SMELLS LIKE TEEN SPIRIT by NIRVANA. Part 1. Story by Paul Mitchell

 

 

It was 30 Years Ago Today: Tall Tales of a Planet Shaking Year in Rock.  Part 1

This story was first published in The Big Issue in June 2021, as ”The Year My Voice Broke”

Geelong 1991

It wasn’t quite Dickensian, but Geelong in the recession of 1991 was the best and worst time to form a rock band. Best because you couldn’t get a job and there was nothing else to do, worst because bands all over the world kept reinventing rock.

After uni and share house rites-of-passage in Melbourne, I’d moved back to Sleepy Hollow. Paul Keating’s recession was in full dip and Geelong’s Pyramid Building Society had collapsed, deepening the downturn. There was barely enough underemployment to go round, but that didn’t matter. I’d finished my journalism degree and I was ready, with my Bono-esque singing and lyrics, to form a band and save the world. Work was just a means to noodles and cabbage, so I was happy enough with a job caring for a disabled man a few hours a week in his home. The rest of the time I spent in a one-bedroom flat in Geelong West I shared with my girlfriend, trying to speed learn guitar. I’d been at it a year because I’d realised that, even though my voice would make me the next Bono, it’d help if I added some music to my as yet unformed band.

Luckily for her sanity, my girlfriend was still studying and wasn’t often in the flat during the day. We’d moved to Geelong because I had family there and she needed to travel between Melbourne and Warrnambool for classes and placements. She did her best to avoid my band mania, insisting on headphones when I tried to learn electric guitar, and she no doubt relished her quiet train trips to Melbourne. But on one of them, she made the mistake of meeting one of her Geelong-based classmates. His name was Andrew and he played guitar.

“My boyfriend’s a  . . . singer,” she allowed. “And he wants to form a band.”

Woo-hoo!

Nineteen-ninety-one was the greatest year in rock history. Anyone who says otherwise wasn’t 22 and forming a band. Alternative rock took over the charts and this greatest year in rock history meant it was the best time to be hearing new and exciting sounds – and the worst to be trying to sort out your band’s sound. Rock music’s direction changed monthly, and every new song we wrote sounded like the latest track by the next biggest thing in rock: Nirvana, Primal Scream, Soundgarden, Red Hot Chilli Peppers, Pearl Jam, Pixies, Dinosaur Jnr . . . they all released albums in ’91 that hammered rock into new shapes*.

We called ourselves Tall Planet because we were all at least six-foot in the old scale. The orange cover image Andrew made for our demo tape had a shadowy giant standing over a planet of screaming people. It was the best thing our band ever did.

Andrew was the kindest bloke I’d met and the second vegetarian. He was also an excellent rhythm guitarist, but Tall Planet’s make up meant he had to play lead guitar, which he’d never done, while I did two things I’d never done: publicly sang my potentially world changing lyrics and played acoustic guitar, albeit arrhythmically.

My musical heritage consisted of singing my team’s theme song in the clubrooms after a footy win, so it was lucky Andrew knew two other kind vegetarians. Drummer David was a blond-haired jack-in-a-box, influenced by the ‘Madchester’ sound. He played at least a beat ahead of where we wanted our songs. Bassist Martin, with hair down to his backside, was the only trained musician in the band. Influenced by Mudhoney, his melodic playing was, to be fair, better than our demo tape cover image.

Andrew was inspired by some band I’d never heard of called Teenage Fanclub, and I was, of course, powered by Bono’s singing, lyrics and bombast. We were a group that sounded like four bands in one. The sonic equivalent of having all corners of a pizza quattro stagioni shoved in your mouth at once.

And that was before the regular updates to our sound that resulted from the steady release of genre-busting, chart-topping 1991 classics.

At first, it all seemed simple: REM released Out of Time in March and its blend of acoustic and electric instrumentation suited Tall Planet’s sound up to the sky. Andrew and I wrote our first song together soon after, Sweet Something, which included my brilliant lyrical play on the idea of whispering a ‘sweet nothing’ to your partner: “Whisper to me / a sweet something you see / something to make me feel alive”.

You see what I did there? What a song! We thought it stacked up well beside REM’s Shiny Happy People and Losing My Religion.

We were onto something sweet alright and, even if our songs in rehearsal bored Martin stupid and drove David to an extra level of hyperactivity, Tall Planet soon played its first gig: in the bistro lounge of the Telegraph Hotel at the concrete end of Pakington Street, Geelong West. Our amps sat on dinner tables, the crowd consisted of our girlfriends and some unfortunates at the bar who’d just finished their counter meals. I don’t know whether they stayed or left. I was too busy looking down at my guitar to make sure I was playing the right chords.

No matter, with the REM sound in demand, we’d make rock history. There was some band called Things of Stone And Wood that Martin’s girlfriend had seen in Melbourne, who she thought might be competitive with us, but we’d never heard of them. And we’d just written another acoustic rock classic called Together, with lyrics about all people needing to get together. We didn’t care about things of stone, wood, metal, string or cotton wool.

For our next gig, we joined a battle of the bands comp in a pub somewhere in Geelong’s CBD on a Wednesday night, a time and place you’d normally only be seen if you wanted to be beaten up. But we were solid, together, lots of sweet somethings. The band that came on after us, Deer Bubbles, had a girl for a lead singer and rhythm guitarist. As a prop, they had balloons all over the stage, and when they finished a song the lead singer popped one.

Andrew and I thought it was a cheap marketing gimmick to help the crowd remember them. A gimmick I remember clearly, thirty years’ on.

In the amiable Geelong rock scene of ‘91, bands chatted and compared influences and tastes in beer. Carlton Draught or VB? Deer Bubbles’ drummer seemed to have enjoyed more of both than anyone my age – and I’d been to uni at Deakin Geelong in first year, 1987. Some toga party goers are only now getting over their hangovers. Deer Bubbles’ singer didn’t seem to have had a drink, but when she told me her name I couldn’t understand it. I got to know it a few years later, when everyone had to learn to say Adalita from Magic Dirt.

 

Next week: Part 2. Close encounters with The Meanies, Tex Perkins, Kim Salmon…and all the 1991 albums not made by Tall Planet.

Stereo Story 641