With Soundgarden bringing its reunion tour to the Bill Graham Civic Auditorium in San Francisco next week, it’s a perfect time to turn the clock back 20 years and look at 1991.
It’s remembered as the year grunge exploded, which came in the closing months of the year.
Nirvana’s “Smells Like Teen Spirit” led the charge, becoming the anthem of a genre and a generation.
That’s the story of 1991 most people know pretty well. By late ’92, grunge was everywhere. The Seattle scene’s “Big Four” — Alice in Chains, Nirvana, Pearl Jam and Soundgarden — all had albums that ranked among their best in ’91 or ’92, with, respectively, Dirt, Nevermind, Ten and Badmotorfinger (above).
They weren’t the only ones. Screaming Trees and Mudhoney were part of the ’91 crowd. Temple of the Dog, a tribute album made by members of Pearl Jam and Soundgarden, released its only album in ’91.
Grunge’s emergence was just one of many musical milestones for modern music in 1991. It’s a prism through which much of the last 20 years needs to be viewed.
I’m talking about the creamy middle, with grunge and the first flirtation with alt rock, not the gooey, saccharine pop ends of the ’90s with boy bands and, regrettably, at the tail end, nu-metal.
For rock, it was a seismic change. Metallica broke firmly into the mainstream with its self-titled record commonly called “The Black Album.” Red Hot Chili Peppers did the same behind the strength of Blood Sugar Sex Magik, which yielded the hits “Give it Away” and “Under the Bridge.” A group that would later rocket to power named Smashing Pumpkins issued its debut, Gish.
U2 redefined itself with Achtung Baby. My Bloody Valentine dropped Loveless, a definitive shoegaze album. Toad the Wet Sprocket bubbled up on the college radio charts with “All I Want,” a single that paved the way for sensitive guy rock throughout the decade. R.E.M. moved jangle pop into the mainstream behind its biggest single to date, “Losing My Religion.”
Lollapalooza — now an annual festival in Chicago, but once a touring rock circus — started in ’91.
The change didn’t seem significant at the time, but the landscape changed irrevocably.
The genre of grunge didn’t age particularly well. Soundgarden is the only member of the “Big Four” that can have a legitimate reunion, sadly, due to the deaths of Nirvana’s Kurt Cobain in 1994 and Alice in Chains’ Layne Staley in 2002 and Mike Starr earlier this year.
We spent more than a decade after Cobain’s death coming to grips with what we lost and abiding post-grunge and nu-metal, both of which tried to take the grunge formula and mutate it.
Nirvana’s “soft verse, hard chorus” writing style is still the template for modern rock songs, with loud instrumental breaks and choruses pitted against soft verses. That style, which Nirvana stole from The Pixies, is still in full effect on modern rock radio stations.
Soundgarden, meanwhile, feels locked into a certain period in history, although there’s a new record due in 2012.
The group split in early 1997. In the intervening years, guitarist Kim Thayil stayed busy, working with a number of groups including Dave Grohl’s Probot side project and the Presidents of the United States of America. Bassist Ben Shepherd recorded a solo album that remains unreleased and slipped into financial troubles. Drummer Matt Cameron took up the sticks with Pearl Jam.
Lead singer Chris Cornell formed Audioslave with three members of Rage Against the Machine. He also tried a torturous R&B experiment with Timbaland that is played as an alternative to waterboarding.
So maybe Soundgarden’s revival has come at the exact right moment.
The ’90s revival is in full swing. “90210″ revived the TV franchise from the fabled SoCal zip code a few years ago. One of the biggest films of 2010 was “Toy Story 3,” a franchise that started in the mid-’90s. Fashion has swung to back to accepting acid-wash jeans and plaid is cool again.
It’s not uncommon. Trends cycle back on themselves. We spent most of the Aughties in the grips of an ’80s revival, so it seems appropriate that we’ve moved right into a ’90s rebirth.
Along with that, the return of one of its most defining grunge bands 20 years after the genre broke into the mainstream, is strangely long-awaited and well-timed.
My favorite rendition of "Smells Like Teen Spirit," which comes from the With the Lights Out box set issued in 2004. It's an alternate mix of the original, with more intense drums and a rougher, dirtier guitar mix:
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