They Should Have Stuck With Mookie Blaylock

I've been thinking about grunge a lot lately. Or should I say "Grunge." Maybe it's the cold weather and the need for long underwear, even when going to sleep for the night, but I've recently been revisiting the music that soundtracked my early teenage years. It all started, as most of my musical rethinkings do lately, with Rock Band. While playing this greatest of all games a few months ago, Alice in Chains' "Man in a Box" came up and even though I initially groaned, I quickly was won over by the song and its sludginess and nihilistic tone. Maybe enough time had passed and I was ready to delve back into the Seattle scene and dredge up all those memories of bad facial hair and drop D tuning. Maybe Tad were a band of genuises in retrospect and all I needed to do was take the time to rediscover them.

My interest quickly passed. I relistened to Soundgarden's Badmotorfinger and I liked it. I didn't fall back in love with it but it was enough to erase the painful memories of Audioslave and push me further down the flannel path. Next stop: Pearl Jam. Thanks to Eddie Vedder and Co., the journey was over almost as soon as it began. What an overrated dung heap of a band they are, with nothing but spotty albums, at best. Ten is atrocious most of the time, including the excruciating "Even Flow," a song that is in contention for worst single of all time. Everyone always talks about their third record Vitalogy as being a highwater mark featuring hit after hit but in reality it, like all of their other albums, is an absolute slog to get through. It is joyless music. Eddie Vedder is a brooding fun-vaccum, oftentimes in desperate need of a melody that just won't come. I listened to 5 of their cds and got so mad at them and the boring, boring songs that I ended my foray in the grunge world right then and there.

So today at work, for no reason I can figure out, Stone Temple Pilots's "Creep" drifted into my head. I haven't heard this song in years yet it was not an unpleasant visit. I found myself humming the "Take time with a wounded hand" chorus as I wandered around the building. Even in the early 90s my love affair with this band was brief but I still liked, and apparently still like, this song. It was a great ripoff of a slow burn Nirvana tune and that's good enough for me. I remember back when Core came out, I thought the first 15 seconds of album opener "Dead and Bloated" were the coolest thing ever. What a shock it was to hear that exact song on the radio on the way home tonight. I braced myself for the worst but it didn't come. Radio turned up, I listened intently and loved every second of this supercheesy intro, sticking around for the rest of the song which was so low end and gross that it reminded me of why I wanted to revisit 1992 in the first place. Who would have thought that 17 years later, Scott Weiland would trump Eddie Vedder?

Dead And Bloated - Stone Temple Pilots