Moments #60-51
There are such things as the chaos theory and the butterfly effect: tiny changes set up larger ones; it’s impossible to predict the future with any degree of certainty, as you can’t predict everything that’ll have a bearing on an event’s outcome.
60. Legs McNeill and a friend liked the Dictators so much that they started a fanzine. The original title was Teenage News, after a New York Dolls song. But then they noticed the cover of the Dictators’ Girl Go Crazy album, which featured the band sitting around in leather jackets and looking generally “punk.”
The magazine’s title was changed to Punk… pretty soon, anyone who appeared in the magazine was referred to as a “punk” / played “punk music.” It was hard, fast, primeval rock… and the magazine was a big hit amongst the music set in those days.
59. Dec. 17, 1977: the Sex Pistols couldn’t play for SNL because they had problems with immigration and customs. So the producers of the show were forced to hire a band called Elvis Costello and the Attractions. Their hit song at the time was called Radio Radio, but the producers said they couldn’t play it because NBC owned a lot of radio stations… they couldn’t take the chance of appearing to bash the parent network.
Elvis Costello said they’d play a song called Less Than Zero instead… but after playing the first few notes of the song, he apologized to the audience and ripped into Radio Radio instead.
58. The Clash was so socialist that they appeared to be almost Communist. But Jan. 26, 1977 rolled around. They signed a 100,000-pound record deal with CBS… that immediately marked them as sell-outs, even though they did end up acheiving their stated goal of “corrupting the industry from within.” Even though the Sex Pistols had ironically gouged multiple record labels, the Clash’s act was seen as more out-there… perhaps because of their stated views on things.
57. June 4, 1976: The Sex Pistols’ first gig… the cost was only 50 pence, yet less than 50 people showed up. Members of several bands were in the audience, including New Order. You can see it in the film of the Manchester music scene, 24-Hour Party People.
56. Jan. 14, 1978: The Sex Pistols’ last gig with Sid Vicious at the helm. Everybody hated each other at this point… the audiences were hostile, manager Malcolm McLaren was a pain, Sid Vicious was always wasted and needed protection from his own bodyguard, etc. This was a band ready to blow apart literally within hours, and Johnny Rotten had a good idea of who was getting robbed: basically everyone. Their last gig was at the Winterland Ballroom in San Francisco.
55. Malcolm McLaren (the aforementioned Sex Pistols manager) and Vivienne Westwood had set up a store called Let It Go. The store sold adult toys and clothing for “teddy boys.” They were in New York for a business trip when McLaren decided to check out the legendary club CBGB’s. He met Richard Hell of the bands Television and the Heartbreakers. (not the same as Tom Petty’s Heartbreakers, I think)
Hell was wearing clothing attached with safety pins because he was so poor, yet McLaren was so taken with this “sense of style” that he took the idea back to England. The store was renamed Sex, and now sold clothing that was held together with items such as safety pins… that was a big hit among people who went there.
54. Jan. 21, 1989 marked the beginnings of one of the most infamous couples in the history of rock and roll. Kurt Cobain of Nirvana met Courtney Love of Hole at a Nirvana gig in Portland, Oregon. He told a friend that she looked like Nancy Spungen, Sid Vicious’ girlfriend who may or may not have died at Sid’s hands. Courtney was friends with Jennifer Finch of the band L7, who was a former girlfriend of Dave Grohl. She told Dave that she liked Kurt, and sent him some seashells. In May 1991, they met again at a Butthole Surfers gig. They shared drugs and beer, and struck up an instant friendship… especially when she punched him in the stomach.
53. In September 1990, Dave Grohl was in a band called Scream. They were on tour, but the bass player had girlfriend problems and had to bail out. Dave wanted to be in another band, so talked to his buddy Buzz Osborne about it. Buzz said that his buddy Kurt Cobain had a band that was experiencing drummer problems, so encouraged Dave to audition.
On Sept. 25, Dave auditioned and got the gig instantly. His first gig with Nirvana was Oct. 11, 1990. That was the beginning of the biggest rock band of the 90’s.
52. Nov. 10, 1994: the first-ever professional Internet-only concert was performed on this date, by a Seattle band called Sky Cries Mary. Before then, the only Net concerts had been played by nerds for nerds. The Sky Cries Mary concert was wonky and glitchy, but still a concert tecnologically. Streaming and audio are common things nowadays, but not then.
51. Mar. 20, 1990: A record store on Hacienda Blvd. in Los Angeles called Warehouse invited Depeche Mode to come and sign autographs. By 9 that night, there were so many people in the record store that the glass of the windows was bending. Traffic had to be stopped around that area. There were 25,000-30,000 people in the parking lot alone at that time, and only 30 security guards to maintain some semblance of order among them.
At 10, Depeche Mode was around… but the announcement was made that the autograph session had to be cancelled due to the sheer number of people around. When people heard this, they got angry and started a full-scale riot. The LAPD was called in, 7 people were sent to hospital, and the record store was hit with a $25,000 repair bill.
Moments #50-41
For some reason, they only broadcast half the show that week… very weird. Thank goodness for the one-sentence recaps at the end! 
- The 25th anniversary of Woodstock, in 1994.
- Jack Irons passes a Mother Love Bone (demo?) tape to Eddie Vedder… the beginnings of Pearl Jam.
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Licensed to Ill by the Beastie Boys is a huge hit for the white Jewish rapper act.
- The Sex Pistols sign to the record label A&M in front of Buckingham Palace.
- Winter 1990: Kurt Cobain goes out for a night on the town with his good friend Kathleen Hanna of the Seattle band Bikini Kill. It involves a lot of beer, spray-painting of graffiti, and other good-natured pranks. When they get back to Kurt’s house, Hanna spray-paints the words “Kurt Smells Like Teen Spirit” on his bedroom wall.
At the time, Kurt liked another member of Bikini Kill. Tobi Vail wore the deodorant Teen Spirit, and Hanna’s tagline meant that Kurt smelled like the deodorant because he was all over Vail. Kurt didn’t get it, and instead thought it meant “Wow… you’re really cool… you have the spirit of teen rebellion within you.” (a great compliment, right?)
He didn’t understand the true inspiration until after he’d written the hit song Smells Like Teen Spirit.
45. 1951: The invention of the stringed acoustic double bass guitar by the Leo Fender Guitar Company. It was light, portable, had frets to put your fingers in, and could be worn around the neck. This invention allowed for electric phat bottom-heavy bass notes in almost every song written since, except for songs by the White Stripes. 
Through 1957 to 1960, the stand-up bass was almost entirely phased out through music.
44. The Smiths almost singlehandedly saved guitar-based pop music in the UK when they formed in 1982. By 1987, there were problems associated with drug use / personality conflicts / fights with the record label. On Aug. 18, Morrissey sent a letter to the producer stating his intent to break up the band in order to pursue a solo career.
On Sept. 12, the breakup became official. This caused as much heartbreak as the Beatles’ disbanding did among music fans of that era.
43. In the 1980’s, people liked goth music for its dark properties. They also noticed when Robert Smith of the Cure got rid of his unruly jet-black hair that he’d had from 1982 to 1984. There was a swift, angry reaction when he got it cut in military style… much like the one Elvis received when he joined the Army and had to get it cut. In 1992, “The Hair” was back to stay… Cure fans hated the non-black haircut.
42. U2 started innocuously enough, through an ad that Larry Mullen pinned to a high school bulletin board saying that he wanted to start a band. Seven people showed up in his kitchen a few days later: Dave Evans, Dick Evans, Adam Clayton, Larry himself, Paul Hewson, and two other schoolmates.
Once Paul started playing the guitar, he was banned from any type of guitar playing. (lead or support) He was only allowed to sing, and they didn’t know much about other bands then. They certainly did when they got famous, though.
41. Shawn Fanning was taking senior-level courses at Northeastern University in Boston, yet got bored. Through friends he met on an IRC chat channel, he was introduced to MP3s. He quickly got tried of their crappy servers, lost FTP downloads, etc. Using his Uncle John’s $7000 notebook computer, he created Napster and launched it on June 1, 1999. (Napster was a nickname that his friends had given him for his “nappy” haircut)
The new file-sharing system was only originally supposed to be for about 30 of his friends, yet they told lots of others about it. From a base of 30 people to thousands eventually, it had lots of appeal… the rest is history, as we all know.
Moments #40-31
In the course of time, there are often “hinge-points”: events where the course of history is altered irrevocably. Take the eruption of Mount Krakatoa on Aug. 27, 1883 in Indonesia. A few months later, the sky was still blood-red in Norway (as depicted in a painting); the eruption was heard round the globe; and there were numerous cold-weather records set because all the ash from the eruption had blocked the sun.
Someone even theorized that the eruption led the Dutch to abandon their religion at the time and turn to Islam. Who knows… an eruption leading to an extreme form of religion?
40. The nights of June 18-19, 1977: God Save the Queen by the Sex Pistols had gone to #2 on the UK charts a week earlier. Needless to say, monarchists did not take kindly to Queen Elizabeth II being called a “moron.”
Johnny Rotten, a producer, and an engineer were attacked brutally on June 18; Rotten’s tendons were severed, and he was saved only by his thick leather pants. On June 19, drummer Paul Cook was attacked just as brutally by six guys with pipes. All this because of a song…
39. In May 1989, R.E.M. was on tour in Germany to support their Green album. The Düsseldorf date on May 9 went well, and the band went to Munich from there. Drummer Bill Berry suffered hallucinations and a fever… the German doctors couldn’t figure out what was wrong with him. They blindly prescribed him many different things, including tetracycline.
It was the tetracycline that saved his life, for his eventual diagnosis was Rocky Mountain Spotted Fever. Bill got it while gardening at home a week earlier, and the disease incubates for a week. Thank goodness the prescription was right on the money, otherwise he might be dead.
38. March 1, 1995: Bill Berry’s brain explodes on stage. R.E.M. was doing a show in Switzerland. They had just reached the falsetto part of a song called Tongue when Bill Berry had a blinding headache onstage. The pain was so severe, he had to be carried offstage. Doctors in the Swiss Alps found that he had suffered two brain aneurysms, and Bill could have had brain damage.
These two incidents played a very important role in Bill Berry’s decision to retire from music on Oct. 31, 1997.
37. April 15, 1994: An Orange County record label called Epitaph releases an album by the band Offspring. It wasn’t expected to move a lot of units, but the first single was picked up by a Los Angeles radio station… that was strange enough. The label offered Offspring $5000 to do a video for MTV, and the popularity of both band and album began to soar.
Smash became the biggest-selling indie album of all time, with eventual sales of 12 million albums. It was expected to sell maybe 60,000 units during its lifetime, but sold that many every day.
36. December 1965: This might be one of the most important talent discoveries in new rock history. The Velvet Underground were playing a club in New York called Café Bizarre. They played six sets a night for six days a week, and were paid $5 for each set. Since their music drove away patrons and didn’t exactly fill up the place, they’d already been fired once by the owner… and were on the verge of being fired a second time.
That all changed when Andy Warhol and his band of weirdos dropped in… they liked the band’s avant-garde approach to music, and the band accepted Warhol’s offer to be their patron and producer at his studio. (the Factory) Who knows where we’d be in new rock history now, without these founders of alt-rock music?
35. The 1996 Smashing Pumpkins world tour featured the drug problems of touring keyboardist Jonathan Melvoin and drummer Jimmy Chamberlain spinning out of control. They both OD’ed in Thailand and in Spain. On July 11, they both went on a run for some potent drugs. By the morning of July 12, Jonathan was dead: ironically, he had trained as an emergency medical technician.
Everybody was soon down at the police precinct giving statements… five days later, the band issued a statement of their own. Billy Corgan, James Iha, and Darcy Wretzky stated that Jimmy Chamberlain was fired, and that they wished him the best that they had to offer. In 1999, the band was back in its old familiar form: Chamberlain was invited back into the band, even as it was breaking apart.
34. This one came about by accident and was a quirk of fate. New Order hated doing encores, and would rather be backstage getting a head start on partying the night away. Someone got the idea of leaving a drum machine on as the encore while the band rushed backstage to do said partying. To better entertain the audience, a bassline and computerized voice samples were added to the mix.
One day, the band was in the studio and decided to record this encore… they were under the influence of recreational drugs, but managed to get all the tracks down. The engineer sent them across the street to a café… that way, he could mix the tracks in peace, since they were so high. In a day where people were used to Joan Jett’s I Love Rock and Roll and Olivia Newton-John’s Physical, the new track’s dance club debut was a hit. Nobody had ever heard anything like New Order’s Blue Monday before: it made dancing cool again.
Incidentally, the band lost one pence on every album sold because the artwork on the record single was so expensive to produce. However, the reaction to the track was staggering; it was the best-selling 12-inch record ever made.
33. In the spring of 1993, Noel Gallagher joined his little brother Liam’s Manchester band Oasis. Since Noel insisted on having complete control over everything, it was actually more of a coup d’etat. Noel had recently been fired from his job, and was on his last 2000 pounds of severance pay.
On a night in May 1993, Oasis bullied their way on stage in a club called King Tut’s Wah-Wah House. They threatened that they would burn the club down if they weren’t allowed to play that very minute, and they got their way. Alan McGee was a talent scout in the audience that night to check out the other bands… he was so impressed with Oasis that he released a demo single.
Oasis was on their way to becoming one of the biggest bands of the 90’s, and perhaps the world… and all because they bullied their way onstage, in a club where a talent scout for other bands was in the audience.
32. Aug. 14, 1995: The war between the two biggest bands in Britpop history. The release of Oasis’ second album Roll With It was very much hyped up. There was bad blood between them and Blur already: Noel Gallagher and Damon Albarn had brawled backstage at an awards show, for example. It didn’t help when Blur moved up the release date of their own album to coincide with the release date of Oasis’ album.
Bookies took bets on the outcome, and even the normally staid BBC covered the war between Oasis and Blur for Britpop supremacy. So who won in the first week? Blur’s album Country House sold 270,000 units to Oasis’ 220,000 for Roll With It. However, Blur was sneaky: they released two different versions of their album, differing only by one song. If you were a rabid Blur completist, you had to buy both versions. Pretty tricky, eh?
31. Aug. 14, 1974: Exactly 21 years before the war between Oasis and Blur, the Ramones played their first gig at the New York club CBGB’s. There were 12 people in the audience, including the owner’s dog. By the end of the year, they had played 74 gigs there… the word got out after every gig.
There were no solos, no letting up except to count in to the next song, no acknowledgement of the audience whatsoever… and of course, there was the music played at a zillion miles per hour. The audience could differ every night: Andy Warhol and his bunch, stuffy intellectuals, rich kids slumming it, etc. This was a band that appealed to everyone, with no holds barred.
