Signature Songs 07: Alternative/Grunge Edition Quiz

Answer: Pearl Jam

"Alive" began life as an instrumental demo entitled "Dollar Short" written by Stone Gossard and shopped around in order to find a lead singer. Eddie Vedder got hold of the tape and wrote the lyrics.

"Alive" is Song One in what is called the "Mamasan" trilogy. The song deals with a young man who discovers his father is actually his step father. As he grows up, his mother falls in love with him because he looks so much like his father, who is deceased, and ultimately seduces him. This drives him to insanity, and in the song "Once" he goes on a killing spree. In the B-Side "Footsteps", he is in jail contemplating his life and awaiting execution.

Although never charting on the Billboard Top 100, it spent sixty one weeks on the charts just slightly behind the top 100.

Answer: Oasis

"Wonderwall" was written by Noel Gallagher. As Oasis's signature song, "Wonderwall", is their only top ten hit on the US charts in the 1990s and the 2000s. It placed 76 on the UK's list of best selling singles. Although Noel originally wanted to sing the song he gave it to his brother Liam Gallagher, and Noel sang "Don't Look Back in Anger" which according to Noel is the only song he really wanted to sing.

Like "Smells like Teen Spirit" for Kurt Cobain, "Wonderwall" has became rather a nuisance for Liam Gallagher. He said in 2008: ""I can't [expletive] stand that [expletive] song! Every time I have to sing it I want to gag. Problem is, it was a big, big tune for us."

Answer: The Smashing Pumpkins

"1979" is The Smashing Pumpkins' only Top Twenty Hit on the Billboard Hot 100 in the 1990s, peaking at Number 12 and Number One on the Mainstream Rock Tracks and Modern Rock Tracks. It was the second single from the 1995 double album "Mellon Collie and the Infinite Sadness", which in my opinion is the best Pumpkins album released. The track features sampling and looping, which was previously unexplored territory for the band.

After the Smashing Pumpkins finished the "Siamese Dream" tour, Corgan, being the workaholic that he is, wrote 55 to 60 songs for their upcoming album. The last track written for the album (though not the last song written for the "Mellon Collie" era) was "1979". "1979" was largely unfinished, being only a few cord changes and a section of melody with no words. Flood, the band's producer, told Corgan the unfinished song wasn't good enough and wanted to drop the instrumental piece from the album. Corgan then finished the song in four hours. After Flood heard the finished product he immediately decided to place it on the album. According to Corgan "1979" is the most important song on the entire album from a personal perspective. In 1996 interview Corgan said "something that combines technology, and a rock sensibility, and pop, and whatever, and hopefully clicks. Between 'Bullet with Butterfly Wings' and '1979' you have the bookends of Mellon Collie and the Infinite Sadness. You've literally the end of the rock thing, and the beginning of the new thing".

The last song written and released in from the "Mellon Collie" era, according to Corgan, is, appropriately enough, "The Last Song" on the "Aeroplane Flies High" box set. This box set is fantastic if you haven't heard it, and proves "Mellon Collie" could have just as easily been a triple album set. There's that much good stuff on it. "The Last Song" was written after "Mellon Collie" was completed and released.

Answer: Blind Melon

"No Rain" appears on the debut eponymous 1992 album of Blind Melon. Both the video of "No Rain" and the album cover feature the Bee Girl. The Bee Girl's real name is Heather DeLoach, and she appeared in a video for Weird Al Yankovitch and also two episodes of the medical drama show "ER". The "No Rain" single features the band in a grassy field and invokes the early folk-rock of The Grateful Dead.

Pearl Jam even wrote a song called "Bee Girl" which they performed on Bob Coburn's radio show "Rockline" on October 18, 1993. I remember hearing the track in 1998 on the radio before the release of their record "Yield". "Bee Girl" would go commercially unreleased until the 2003 double disk compilation blowout "Lost Dogs". The track of "Bee Girl" on that recording also featured a hidden track called "4/20/2002", a tribute to Layne Staley.

Answer: Mother Love Bone

"Chloe Dancer/Crown of Thorns", two songs sequenced into one track, is one of the defining songs for me from the early 1990s. The song appears the EP "Shine". The stand alone version of "Crown of Thorns" appears on the band's only studio album "Apple". The song also appeared on Rolling Stone's list "The Fifty Best Songs Over Seven Minutes Long".

The song got its primary exposure through the "Singles" soundtrack that is considered one of the defining documents or the Grunge era, and truly helped to bring Grunge into the mainstream. The only notable artist who is MIA from "Singles" is Nirvana.

Answer: Bush

I remember the first time I heard Bush was on a college radio station in Stillwater, Oklahoma, back in early 1995. Although a defining single from that album, it was "Come Down" and "Glycerine" that truly broke Bush into the mainstream as far as the Billboard Hot 100 goes. There were five singles from "Sixteen Stone": "Everything Zen", "Little Things," "Comedown", "Glycerine", and "Machine Head". All did tremendously well in their perspective charts. "Little Things" is also notable for being pretty similar to Nirvana's "Smells Like Teen Spirit" in chord progression.

"Sixteen Stone" is an album that was in heavy rotation in my CD player back in the 1990s.

Answer: Alice in Chains

Alice in Chains wrote "Man in the Box" and the single was released in 1991. The song appeared on their 1990 debut album "Facelift". In the "Music Box" box set liner notes, Jerry Cantrell says this of the song "That whole beat and grind of that is when we started to find ourselves; it helped Alice become what it was." According to Layne Staley, the song deals with censorship by the media, which is appropriate as the track is routinely censored for curse words found in the lyrics. According to Staley, regarding the lyrics, "I was really stoned when I wrote it." The song has long been held as one of the band's signature songs, and one of the defining songs of the Grunge era.

Answer: Stone Temple Pilots

"Plush" was the second single from Stone Temple Pilot's debut album from 1992, "Core". The track reached Number One on the Album Rock Tracks and Number nine on Modern Rock Tracks and also netted the band a Grammy for "Best Hard Rock Performance" at the 1994 Grammy Awards.

The band also performed an acoustic version at the MTV show "Headbanger's Ball" that proved to be a very popular hit as well though initially the acoustic version only available on their single "Creep". Both the acoustic version and the studio version appeared on their 2003 Greatest Hits compilation "Thank You".

Answer: Live

Live recorded "Lightning Crashes" in 1993, and released the song on their 1994 album "Throwing Copper". Being from Oklahoma, my own principal memories of this song tie into the Oklahoma City bombing of the Murrah building on April 19, 1995. One of the OKC radio stations took "Lighting Crashes" and mixed the song with audio and news clips pertaining to the bombing. The radio stations played this mix a lot during the aftermath of that horrible tragedy.

Live's lead vocalist and principal song writer for this individual song, Ed Kowalczyk, has this to say about the track:

"I wrote 'Lightning Crashes' on an acoustic guitar in my brother's bedroom shortly before I had moved out of my parents' house and gotten my first place of my own."

He also had this to say about the song's video: "While the clip is shot in a home environment, I envisioned it taking place in a hospital, where all these simultaneous deaths and births are going on, one family mourning the loss of a woman while a screaming baby emerges from a young mother in another room. Nobody's dying in the act of childbirth, as some viewers think. What you're seeing is actually a happy ending based on a kind of transference of life. The dedication to Barbara Lewis (a classmate who was killed by a drunk driver in 1993 who was fleeing from the police after a robbery in York, Pennsylvania; Barbara had many of her organs donated including a liver to a ten month old baby) came after the song was written. But it was something that we hoped would honor the memory of a girl we grew up with and help her family cope with sorrow - which it seems to have accomplished - in a fashion in keeping with the theme of the song."

Ed Kowalczy frequently dedicates the song to victims of the Columbine High School massacre at live performances.

Answer: Weezer

Weezer recorded "Buddy Holly" which, along with "Undone - The Sweater Song", proved to be a big hit for the band back in 1994. They released the single on Buddy Holly's 58th birthday. Rivers Cuomo, the author of the song, was originally unsure of including it on Weezer's album. The album's producer, Ric Ocasek, had this to say:

"I remember at one point he was hesitant to do 'Buddy Holly' and I was like, 'Rivers, we can talk about it. Do it anyway, and if you don't like it when it's done, we won't use it. But I think you should try. You did write it and it is a great song.'" [Source: River's Edge]

Ultimately Rivers agreed with his producer, and the rest is pop history!