Fade Through Away

You gotta reach down and pick the crowd up, that’s what it’s really all about. Music means something when it reaches out and makes your whole body shudder in pleasure, and you look around and see that same sated feeling of connection on the faces around you. The last time I truly saw that was when I saw the Damned on the Fiend Fest tour, and turned to see the girl standing next to me with that look on her face…. I never got to see Mother Love Bone, but I like to think that they would have been that impressive, at least on their best nights. When I first heard them it was early in 1992, and my best friend had purchased their sole full length album, Apple. I didn’t dig it all that much, and he didn’t either. It just seemed remote and distant. For some reason I don’t even recall I picked up a used copy of Apple and played it enough times to get the jist of the tunes and soon found that there was something in the music that worked for me. They became one of the Seattle groups that I really identified with.One of the things that I have noticed about MOG is that Pearl Jam is a band that people talk about a lot, and that feels strange to me. My friends and I were into them when they first hit, but cooled on them as the music became less and less accessible. When I was college my Soc 101 class did a unit on music and culture and the teacher did a survey where everyone was asked to list their three favorite current bands. Pearl Jam was on my list and on the list of enough others to be the number one favorite band in the class. As I recall this was somewhere between Ten and Vs. I recall vividly buying the vinyl of Vs. because it came out a week before the CD and I wanted to hear it that baddy and while I liked it, I didn’t like it enough to listen to it all that often. As Pearl Jam dropped off my radar more and more, Mother Love Bone (which was the band that birthed Pearl Jam, for those of you who don’t know) became more and more interesting to me. Maybe it was the fact that here was a band with a lot of promise that suffered a staggering loss just as things were starting to get going. Maybe it’s that they more so than any of the other Seattle groups had an element of playfulness and fun about them. Maybe it was that their songs just resonated more with me … I don’t know..What I can say is this, if you haven’t heard them, and are open to something that bridges the late 80’s Glam Metal and the early 90’s grunge scene, that has a sparkle and a shine to it, as well as a reflective side, you should check them out. Also there is a great documentary about their late singer Andrew Wood making the rounds at film festivals. It’s one of the best rock documentaries that I have seen in the last year, and that’s saying a lot, cause I’ve seen both the “A New York Doll’ and “The MC 5: A True Testimonial’ doc’s in that time. http://www.malfunkshun.com/index333.html