Word: azerrad
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 2000-2009
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...wasn't, of course. A new book by rock journalist Michael Azerrad, "Our Band Could Be Your Life: Scenes from the American Indie Underground 1981 - 1991" (Little, Brown) catalogs the labors of 13 `80s bands with whom Nirvana and countless other `90s acts shared an aesthetic (distorted guitar with a minimum of studio effects, flannel), and without whom "alternative" would never have become a household word. It narrates, down to the homemade posters and tour van repairs, how they gradually built up an audience large enough to make record labels and critics take notice, so that Nevermind and other...
...Azerrad, who wrote the 1994 Nirvana bio "Come As You Are," well knows how indispensable Kurt Cobain's band was in alt-rock's rise to prominence, but "Our Band Could Be Your Life" is a lesson in the impossibility of reducing the revolution to an individual (or a trio). Its story goes like this: in the early `80s, a bunch of kids in unknown punk bands, like L.A.'s Black Flag, figured out that "calling up a pressing plant and getting their own record manufactured wasn't the mysterious, exclusive privilege of the giant record companies on the coasts...
...only after long years of miserable day jobs and masterful schmoozing that they were picked up by David Geffen's DGC label and became internationally-recognized rock stars. Azerrad quotes former Sonic Youth drummer Bob Bert on the band's prowess at working the room: "You'd go to a party and Kim [Gordon, singer and bassist] would know who the Village Voice writer was in the corner of the room and she'd make sure she went over there." By 1991, that kind of fastidious networking had put Sonic Youth and Dinosaur, Jr. in the enviable position of being...
...same, nobody made any money to speak of until the major labels came calling. "Do you make a profit?" a reporter asks Black Flag's Ginn in one of the many `zine articles Azerrad excerpts. His response: "We try to eat." While members of Sonic Youth now drive Volvos and divide their time between Manhattan and country homes, the people who accumulated real wealth as a result of the American indie rock saga of the `80s were either in Nirvana or married to people in Nirvana. For that reason, the tenth anniversary of Nevermind comes attended by unceremonious squabbling. Courtney...
...company were merely a key regiment in the motley alt-rock army. With no beacon of commercial viability in sight, that far-flung herd of musicians, label heads, college radio DJs and `zine writers slowly but steadily introduced a new kind of rock `n' roll to people who, in Azerrad's words, "would seek out the little radio stations to the left of the dial that didn't have such great reception, who would track down the little photocopied fanzine, who would walk past the sprawling chain record store with the lighted sign and go across town to the little...