![]() ![]() (1991 was also the year of C&C Music Factory.) But amid the hoopla I hope we remember that while the rock historians, biography writers and magazine publicists are busy emphasizing the epochal shifts in music, they sometimes overshadow everything else - the incremental changes that preceded such changes or that follow them the worthy bands like the Fellows, who but for a genre fluke might have been the sensation and, of course, the pop roadkill left behind. Few records get this kind of attention 10 years after they come out, of course, but "Nevermind" is an album worth celebrating, at least with the same kind of barroom nostalgia that baseball fans might use to discuss a fabled World Series win from days gone by. This fall you're going to see a slew of articles - and even my own recently released biography of Kurt Cobain - timed to celebrate the 10-year anniversary of Nirvana's "Nevermind" album. ![]() I was thoroughly convinced that the Fellows semi-anthem "Beer Money" would soon be blasting from every college dorm room in the land. I liked the band enough that I designed their first two album covers, forgoing payment and taking instead what I thought would be valuable test-pressings. The Fellows went on to have a respectable career as indie-rock darlings, but there were only a few thousand fans buying their albums in the mid-'80s, not a few million. When the band in question actually was reviewed in Rolling Stone - something very unusual at the time for any indie band, much less one from the sleepy Northwest - it seemed inevitable that massive success was just around the corner.īut sadly the year was 1986, Sub Pop was still a cassette fanzine, "grunge" was something you found under your fingernails and the musician in question was Scott McCaughey of the Young Fresh Fellows. He was a talented songwriter and guitarist from Seattle who wrote unforgettable songs he had a mop of hair that was perennially in his face, providing the aloofness required for stardom his band's independently released debut scored good reviews virtually everyone who saw the group in concert agreed they'd seen one of the most fun bands in the world and, most important, those notices were beginning to bring the first national attention to the Northwest rock scene since Heart. During one distinct point of the 1980s, I became convinced - as did everyone I knew who considered themselves alternative music aficionados - that the Northwest finally had produced a certifiable new rock star. ![]()
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