production. Rather than reject their fanbase as Nirvana did, Pearl Jam expanded theirs.
That doesn't mean that Pearl Jam was *better* than Nirvana, and I would never claim that. But it does mean that, back then, Pearl Jam was by far the "bigger deal". (And it wasn't close.)
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