A Grunge Dirge

Covers of songs can tell you alot about the band or artist doing the covering and the band or artist being covered. Like a good translation of a poem, the covered song stands on its own as a song. And like every good translation, it propels the listener to find the original and listen to it anew.

Though I have memories of seeing "Smells Like Teen Spirit" the first time it hit MTV, I was only 9 or 10 at the time, and well, I was only 9 or 10. By the time I was 16 (1998), we had so-called "alternative" rock. WAAF and WBCN (the two rock stations in Boston where I grew up), seemed to play only two bands: Creed and Limp Bizkit. "Grunge" music was too close in time for it yet to be nostalgically mythologized, and the next new thing hadn't happened yet. So we had "alternative," which at the time meant Christian rock and rock-rap hybridity (which we've always had in rock and so wasnt really "new"--see the Beastie Boys, "Walk this Way" by Aerosmith & Run DMC, The Clash, Blondie doing rap songs, etc in the 1980's). 1998 sucked, in other words, so kids my age were forced to listen to the earlier, initial grunge thrust. Alot of us grew up listening to Pearl Jam, Nirvana, Alice in Chains, Pumpkins, just 5 years behind the curve. Alot of us stretched further back, to 70's era stuff like Pink Floyd, Led Zeppelin. Some of us went for more 80's rock: The Smiths, The Cure, Husker Du (maybe just me, dunno). This is what happens when you're stuck with Collective Soul and Third Eye Blind.

But not all was lost: no, far from it. Bands emerged from that time and many of them stay with me. One of the bands that emerged and really hit in the late 90's and early 00's was Staind, a band from the North Shore of Boston. Their sound was more metal than grungy, but the lyrics took their subject and tone from Nirvana. Tender and aggressive: that is their sound

Aaron Lewis's acoustic solo album came out recently, and I was pleasantly surprised to find him covering early 90's staples by Smashing Pumpkins, Pearl Jam, and Nirvana. His cover of Pearl Jam's "Black" is exceptional in that Lewis displays a vocal range Eddie Vedder just doesn't have. Take this verse, at once the highest point of the song followed by the lowest. The speaker of the song, deeply fucked up over a breakup, is momentarily cheered up by a walk outside and a glimpse of laughing children at play. First, the original Pearl Jam:

http://media1.podbean.com/3369/u/Vedder1real.mp3

Note how his voice trails off after the rush. There is a poignancy at this moment, for the speaker's momentary rejuvenation must come crashing down the minute he is brought back to his own being-in-the-world and realizes he is not, after all, a child. The song turns on the line "All the love gone bad," and hits its peak (nadir?) with the lines:

I know someday you'll have a beautiful life
I know you'll be a sun--
in somebody else's sky.
But why
Why
Can't it be
Mine?

Lewis's version makes this turn even more poignant than the Pearl Jam song:

http://media1.podbean.com/3369/u/staind.mp3

Have to include the end of the original PJ song as well, for good sake, which Lewis doesnt attempt to emulate:

http://media1.podbean.com/3369/u/Vedder2.mp3