Alan Cross: Greatest Moments in New Rock History #40-31

In the course of time, there are often "hinge-points": events where the course of history is altered irrevocably. Take the eruption of Mount Krakatoa on Aug. 27, 1883 in Indonesia. A few months later, the sky was still blood-red in Norway (as depicted in a painting); the eruption was heard round the globe; and there were numerous cold-weather records set because all the ash from the eruption had blocked the sun.

Someone even theorized that the eruption led the Dutch to abandon their religion at the time and turn to Islam. Who knows... an eruption leading to Al-Qaeda? :O


40. The nights of June 18-19, 1977: God Save the Queen by the Sex Pistols had gone to #2 on the UK charts a week earlier. Needless to say, monarchists did not take kindly to Queen Elizabeth II being called a "moron."

Johnny Rotten, a producer, and an engineer were attacked brutally on June 18; Rotten's tendons were severed, and he was saved only by his thick leather pants. On June 19, drummer Paul Cook was attacked just as brutally by six guys with pipes. All this because of a song...


39. In May 1989, R.E.M. was on tour in Germany to support their Green album. The Düsseldorf date on May 9 went well, and the band went to Munich from there. Drummer Bill Berry suffered hallucinations and a fever.. the German doctors couldn't figure out what was wrong with him. They blindly prescribed him many different things, including tetracycline.

It was the tetracycline that saved his life, for his eventual diagnosis was Rocky Mountain Spotted Fever. Bill got it while gardening at home a week earlier, and the disease incubates for a week. Thank goodness the prescription was right on the money, otherwise he might be dead.


38. March 1, 1995: Bill Berry's brain explodes on stage. R.E.M. was doing a show in Switzerland. They had just reached the falsetto part of a song called Tongue when Bill Berry had a blinding headache onstage. The pain was so severe, he had to be carried offstage. Doctors in the Swiss Alps found that he had suffered two brain aneurysms, and Bill could have had brain damage.

These two incidents played a very important role in Bill Berry's decision to retire from music on Oct. 31, 1997.


37. April 15, 1994: An Orange County record label called Epitaph releases an album by the band Offspring. It wasn't expected to move a lot of units, but the first single was picked up by a Los Angeles radio station.. that was strange enough. The label offered Offspring $5000 to do a video for MTV, and the popularity of both band and album began to soar.

Smash became the biggest-selling indie album of all time, with eventual sales of 12 million albums. It was expected to sell maybe 60,000 units during its lifetime, but sold that many every day.


36. December 1965: This might be one of the most important talent discoveries in new rock history. The Velvet Underground were playing a club in New York called Café Bizarre. They played six sets a night for six days a week, and were paid $5 for each set. Since their music drove away patrons and didn't exactly fill up the place, they'd already been fired once by the owner... and were on the verge of being fired a second time.

That all changed when Andy Warhol and his band of weirdos dropped in.. they liked the band's avant-garde approach to music, and the band accepted Warhol's offer to be their patron and producer at his studio. (the Factory) Who knows where we'd be in new rock history now, without these founders of alt-rock music?


35. The 1996 Smashing Pumpkins world tour featured the drug problems of touring keyboardist Jonathan Melvoin and drummer Jimmy Chamberlain spinning out of control. They both OD'ed on heroin in Thailand and in Spain. On July 11, they both went on a run for some Red Rum heroin. By the morning of July 12, Jonathan was dead: ironically, he had trained as an emergency medical technician.

Everybody was soon down at the police precinct giving statements... five days later, the band issued a statement of their own. Billy Corgan, James Iha, and Darcy Wretzky stated that Jimmy Chamberlain was fired, and that they wished him the best that they had to offer. In 1999, the band was back in its old familiar form: Chamberlain was invited back into the band, even as it was breaking apart.


34. This one came about by accident and was a quirk of fate. New Order hated doing encores, and would rather be backstage getting a head start on partying the night away. Someone got the idea of leaving a drum machine on as the encore while the band rushed backstage to do said partying. To better entertain the audience, a bassline and computerized voice samples were added to the mix.

One day, the band was in the studio and decided to record this encore.. they were loaded on LSD, but managed to get all the tracks down. The engineer sent them across the street to a café so he could mix the tracks in peace, since they were so wasted. In a day where people were used to Joan Jett's I Love Rock and Roll and Olivia Newton-John's Physical, the new track's dance club debut was a hit. Nobody had ever heard anything like New Order's Blue Monday before: it made dancing cool again.

Incidentally, the band lost one pence on every album sold because the artwork on the record single was so expensive to produce. However, the reaction to the track was staggering; it was the best-selling 12-inch record ever made.


33. In the spring of 1993, Noel Gallagher joined his little brother Liam's Manchester band Oasis. Since Noel insisted on having complete control over everything, it was actually more of a coup d'etat. Noel had recently been fired from his job, and was on his last 2000 pounds of severance pay.

On a night in May 1993, Oasis bullied their way on stage in a club called King Tut's Wah-Wah House. They threatened that they would burn the club down if they weren't allowed to play that very minute, and they got their way. Alan McGee was a talent scout in the audience that night to check out the other bands.. he was so impressed with Oasis that he released a demo single.

Oasis was on their way to becoming one of the biggest bands of the 90's, and perhaps the world.. and all because they bullied their way onstage, in a club where a talent scout for other bands was in the audience.


32. Aug. 14, 1995: The war between the two biggest bands in Britpop history. The release of Oasis' second album Roll With It was very much hyped up. There was bad blood between them and Blur already: Noel Gallagher and Damon Albarn had brawled backstage at an awards show, for example. It didn't help when Blur moved up the release date of their own album to coincide with the release date of Oasis' album.

Bookies took bets on the outcome, and even the normally staid BBC covered the war between Oasis and Blur for Britpop supremacy. So who won in the first week? Blur's album Country House sold 270,000 units to Oasis' 220,000 for Roll With It. However, Blur was sneaky: they released two different versions of their album, differing only by one song. If you were a rabid Blur completist, you had to buy both versions. Pretty tricky, eh? ;)


31. Aug. 14, 1974: Exactly 21 years before the war between Oasis and Blur, the Ramones played their first gig at the New York club CBGB's. There were 12 people in the audience, including the owner's dog. By the end of the year, they had played 74 gigs there.. the word got out after every gig.

There were no solos, no letting up except to count in to the next song, no acknowledgement of the audience whatsoever... and of course, there was the music played at a zillion miles per hour. The audience could differ every night: Andy Warhol and his bunch, stuffy intellectuals, rich kids slumming it, etc. This was a band that appealed to everyone, with no holds barred.