Brett Eugene Ralph wrote:Rotten Tanx wrote:Then, just a few months later, I was watching the music channels again. This song called Smells Like Teen Spirit came on.
Guns and who? Wear a kilt? Fuck off. Guitar solos? Pssh.
Still, 13 years later, put Mr Brownstone on and I'll get the same shivers I got when I was 13. But I guess from the nostalgia rather than the revelation.
Tanx, your comment supports my friend Mick's hypothesis that Kurt Cobain "killed off real rock & roll." Since the advent of Nirvana, so-called "hair metal" (old school rock & roll's standard bearers at the time)ceased to be a viable commercial entity, existing only in the guise of formerly successful acts playing cheesy clubs in which aging rockers can burn up and die.
For the record, I like and listen to Guns 'n' Roses way, way more than Nirvana. What I liked about GnR early on was that, in the face of increasingly heavy metal like Slayer and Metallica, they weren't really a metal band but were much more steeped in the 70's hard rock I grew up on: Skynyrd, Lizzy, Aerosmith, Queen. Unlike most metal, their music still had sex, and it still had soul, as evidenced by my friend Junior's devotion to "Mr. Brownstone"--a strange devotion coming from a man who has never done heroin and who happens to be black. There seemed to be a kind of renaissance of 70's-derived hard rock (as opposed to metal) in the late 80's with GnR, the Black Crowes, Tesla, and lesser-known acts like the London Quireboys, who had a pretty great Faces one-off called "It's 7 o'clock (Time for a Party)." And am I the only one who ever noticed how much, in their finest moments, Poison sounds like a much cleaner, dumber New York Dolls?
While I'm not so sorry to see bands like Poison go by the wayside, I am sorry to have seen the Chuck Berry tradition pretty much disappear in rock music in the wake of all the droning chords and droning vocals that characterize Nirvana and its ilk; Mick calls this "dark tones," which he thinks have sucked the spirit out of rock music. Strangely enough--and my friend Wink pointed this out to me--the Chuck Berry boogie woogie motif seems to exist solely in contemporary country music these days. A case can be made for it having more in common with rock & roll's originiating influences than "grunge" and what came after.
