from Sixteen Stone (1994)
I’ll always have a soft spot in my heart for the first band I ever saw live: Veruca Salt. It was 1997, Party of Five was still going strong, and I was taking my first ever trip to Madison Square Garden (not having been a Ranger fan growing up). I was too young and excited to care how crappy the seats ended up being because walking up that ramp hearing the band, then walking up to the railing and seeing them, was the beginning of a proud decade when I’d see almost every one of my favorite bands, including the historically significant ones, not including as always the ones that were dead or disbanded.
I’d never heard of Veruca Salt except from that movie about those old people in bed but that also didn’t matter because I wasn’t there to see Veruca Salt. They were not the reason I woke up early one Saturday morning, the first of March, which I remember because I passed the time while on hold with Ticketmaster changing over my many calendars including that Beatles one. They were not the reason my dad met up with my friend Joe and waited for me to finish up with baseball for the day so he could rush us into the city, the city where I now live, the city which until then I’d only really visited around the holidays. And they were not the reason the people of New York thought my father was a lunatic. That was because, in my haste to rush out of the locker room to get to the car, I left behind my sneakers. And so my dad, as disgusted and accommodating as he could be, swapped shoes with me. I wore to the show his size-too-small black walking shoes, and he passed the time in midtown Manhattan in plastic baseball cleats. And I’ll be forever laughing and thankful because that night I got to see Bush play live.
Maybe it’s a blind spot – or a deaf spot – but I never really thought Bush sounded all that much like Nirvana. The aesthetic is there, sure, but that could be said about many other 90s bands. Two things set them apart, for me: 1) Gavin Rossdale, actually being British, actually sings with a British accent. The rasp is there, but the voice is otherwise different enough for me to set the bands distinctly apart. And that’s almost enough for me, if not for anyone else. 2) Bush’s songs are simpler. The chord progressions have mostly been heard before, so the melodies are more basic. With Nirvana, that’s not always the case. Just think of how different say “Drain You” sounds, chords and melody, from “Little Things,” or “Pennyroyal Tea” from “Glycerine.” You might say I’m cherrypicking but much of Nirvana’s draw is this strangeness, and that’s not the case at all with Bush.
That now being off my chest, I’ll just say that “Machinehead” was pretty much the song of the summer of 1996. I knew and liked the singles before it, but summer songs have their own way of becoming significant. Z100 would play it all the time, including almost every night between 12 and 1 or so, religiously, so I’d stay up for that, with no reason to get up the next morning. Along the way I’d learn the riff and, in fact, it’d be the first song I’d ever sing at any kind of band rehearsal. Yep, it’s fun to hear, it’s fun as hell to play and it’s certainly been at the center of a lot of good memories of that era.
Here’s a clip of the very first time I ever heard the song, when Bush appeared on a short-lived TV show called “Saturday Night Special.” I see that embedding was disabled by the uploader’s request so please do follow the link. Thanks.
1. Green Day, “Basket Case”
2. Melissa Etheridge, “I’m The Only One”
3. Weezer, “Buddy Holly”
4. The Offspring, “Come Out and Play”
5. Bush, “Machinehead”
6. Foo Fighters, “Monkey Wrench”
7. Muse, “Unintended”
8. Radiohead, “Everything In Its Right Place”
9. Stage, “Live Happy, Live With Anorexia”
10. Ludo, “Save Our City”
Dan’s Definitive Top Ten 2010: Introduction