More reunions: STP, Filter

Following in the recent lead of the Smashing Pumpkins, two more '90s acts have announced activity for 2008, joining the comebacks of the Counting Crows and R.E.M. (see below).

According to multiple reports, Stone Temple Pilots are getting back together for a summer tour. So far, only one date has been announced, May 17 at a festival in Columbus, Ohio, but you would have to assume they'll play multiple summer festivals, just like Rage Against the Machine did last year. No word on what this means for Velvet Revolver, Scott Weiland's supergroup with half of Guns 'N Roses; they're supposed to be touring Australia this week, though at last report Weiland was back in rehab. From what I've heard, both album sales for the band's last record Libertad and ticket sales for the supporting tour were weak, so who knows. Slash is saying publicly that recording on Velvet Revolver's third album could begin in April prior to the STP reunion.

What does seem more concrete is that the other STP-related supergroup, Army of Anyone, is pretty much dead, because the DeLeo brothers are back with STP, and singer Richard Patrick says he's getting Filter back together for their first album since 2002's weak-selling The Amalgamut, which failed to go gold (Filter's first two albums both went platinum). Filter are also playing the same festival in Columbus.

All this, of course, got me thinking about Talk Show, the band formed during a prior Weiland rehab stint that was STP with a new lead singer (who sounded oddly like Liam Gallagher). I had the distinct pleasure of seeing Talk Show open up for Aerosmith in the OKC in December of 1997, and they were pretty good. But, their album didn't sell, Weiland's solo album didn't sell either, and Stone Temple Pilots got back together for two more records (not as good as the first three, in my opinion) and a greatest hits set, before breaking up again in 2003.

Here's Talk Show's one hit, "Hello Hello:"

Since '03, the DeLeo brothers have produced an Alien Ant Farm album (which flopped), and formed Army of Anyone, whose single album did not chart. Drummer Eric Kretz has not done anything since STP broke up (according to AllMusic), and sadly neither has Dave Coutts, the lead singer of Talk Show. He's really the Gary Cherone in this whole mess, isn't he?

Considering that both Velvet Revolver and Army of Anyone have been doing STP songs live, there's clearly still a market for the band. Whether or not any new music is forthcoming has not yet been revealed.

R.E.M. is back

After the quite lackluster Around the Sun in 2004 left even the diehards (like me) deflated, R.E.M. have been on a campaign to win back our hearts. First was a series of live rehearsals in Dublin, Ireland last July, where new material was premiered and reworked in response to audience reaction:

(That's an early version of the new single, by the way).
Then the REM Live album came out last fall, showing that the Around the Sun songs weren't as bad as we thought, just overproduced on the album.
On January 1, the band premiered ninetynights.com, which has different footage every day.
And in a strong effort to court the indie community, they premiered their new single "Supernatural Superserious" on Pitchfork. Listen to it here.
It's great, right? Like the perfect blend of 1994's Monster with 1987's Document (two of their most rocking albums). British critics who have heard the whole album are comparing it to Green Day's American Idiot. Others say it's the natural follow-up to 1996's criminally-underrated New Adventures in Hi-Fi.
Whatever it is, I can't wait. I'm going down to Wuxtry Records in Atlanta to pick up my copy, because it's the place where the band recorded their very first demo in 1980. If you can't wait, either, check out this "trailer" for the album:


R.E.M. plays the Langerado Festival in Florida and South by Southwest in March, then embarks on a US and Canadian tour with Modest Mouse and the National in June.

Two more modern-rock stations bite the dust

Two more modern rock stations died this month: 94.7 the Buzz in Oklahoma City switched to a harder-rock format, while 99X in Atlanta went Top 40 on Friday.

I grew up in Oklahoma City, and I remember how excited my friends and I all were when we first got 95X in the mid-‘90s. It didn’t last long, and switched to a lite-FM format, then came back as 94.7 the Buzz around 2002. In its second reincarnation, it was a fairly generic station (at first, it didn’t even have DJs), but it did have the “March Bandness” competition, which was a good way to support local music. It also had the good fortune to be around when the All-American Rejects and Hinder were taking off nationally.

99X is a much bigger loss. Considered one of the “tastemaker” stations of alternative rock in the 1990s, along with WHFS in Washington DC and KROQ in Los Angeles, 99X broke the Cranberries and Silverchair in the U.S. and launched the careers of Collective Soul and Shawn Mullins, among others. They hosted some of the original all-day festivals, later copied by lots of other stations, called Big Day Out. When I was living in England in 1998-99, I listened to 99X on the Internet to get my fix of American-style alt-rock.

What happened to 99X is similar to what’s happened to a lot of modern rock stations; the ratings started to decline around 2000 as fans of ‘90s stuff were turned off by Limp Bizkit, Korn, and their followers. Then when those bands imploded, stations tried to get the old listeners back by playing more and more ‘90s songs. One of 99X’s last DJs estimated that by the end, only one-fifth of the songs they were playing every day were new: that’s roughly three new songs per hour. As this happened, the station became less and less known for breaking bands. In addition, Atlanta became a hip-hop city: Outkast, Ludacris, TI, Lil’ Jon, Usher, etc. The last superstar rock act from the ATL was Collective Soul, and the last rock acts to have any hits were Shawn Mullins and Sevendust, both almost 10 years ago.

Most of the DJs at 99X were fired summarily two weeks ago, but a skeleton crew kept the station going since then. It is staying on for now as a “visual radio station” on the internet. You can listen here. As the individual DJs signed off Thursday evening, they each played little “fuck you’s” to their corporate overlords: the afternoon guy signed off with REM’s “Radio Song”: “It’s that same same song, DJ sucks… Makes me sad. I tried to turn it off, but damn that radio song… hey hey hey.”

At 4:50 a.m., according to the excellent Radio Talk blog (‘cause I wasn’t up), the final DJ gave a nice goodbye to the station and 16 years of music. The final half-hour of 99X consisted of:

Nirvana, “Smells Like Teen Spirit”

U2, “One”

REM, “Radio Song”

Stone Temple Pilots, “Dead and Bloated”

Nirvana, “All Apologies”

Soundgarden, “Fell on Black Days”

Pearl Jam, “Black”

Jeff Buckley, “Last Goodbye”

At 5:25 a.m., they played Green Day’s “Good Riddance (Time of your Life),” then at 5:30 sharp, it went into Beyonce.

Atlanta joins Cincinnati, Philadelphia, and Washington, D.C., all of which have lost their modern rock stations in the last few years. If you live in Georgia, your choices now are an “active rock” station (think Linkin Park, Korn, or Flyleaf) or a “classic alternative” station (read: maybe you’ll hear the new Foo Fighters if you stick around long enough, but wouldn’t you rather hear “Big Me” again?).

Sigh.

Counting Crows are back

Over at I Am Fuel, You Are Friends, they've got a couple of mp3s from the new Counting Crows album, Saturday Nights and Sunday Mornings, out March 25.
And... I'm not that impressed. The faster track, "1492," dates to at least 2000, and possibly as far back as 1997. The softer song, "When I Dream of Michaelangelo," deliberately echoes a 1996 hit, "Angels of the Silences."

Make no mistake, this is almost surely Counting Crows' last shot at being a big-time mainstream band, and not a cult nostalgia act. Their last big hit was almost four years ago and was a goofy, out-of-character pop song from a Shrek soundtrack. The hit before that was a Joni Mitchell cover with Vanessa Carlton, from 2003. To find the last time a real, sounds-like-Counting-Crows song was all over radio, you have to go back to 1999 and "Hangin' Around."

Now they still have a fanbase: they did a tour of minor-league baseball stadiums last summer with Live and Collective Soul (here's "Hangin' Around" from Tulsa with Graham Colton helping out:)


When you consider every one of their original albums has hit the Billboard Top 10, and a live album released last June managed to land at #52, maybe they'll be OK. Or maybe that's a sign that, like REM, Pearl Jam, or Tori Amos, they've got a fanbase who will buy anything the first week. Look at their sales figures:
1994: August and Everything After - 7x platinum
1996: Recovering the Satellites - double-platinum
1998: Across a Wire: Live in New York - platinum
1999: This Desert Life - platinum
2002: Hard Candy - gold
2004: Films about Ghosts (best of) - gold

Now consider that their live performances in the last few years can charitably be called erratic (I personally witnessed Adam Duritz have some sort of on-stage breakdown during a show in Atlanta in the summer of 2005, and have heard other stories), the long layoff and the fact that many of the hardcore fans were turned off by the Joni Mitchell cover and the Shrek song. And this might not turn out so well.

Now, supposedly Duritz has dropped 50 pounds and conquered his demons, and the band is ready to retake their spot atop the pantheon. I hope it happens. When they were at their best, they were a great band. Maybe they can be again.

From the cutout bin: Chalk farM - notwithstanding

I have a bit of a soft spot for Chalk FarM (no idea why the capitalization is that way). In the late fall of 1996, I went to see Better than Ezra at the UNO Arena in New Orleans, still (so far as I know) the largest headlining show BTE has ever done. It was the homecoming date and the last show on the Friction, Baby tour and it was awesome. Chalk FarM was the opening act, and during "King of New Orleans" the lead singer of Chalk FarM came back onstage and turned over cue cards with the lyrics to the song on them. Then he placed a crown on Kevin Griffin's head, which Griffin tossed into the crowd at the end of the show (I still have one of the plastic jewels from the crown).


I believe Chalk FarM came back through town in the spring of '97, but that was the last I ever heard of them, until I found this CD in the dollar bin at my local record store.
So who were they? A Los Angeles band made up of East Coast transplants, they were originally a two-man acoustic outfit that then expanded to a full band, and they were frightfully socially earnest (this really comes through in the lyrics). So a bit like Vertical Horizon crossed with Live. Their one big hit was "Lie on Lie," from 1996, which you can find on YouTube, but which I can't embed for some reason. They then had a minor hit with "Live Tomorrow," which skirted the edge of the mainstream rock Top 40 in '97. As a sidenote, they did much better on the mainstream rock charts than the modern rock charts, which is a little surprising, as the modern rock station where I lived played them a lot.

Chalk FarM was dropped by Columbia sometime in the late '90s, lost their drummer, regrouped enough to put out a second album on their own label in 2000, performed in the film Coyote Ugly, and broke up. The lead singer, Michael Duff, recently released a solo album, and appears from his website to have gotten fairly involved with Scientology... perhaps he can open for Beck.
notwithstanding is a decent album, neither great nor terrible, and considering the success Vertical Horizon had with this basic sound three years later, it's a little surprising that they were dropped by Columbia.

From the cutout bin: Summercamp - Pure Juice

It's time for a new feature here at Tied to the '90s: From the Cutout Bin, where we dig up old CDs that have been forgotten for whatever reason and can now be found in the dollar (or quarter) bin at your local used CD store (if your community still has a used CD store).

First up, Summercamp and their only album, Pure Juice, released in April 1997. These guys came out of the surprisingly-varied Santa Barbara scene, which also produced Ugly Kid Joe, Toad the Wet Sprocket, Nerf Herder, Lagwagon, Dishwalla, and Sugarcult and were together in some form or another for a decade before Madonna made them one of the early signings to her vanity label, Maverick Records. Actually, that may be one reason why these guys aren't around anymore; Madge herself set the bar a little high when (in early 1997, mind you), she claimed that her new signings were better than Oasis (seriously; check it out here)

Not to be cruel, but I have no clue what Madonna was talking about. These guys sound absolutely nothing like Oasis; it's very, very typical mid-'90s alt-rock, distorted guitars with melodies influenced by late-'70s power pop. Think Dishwalla or the Posies, but a little more generic.
Their single "Drawer" went top 40 on the mainstream rock charts and top 25 on the modern rock charts, but the album never charted (Wikipedia says "Should I walk away" went top 10 in Japan). They played the Lollapalooza second stage in '97 (the year it tried to go electronica with Orbital, Tricky, the Prodigy and the Orb on the main stage), then toured with Tonic, did a couple of festivals in Europe and Japan, and dropped off the face of the earth.

So what happened? This article from February 1999 says the band had gone into a studio in Santa Barbara to record a follow-up with producer Gil Norton (Feeder, Foo Fighters, Pixies, Jimmy Eat World, etc.). Another website claims they subsequently recorded in LA, New York, and London, replaced their drummer, and were doing more recording with Bon Jovi's producer. The album was scheduled for fall '99, then fall 2000, but nothing ever came out, not even in Japan. Their Myspace page says they broke up in 2000.

Lead singer Tim Cullen has put out a solo album, toured Japan, and done some work with Bad Astronaut and Sugarcult. He's currently in the Playing Favorites with Marko from Sugarcult and a couple of guys from Lagwagon. Guitarist Sean McCue has played some shows with Glen Phillips of Toad the Wet Sprocket and also has a solo album.

Here's a video of the band playing the Fuji Rock Festival in 1997:


This wasn't a bad album. It showed some promise, and their sound was quite similar to bands like Stroke 9, SR-71, and American Hi-Fi who got pretty big a couple of years later. Maybe Summercamp was a little before their time.
Check out their one sorta hit, "Drawer," which sounds a bit like Superdrag:

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The Nixons

Sorry I haven't posted in awhile; lots going on at the moment. Stay tuned for album reviews of the new Collective Soul, Foo Fighters, and Matchbox 20.

Keep entertained, though, with some videos from the Nixons, one of my favorite '90s bands of all time and recently named 59th-most influential Oklahoma musical artist of all time by the great Oklahoma Rock.com in celebration of the centennial of Oklahoma statehood.
First, "Sister," from the late, lamented NBC show Friday Night (bonus points for a cameo at the beginning of the clip by Edd Helms, Jay Leno's first announcer).


And here's the video for "Happy Song," which is still their best track.


If you're so inclined, John Humphrey, the Nixons' drummer, now drums for Seether, whose new album is out this week.