Appreciate your concern: Relocating the lost heroes of grunge | Features | Music | A.V. AustinAppreciate your concern: Relocating the lost heroes of grunge
Come back, Kim. We miss you.
While no one actually envies Kurt Cobain, Andrew Wood, or Layne Staley, many of their contemporaries who survived the grunge era haven’t always had the easiest of transitions into their lives’ second acts. Of all the members of Seattle’s breakout class, who would have guessed that the ones to most enviably reinvent themselves would be Screaming Trees’ Mark Lanegan and Mark Pickerel (who play tomorrow night at Stubb’s with Soulsavers and at Saturday’s Bloodshot Beer-B-Q, respectively)? Perhaps those left behind in the annals of Hype! history just need a bit of unsolicited advice, which is something we at The A.V Club specialize in. Here we look at five of grunge’s brightest stars who could use a career pick-me-up and how they could get started. If they want. Whatever.
Krist Novoselic
Since Kurt Cobain’s death, Novoselic has been a bit of a wanderer: dabbling in Washington politics, speaking out about election reform, and writing a blog for Seattle Weekly. He’s also taken up a few musical projects, but nearly all of them have been overshadowed by the considerable legacy of Nirvana—such as when he backed out on joining the early incarnation of Foo Fighters because he was afraid people would unfairly judge it as Nirvana II, perhaps not realizing that an entire generation of kids would grow up seeing Nirvana as, say, The Yardbirds to Foo Fighters' Led Zeppelin. He’s also whistled in the dark with stuff like Sweet 75 and Eyes Adrift—both of which were heavily hyped and then politely ignored—and most recently fucked over Flipper when he decided he’d rather go back to Seattle than continue touring with them, forcing them to cancel dozens of dates. In the meantime, he’s mostly been hanging out at home, recently popping up in a cameo in Bobcat Goldthwait’s World’s Greatest Dad, and getting unwittingly tangled in the Kurt Cobain/Guitar Hero fiasco, but with no overt plans to re-enter the business.
Career reboot: Now that the Foo Fighters are on indefinite hiatus—and with bassist Nate Mendel hitting the road with Sunny Day Real Estate—it would be a good time to informally get together with Dave Grohl on something other than a Courtney Love-bashing press release. Anything to get Grohl back behind a drum kit.Matt Lukin
Save Jack Endino and Bruce Pavitt, you’d be hard-pressed to find a living musician more integral to the history of grunge than bassist Matt Lukin, co-founder of both the Melvins and Mudhoney, and immortalized in a Pearl Jam song that bears his name. But despite his pedigree, Lukin was always renowned for his “ordinary fuck-up” attitude, the guy you’d see two-fisting beers with everyone else at the bar before Mudhoney took the stage, and who would spend interviews laughing at his own jokes and acting like he had no idea why anyone would want to talk to him. In that way, he epitomized grunge’s Regular Joe appeal, and it made him an unofficial mascot—as well the most loveable member of Mudhoney, so it was a shame when he retired from the band following 1998’s Tomorrow Hit Today. If you believe Eddie Vedder, he married a Dutch woman he met in Utrecht and went back to doing carpentry in Seattle, more or less done with music.
Career reboot: If touring with Mudhoney sounds like too much work (and it probably is), Lukin should at least have a double-bass jam/recording session with fellow paunchy, beery, low-end wrangler Mike Watt, where they pound some Pike and fuck around on some old Sonics tunes or something. Watt’s pretty busy with The Stooges, so it wouldn’t require too much effort on Lukin’s part.Tad Doyle
Big, burly Tad Doyle and his eponymous band resided on the sludgier end of the grunge spectrum, which meant they were never destined for stardom even if Doyle hadn’t weighed more than 300 pounds and sung like he gargled horse piss and gasoline. But crossover success was never the point of grunge—except when it was—and Doyle had a ravenous cult following in Seattle and among his much more famous friends, so in a way, it’s one of grunge’s sadder stories that Tad never caught on like, say, the Melvins did. That’s especially true considering its sludgy brand of stoner metal is now more popular than ever. Doyle is still holding down his end in the (terribly named) Seattle-area act Brothers Of The Sonic Cloth, and even recently showed up at a Nightwatchman gig that turned into an impromptu Soundgarden reunion with Doyle filling in for Chris Cornell on songs like “Spoonman.” It, uh, wasn’t very good.
Career reboot: Brothers Of The Sonic Cloth is good but seems to lack ambition beyond playing Doyle’s hometown. A taste of something bigger is in order—and if Josh Homme were to ever get his Desert Sessions going again, Doyle could be a great wild card. (And it must be said, a Tad reunion would go over way better than any of its members probably think it would.)Kim Thayil
Speaking of Soundgarden and reunions, Chris Cornell has said repeatedly that he thinks getting back together would tarnish the band’s legacy—a feeling mutually shared among all its members, that recent impromptu one-off notwithstanding. So if Cornell won’t stop pretending to be the hard rock version of Robbie Williams or whatever the fuck he’s doing with Timbaland right now, and Soundgarden won’t dutifully trot back into the Superunknown for a sold-out stadium tour, where does that leave one of rock’s greatest guitarists? Mostly just chilling at home, turning up with an occasional cameo on records by groups like Ascend, and only taking the stage when it’s loosely associated with some form of protest. And that is seriously a shame.
Career reboot: Kim Thayil is one of the few people on this list who doesn’t need to pair up with anybody else to get people interested in hearing him. He could throw together a band of people half his age, whip out a few psych-tinged metal songs in a week’s time, and call it something lame like The Kim Thayil Experience, and he’d have wannabe guitar heroes lining up all across the country to hear it and Southern Lord ready to throw down half a million to put it out. Maybe it’s one of those Michael Jordan things, where he retired knowing he could still whip everyone’s ass—but unlike Jordan, Thayil realizes it’s probably better not to tempt fate by trying to prove it.Selene Vigil
Fronting 7 Year Bitch, one of the few female grunge bands that had any discernible impact, Selene Vigil was a de facto flannel-era sex symbol, drooled over by Beavis And Butthead and their fleshy counterparts from coast to coast. Although it survived the death of founding guitarist Stefanie Sargent and even flirted with major-label exposure like every other Seattle band in the mid-’90s—including a totally bizarre cameo in the awful Drew Barrymore rom-com Mad Love—the band fell apart out of what appeared to be total apathy in 1997, and Vigil ended up fading into semi-obscurity shortly thereafter. Although she briefly returned with the vaguely trip-hop, sort-of gothic Cistine in 2000, it never seemed to get off the ground; these days Vigil is better known for being the wife of Rage Against The Machine/Audioslave drummer Brad Wilk than for any musical endeavor on her own, which is really too bad. She may not have been the greatest lyricist, but she had a genuine Patti Smith snarl to her voice that so many female vocalists attempt to pull off but never really master. (Looking at you, Pink.)
Career reboot: Like Tad, there’s really no reason 7 Year Bitch couldn’t hop on the nostalgia circuit, but in the meantime Vigil should look up Babes In Toyland’s Kat Bjelland—who could probably use some money right now—and form a kick-ass female punk supergroup that only sings nasty songs about Courtney Love. Ladyfest would book them to headline in a heartbeat.