[Vaun]

(05-18-2017 05:58 PM)Chowder Head Wrote:  

(05-18-2017 05:38 PM)Vaun Wrote:  

(05-18-2017 12:40 PM)stugatz Wrote:  

(05-18-2017 12:38 PM)Chowder Head Wrote:  

I never considered Weiland and STP grunge.

Is this common? It seems like people either mention STP or ignore them. I know they were based out of California, but I didn't know a band had to be from Seattle to be grunge.

They were not liked or respected at all at the time other than redneck girls with poof haircuts, or respected by anyone big at the time in the grunge/alternative community. You could say STP was the first Nickelback. People openly made fun of STP and wouldn't tour with them, because they were "corporate rock", and looked more like hair metal band than a grunge or alternative band in during the time. Pavement wrote a song about how much they hated STP, and its a great song. I still have this same view about them but the hate got less and less, I liked a few of their later songs. STP's guitar player was really good. Weiland was a good rock singer, but not grunge/alternative/punk in any way.

WHAT?!? STP was the first Nickleback! I don't remember that. I thought the problem with STP was Weiland was nuts. He was hard to work with. They were more like a hair band -- I remember Weiland in dresses--he was over the top. I don't remember the hate. Creed and Nickleback got a lot of hate but that was much later.

They definitely got a ton of hate in the music community during their first and second album. It died down when they became superstars and MTV wouldn't stop playing the Plush and Interstate Love Song videos, which is a good song. A lot of the stars of the time were openly mocking them, Pavement, Billy Corgan, Trent, the Seattle guys, indie rock, etc, basically the whole alternative music community. At the time the concept of "selling out" was big. Artists had integrity, and didnt want to sell out for the money. That is completely gone these days. To the music scene they appeared to be a record company fabrication, not a real band with any real history or street cred that worked their way up, just a bunch of old hair metal guys that decided to put on dresses to cash in on alternative. Now I am starting to hate them again. To some degree you could say the same thing about Pearl Jam, who also got massive hate too. But yeah I would put them in the Nickelback camp for how uncool and made fun of they were when they came out.

[Mr. Joe Kerr]

http://www.metalsucks.net/2017/05/18/off...y-hanging/

[Bluto]

A complete shame. I really liked his work in both bands and when he did is own thing. He was a very good front man, and I liked his demeanor off of the stage for the most part.

[Windom Earle]

Re the STP hate above, the DeLeo bros were a powerhouse of a rhythm section, and probably the most well rounded musicians of the alternative rock acts at the time, notwithstanding Corgan's brilliance.

So the hate within the music community could have potentially stemmed from that. It certainly didn't appear to be evident in their core fan base (no pun intended), i.e. full time music lovers of the genre as opposed to incidental listeners.

Purple and Tiny Music are arguably some of the most well produced albums of the era too by the way.

So yeah, the Nickleback comparison is bunk.

[Super_Fire]

(05-18-2017 11:12 AM)Araveug Wrote:  

No way, total shock. You see the pattern with these guys and hope that if they can get past their younger days, then they can go the distance.

I grew up listening to soundgarden, black hole sun was all over my childhood (along with the entire superunknown album). The thing about this is that their most recent album (king animal) had some solid tunes on it. It seemed like the real soundgarden, they did it well - not desperately. They were supposed to be working on a new album, had a bunch of songs written. Hopefully those tracks will see the light of day.

Listening to dusty from down on the upside.

King Animal is a great album; feels like it could have come out right after Superunknown, completely natural like you said.

RIP Cornell.

[Chetthebaker]

One of the best voices in rock from the last 30 years. And he kept making albums and stayed active. Terrible that he died while they were in the middle of a tour.

[stugatz]

I sort of concur on STP - they were almost Pearl Jam knockoffs at the beginning and Core is only a good album I'd say (lots of great music regardless though). Purple is far better.

Tiny Music, though is very good and one of my favorite 1990s albums. At that point they'd found a unique sound and, sure, they weren't Pearl Jam or Alice in Chains...but they were better than post-grunge like Bush or Live.

Not heard 4, Shangrila, or the self-titled release later.

[fokker]

(05-18-2017 09:42 PM)stugatz Wrote:  

I sort of concur on STP - they were almost Pearl Jam knockoffs at the beginning and Core is only a good album I'd say (lots of great music regardless though). Purple is far better.

Tiny Music, though is very good and one of my favorite 1990s albums. At that point they'd found a unique sound and, sure, they weren't Pearl Jam or Alice in Chains...but they were better than post-grunge like Bush or Live.

Not heard 4, Shangrila, or the self-titled release later.

I've got Core and Purple, though I only really listened to the first track off Purple. Never heard Tiny Music, 4 or Shangri-La.

Regarding Live, Throwing Copper is FUCKIN' AWESOME. I have it on CD and Vinyl. I also have the other albums of the first Kowalczyk era (1992-2006), although the best two are Mental Jewelry and Throwing Copper. I heard last December that Live reunited with Kowalczyk and they'll be gigging again this year.

(Ed Kowalczyk left Live in 2009 and was replaced with some guy called Chris Shinn, who did an album with them in 2014.)

[LeoneVolpe]

I loved Chris Cornell's music. Anyone who knows me in real life knows that he was my favorite musician, and that I'm not just someone who jumps on a bandwagon after a particular performer dies. This news has fucked with me all day today. It bothers me even more than when I found out Robin Williams had hung himself, and like Williams, I wonder if there could be more to this story than what meets the eye.

I'm not trying to sound like some conspiracy nut here, but it just seems weird that Cornell would do this after his life really seemed to turn around after his past issues with depression, alcohol and drugs. Seems that ever since he met his second wife and had children with her he'd really cleaned up his act. And he does this now?!

If Cornell had done this in '97 after Soundgarden broke up, I wouldn't have questioned it as much (this was a period of time he admitted to drinking/taking drugs). But for him to do it now just seems really strange to me.

Bad things seemed to happen in Cornell's life around the number "7":

Soundgarden broke up in 1997.
Audioslave broke up in 2007.
Cornell dies of apparent suicide in 2017.

...I don't know. Just seems fucking weird as hell to me. Maybe I need to put on a tin foil hat and head over to the conspiracy theory/Hollywood Satanic cult thread. Am I the only one who thinks some people MIGHT have been hired to wait for him to return to his room?

I'm not saying this is for sure and for certain what happened, but if 2016 taught us anything it's that anyone should be skeptical of high profile celebrity deaths, Wikileaks, spirit cooking/occult practices, etc.

[kmhour]

(05-18-2017 09:42 PM)stugatz Wrote:  

I sort of concur on STP - they were almost Pearl Jam knockoffs at the beginning and Core is only a good album I'd say (lots of great music regardless though). Purple is far better.

I remember a Weekend Update joke at the time, riffing on the same comparison - something about "yeah I saw the Stone Temple Pilots before, back when they were called Pearl Jam". I never agreed with the comparison at least listening to Core or Purple. And I do think STP were lumped in with the grunge acts more because they were contemporaries than specific musical overlap.

Shame about Cornell. I think suicide is a shitty way out, but I've become less judgmental with time. I don't know what demons he was battling. Definitely more of a surprise to hear about his passing than Scott Weiland's.

[Super_Fire]

[K Galt]

I graduated high school in '91. Grunge was the contemporary heavy rock of my early 20's. Alice was my favorite, but Soundgarden was my second fav, followed by Pearl Jam and Nirvana. I was listening to Soundgarden since they released their Loud Love album. I was actually surprised when Badmotorfinger hit so much mainstream success.

I saw all of the Seattle "big 4" in concert except for Nirvana. When Nirvana came to Hawaii, the concert was sold out before I even heard the announcement that they were playing here.

Anyhow, I'm only referring to the other Grunge era bands for this thread in regards to the side topic of STP. In '92 and '93, I remember most of us young rockers considered STP ripoff copycats who were the first to jump on the grunge bandwagon.

All my cohorts in their 20's in the scene at the time called them "Stone Temple Posers" or "Stone Gossard's Pirates" a reference to Pearl Jam's rhythm guitarist. That's just how I remember it....

I met the guys in Pearl Jam when they played here in '92, met Alice when they played here in '93. Soundgarden only played here years later, on the Down on the Upside Tour, and Hawaii was their last show just before they broke up before Chris joined Audioslave and then this latest reunion with the band and tour in 2017.

Soundgarden actually broke up here in Hawaii that same night after what was scheduled to be the last show of the Down on the Upside tour. Supposedly they got into a total band argument at the Jazz Cellar nightclub in Waikiki (by that time it had been renamed the Rock Cellar, but us Hawaii folk will always remember it as the Jazz Cellar,) the very night they played their last show in Honolulu. That was sometime in the early 2000's...not exactly sure when.

Anyhow, in my estimation, Chris was the best talented and had the widest vocal range of the Seattle grunge vocalists, though I personally liked Layne Staley better.

But I am still saddened by the news of his death.

While I loved Temple of the Dog, my absolute favorite performance of the grunge era was Alice MudGarden with the song Right Turn...Chris Cornell and Mudhoney's vocalist Mark Arm guest starred on the Alice in Chains EP, SAP, in a truly awesome "unplugged" all-star jam.

RIP Chris

[stugatz]

(05-19-2017 12:16 AM)K Galt Wrote:  

I graduated high school in '91. Grunge was the contemporary heavy rock of my early 20's. Alice was my favorite, but Soundgarden was my second fav, followed by Pearl Jam and Nirvana. I was listening to Soundgarden since they released their Loud Love album. I was actually surprised when Badmotorfinger hit so much mainstream success.

I saw all of the Seattle "big 4" in concert except for Nirvana. When Nirvana came to Hawaii, the concert was sold out before I even heard the announcement that they were playing here.

Anyhow, I'm only referring to the other Grunge era bands for this thread in regards to the side topic of STP. In '92 and '93, I remember most of us young rockers considered STP ripoff copycats who were the first to jump on the grunge bandwagon.

All my cohorts in their 20's in the scene at the time called them "Stone Temple Posers" or "Stone Gossard's Pirates" a reference to Pearl Jam's rhythm guitarist. That's just how I remember it....

I met the guys in Pearl Jam when they played here in '92, met Alice when they played here in '93. Soundgarden only played here years later, on the Down on the Upside Tour, and Hawaii was their last show just before they broke up before Chris joined Audioslave and then this latest reunion with the band and tour in 2017.

Soundgarden actually broke up here in Hawaii that same night after what was scheduled to be the last show of the Down on the Upside tour. Supposedly they got into a total band argument at the Jazz Cellar nightclub in Waikiki (by that time it had been renamed the Rock Cellar, but us Hawaii folk will always remember it as the Jazz Cellar,) the very night they played their last show in Honolulu. That was sometime in the early 2000's...not exactly sure when.

Anyhow, in my estimation, Chris was the best talented and had the widest vocal range of the Seattle grunge vocalists, though I personally liked Layne Staley better.

But I am still saddened by the news of his death.

While I loved Temple of the Dog, my absolute favorite performance of the grunge era was Alice MudGarden with the song Right Turn...Chris Cornell and Mudhoney's vocalist Mark Arm guest starred on the Alice in Chains EP, SAP, in a truly awesome "unplugged" all-star jam.

RIP Chris

That, my friend, is one of my favorite Alice in Chains tracks ever (great EP, too). Cornell just EXPLODES into the track without warning and completely changes the trajectory of the song. That's not what guest vocalists do! But this dude was special.

This is hitting me particularly hard today. I was severely depressed in high school and grunge (AIC and Pearl Jam in particular) was almost like therapy that saved me from doing something reckless. It just had this particular way of spelling out what malaise, pain, and intense despair felt like, and I didn't feel alone as a result.

I'll admit that I've never been too hot about Soundgarden, despite the fact that, as a participant in choirs myself, I have always been in awe of Cornell's voice. Still hit pretty hard regardless. This is probably because many of the deaths that would have hit me the hardest already happened (Layne Staley, and to a lesser degree, Shannon Hoon, Andrew Wood, and Kurt Cobain) and Cornell is the surrogate. I'm really going to be a mess when Eddie Vedder buys it, but he seems to be a healthy guy.

[K Galt]

Quote:

That, my friend, is one of my favorite Alice in Chains tracks ever (great EP, too). Cornell just EXPLODES into the track without warning and completely changes the trajectory of the song. That's not what guest vocalists do!

Exactly! One of my strongest memories from then was when I bought that cassette from my local music store the day it was released, and we listened to it while driving back to my girlfriend's house in her car. First couple of songs (Brother, Got You Wrong) were cool, but I still vividly remember when we had parked the car and were about to get out, and I said let's wait, there's only one more song on this side of the cassette, let's listen to it before we go in to the house. When we heard the ending of it, I still remember her, her sister and I all looked at each other with wide eyes. We were blown away, and actually rewound the tape to listen to it again right there.

Anyhow, here was my other favorite Chris Cornell acoustic jam:

[K Galt]

(05-18-2017 11:45 PM)kmhour Wrote:  

I remember a Weekend Update joke at the time, riffing on the same comparison - something about "yeah I saw the Stone Temple Pilots before, back when they were called Pearl Jam". I never agreed with the comparison at least listening to Core or Purple. And I do think STP were lumped in with the grunge acts more because they were contemporaries than specific musical overlap.

I think it had more to do with their first couple of videos, where #1 Weiland's high cheekbones made him look very similar to Eddie Vedder, and #2, they hit success about a year after the Seattle big 4 had already hit it big with their initial hits - Smell Like Teen Spirit, Outshined, Man in the Box, and Alive were already overplayed on radio and MTV before STP came out. At that time, they just seemed too derivative...taking elements from all four of the Seattle bands who had just broken into "superstardom." AKA the big 4 were Lollapalooza headliners, while STP were just wannabes.

I appreciate their music now...but back then, everyone I knew considered them bandwagon poser's jumping on the grunge trend to make $.

I laugh at it now...they were ALL in it for the $$$$ (of course...duh) but still, as far as most of the people I hung out with in the early 90's, we all considered them imitators and not the real deal.

[Vaun]

(05-19-2017 12:16 AM)K Galt Wrote:  

RIP Chris

We saw a lot of the same tours at the same time, but I was in the midwest. Pearl Jams first tour, Soundgarden, Janes, Beasties, all of the greats in their pre-mega fame stages. Was lucky enough to see Nirvana on Halloween for In Utero. I played in bands and opened for a few famous acts at this time while in high school. Being a fan before and after their fame was remarkable to witness, kind of like the manoshpere now. It seems like the entire society was influenced by these underground/non-mainstream bands and artists.

I truly think if you grew up in this time period, and loved music, as did most of my high school, it was the closest thing to being alive in the late 60's during the explosion of music then. I went to hundreds of shows, not only the grunge/punk/alternative/rap, but the Dead too, multiple times.

[churros]

Wonder what the hell was up with him. Guy had it all. Among the best singers in rock, and the best looking.

Couldn't deal with age?

[Quintus Curtius]

This one really cut deep. I've been feeling really low since I heard the news. It's not as bad as I felt about Layne Staley, but Chris Cornell was one of the greats of the early 1990s rock scene. I remember hearing him, with that incredible voice, almost literally peel the paint off the walls on some of his tracks.

Ah, well. Life is for the living.

[IvanDrago]

I have read a couple articles saying he was found collapsed in his bathroom with a "band" around his neck. Nothing is confirmed yet of course, but this still sounds like he went out INXS style to me.

[monster]

(05-19-2017 12:03 AM)Super_Fire Wrote:  

Dave's eulogy was cool but that song was hard to listen to.

[Vill@in]

(05-19-2017 08:16 AM)Vaun Wrote:  

I truly think if you grew up in this time period, and loved music, as did most of my high school, it was the closest thing to being alive in the late 60's during the explosion of music then.

Hell yes. Like everyone else in this thread I grew up on this music and after time you realize just how special the period was.

[Bluto]

(05-18-2017 11:45 PM)kmhour Wrote:  

(05-18-2017 09:42 PM)stugatz Wrote:  

I sort of concur on STP - they were almost Pearl Jam knockoffs at the beginning and Core is only a good album I'd say (lots of great music regardless though). Purple is far better.

I remember a Weekend Update joke at the time, riffing on the same comparison - something about "yeah I saw the Stone Temple Pilots before, back when they were called Pearl Jam".

David Spade is the guy, I cant really say why I remember that other than he did the same thing a few other times, and I really am not a fan of Pearl Jam so it stuck with me.

I would consider STP to be more of a knock off of Red Hot Chili Peppers personally, but that is just me.

[Zep]

This really is a shame, Chris Cornell was incredible.

Limo Wreck, one of the greatest moments in rock singing from 5:17 to 5:33.

4th of July - heaviest track I've ever heard, what an accomplishment to pull something like this off.

[catoblepa]

SG songs are often dealing with depression, melancholy and mood disorders. Dude had obviously been in a chronic state of depression or dysthymia which is mild depression but enough to affect your daily life and then you have recurring moments of co-morbidity with major depressions and those moments are the worst because you're the most vulnerable and suicidal. People didn't go past his exuberant falsetto and thought he was full of life but he clearly wasn't.

[Vaun]

(05-20-2017 08:08 PM)catoblepa Wrote:  

SG songs are often dealing with depression, melancholy and mood disorders. Dude had obviously been in a chronic state of depression or dysthymia which is mild depression but enough to affect your daily life and then you have recurring moments of co-morbidity with major depressions and those moments are the worst because you're the most vulnerable and suicidal. People didn't go past his exuberant falsetto and thought he was full of life but he clearly wasn't.

His best friend/roommate, who was another promising singer of the band Mother Love Bone, that later became Pearl Jam, OD'd in their apartment when they lived together. This was right when Soundgarden exploded, and Chris' writing went really dark after that. This has been often referred to as the influence for Chris' dark writing. If you really want to see a time when he was full of life, look at his work before Badmotorfinger. He was pretty red pilled too, wrote about sex, etc.

Don't you don't you want to thrill me
Don't you be afraid to tell me
Tell me if you think it's ugly
But now don't you want to touch it anyway

I've been looking for a reject
And you ain't had nothing like me yet
Don't you think it's time for motion
I can take what you've been pushin'

Hey I know what to do
I'm gonna fuck fuck fuck fuck you
Fuck you
Ya I know what to do
I'm gonna fuck fuck fuck fuck you
Fuck you I'm gonna

I'm the beast and you're the master
You're the meat of the matter
I'm no fool for discretion
When it's on the tip of my tongue

Don't' you don't you want to thrill me
Don't be afraid to tell me
Tell me if you think it's ugly
But now don't you want to touch it anyway