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When We Were Grunge

The news of Chris Cornell’s sudden and unexpected death got me thinking back to the first time I ever heard Soundgarden. At the time my musical tastes were all over the place, I had a led a sheltered existence and had only recently started venturing out beyond my comfort zone, both musically and geographically. I can still see the cassette cover for Louder Than Love in the zippered container on the floor of the Mustang along with MDC, Fugazi, and Green Day’s 1,039/Smoothed Out Slappy Hours. Angie slid the tape in to the dash and by “Full On Kevin’s Mom” I was totally hooked. This honestly isn’t that unique, while I had some punk in my catalog along with some industrial, a little goth, my collection had breadth but no depth. I knew I liked grunge, in fact I met Angie on a double date to an Excess Lettuce/Bleachbath show at the Pik N Pak has shaped me over the years and it’s due to her influence that I even know a lot of the bands that I put on this little mix I whipped for you all. Some of the quality isn’t great because, to be honest, some of these are rips from when I originally bought the CDs. Grunge being what it was I am not certain a higher bit rate or better quality rip would improve the sound that much but I still love the music.

I hope I represented the scene pretty well in 13 tracks but feel free to offer your opinions. Chris Cornell’s passing sucks but I’ve chosen to celebrate the scene he helped create and revel in the amazing memories that certain music can bring to mind. I would prefer to find beauty in tragedy and today I think I’ve done that, at least for myself. So rest it peace Mr. Cornell, you were an amazing artist and you’ve left behind a body of work that will inspire new artists for generations to come. I only hope you’d find my tribute a fitting one!

Compilation art attribution
I don’t remember… IV flickr photo by Miss Cartier shared under a Creative Commons (BY-NC-SA) license

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The What, Why, and Where…

I’ve been at the blogging game for a long time. I wrote my first blog site, monochromeforest.net in 2001 and by that I mean I coded the site as well as writing all the shitty stuff you can still see at archive.org. I was part of an E/N collective that we called brainrape.net, blogged on various personal domains over the years, and for over half of the last decade I’ve written for the venerable 9 Bullets as Romeo Sid Vicious, I even ran the joint for a couple of years. I’m still taking care of 9B on the technical side and I love the music we’ve covered, I love the people behind the music, and I am more than proud to call many of them friends. Not a single bit of that has changed since 2009 when Autopsy IV (someone I met on the Lucero message board) asked if I wanted to write for the site. However I have changed, I have a much larger family than I did then, a job that’s more demanding of my time, I’ve grown older and require more sleep, and a lot of other various things that place demands on my time. Last year I handed the reigns of 9 Bullets over to Patrick Hayes for the simple fact that I couldn’t handle the time or emotional effort to run the joint anymore.

Some folks may not understand what goes in to running a site, even “just” a music blog, especially on the emotional side. For me it all boils down to this: every record I wanted to write about and couldn’t, every day I didn’t schedule a post, every artist I didn’t make out to see live, every show I didn’t promote on Facebook, and every other exiguous bit weighed on me. I felt like I was letting a lot of people down. In reality I know that everyone, including the artists, knows that life happens and sometimes that means we fall down but that didn’t stop my head from beating me up missing a great show or not being able to find the words to write about a great record. Even now, having pulled back to just handling the technical side of things, there’s a gravity to logging in to 9 Bullets. It wasn’t an easy decision to strike out on my own but if I wanted to continue to write then it was a necessary one.

Through The Whiskey Glass will be a lot of things but most importantly, for this first post, is what it won’t be. I don’t want to recreate 9 Bullets. TTWG is a place for me to write about whatever the hell I want to, to publish the podcast that I’ve been too embarrassed to publish (Drinkin’ About My Daddy), and post playlists. I expect to be a little eccentric in what gets posted for the first while. It will take some time for me to settle in to this new skin and see where it takes me. I’d love it if you’d stick around and see what happens, I may be just as surprised as you are! I do have a podcast to post just as soon as I sort whether I’m self hosting or putting it on a service so you should see that soon. I hope some of you will follow me down this new rabbit hole.