Sparkle and Fade
Back in the nineties I thought that the Everclear song "Santa Monica," which got a good deal of airplay then, was a pretty good song. I didn't know anything else about the band though so I held off on buying the CD until years later when I found it used somewhere. I still don't know anything about the band but I like that CD a lot. It's sort of wistful and nostalgic, and it resonates even more now I'm nostalgic about it, because it reminds me of the way things were when that song was on the radio. Which fits, because several songs on the album are about being nostalgic for things that it was really best to have given up and moved on from.
I think if that album had come out ten years earlier Everclear would have been huge on the underground - or "alternative" or whatever you call what it was - music scene. But by the time Sparkle and Fade was released Nirvana had made it big and the opportunity arose for the sort of bare-knuckles rock I liked to much in the '80s to make some Real Money.
I've listened to that album a few times recently and it's brought up all sorts of memories. Yesterday at lunch I found myself telling a co-worker how I rubbed shoulders at a wedding with Thurston Moore and Kim Gordon from Sonic Youth and the MacDonald brothers from Redd Kross, who had brought along Sofia Coppola.
I've thought about digging out my Flaming Lips flyer from 1987. Maybe I should get that framed.
