HATE TO ADMIT IT, BUT…
Bush
“Glycerine”
Sixteen Stone
1994 | Trauma Records

It was kind of fun to watch big bands of the mid-90s get poised for stadium success on the club level. In the last days of post-Nirvana rock and roll, paying one’s dues was still a necessary step towards coming up into mainstream success. Dave Grohl – former drummer for a band who had played in front of a quarter of a million people MANY times – took his Foo Fighters on the road for the first time in 1995, opening for former Minuteman Mike Watt. Ultimately, Grohl took his own songs back to the stadium (and, God bless him, Mike Watt still jams econo), but on the way, he had to – got to, really – play “This is a Call” and “Big Me” in the same sweaty clubs he’d started out in.

And it was really cool to see the combinations that bands got thrown into on tour. Summer 1995, I got to see Bush and the Toadies – one of whom was about to go supernova and the other to toil in semi-obscurity (albeit with a small, but rabid fanbase), though we didn’t know who yet – on what amounted to a double-headliner bill in Detroit.

The Toadies were good. They looked the part of a legit underground rock band (and probably still had jobs when they weren’t on tour), and they seemed to have fun, even though their songs kind of had that off-kilter rhythm and quirk about them. Bush, though – they  had the stadium-level show down to a science, probably had been rehearsing it in practice spaces at home in England. Frontman Gavin Rossdale gestured to the crowd, and the crowd went wild. Floodlamps painted the four men onstage like gods. They could very well have been lip-syncing, that’s how little one could see through all the smoke and lights. The band played probably everything from their debut, Sixteen Stone, and maybe a B-Side or two. And here was another cool thing about mainstream bands touring their first albums – dudes had no choice but to play the B-sides.
More on Bush | “Glycerine”

NOT ROCK
Two years have gone by without the pretty pain and masochistic outgivings of Tool. No perfectly starched performances backdropped by bizarre animations of human activity and, worst of all, no new albums. Since the 10,000 Days tour, I have checked in every two months with fingers crossed that Tool’s status quo would change.  Finally, it has.

Tool is headlining Lollapalooza (I can’t believe they are listed second to Depeche Mode).  Though excited to learn they aren’t dead in the water – I was a little worried – there was a bit of shock factor upon learning that their two-year hiatus will come to an end at a frat-boy festival. I never really thought of Tool as the festival-type band, but hey, if Nine Inch Nails can do it – three Grammys or not, their progressive and churning approach to metal, dark and desolate, has always been underappreciated and severely misunderstood – then so too can Tool. It’ll be interesting to see how Snoop Dogg fans receive them.
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