P is for Photograph

Most people know The Verve Pipe for their track "The Freshmen" and not much else, but their Villains album was in heavy rotation on my cd player in the spring of 1996 when it came out. I've always felt that the other three singles from the album--"Cup of Tea", "Photograph", and the title song--were much stronger tracks than the one that ended up being the major hit (a song I tend to call "one of those Dawson's Creek type of tracks" because it has that high school melodrama feel).

The spring of 1996 was a major shift for my life. I'd moved back home with my parents a few months previous in August of 1995 and trudged my way through the rest of that year by working at various places like the Leominster Sony Theater and then at WCAT. Around that time I also started hanging out with Kris, one of my friends from high school. She and I were in the same boat, stuck in a small town and feeling aimless, so we got each other through the doledrums by hanging out, going to shows and going on road trips. Our lives were so pathetic that on New Year's Eve of 1995 into 1996, we went to see Jumanji in the theater and hung out at a friend's house playing pool...and none of us noticed the clock passing midnight until at least a half hour later. We all decided right then that 1995 truly did suck ass on multiple levels, and promised ourselves that 1996 would be infinitely better.

Kris and I spent a good amount of time listening to this album and others (mostly Spacehog's Resident Alien, Ben Folds Five's self-titled debut, and Radiohead's The Bends) on our rides through New England. We took trips to Northampton and Amherst, up to Keene, and sometimes even out to Salem. Eventually she moved out of town and we lost touch for a number of years, but we both moved on and moved ahead. By the end of 1996 I'd been hired by HMV, owned my first car, and began writing The Phoenix Effect. It would be another eight years before I too moved out, but I was at least moving in the right direction.

This was an interesting time for alternative rock...it had finally broken through into the mainstream just a few years previous with grunge and so on, and now all the more radio-friendly alt-rock bands came out of the woodwork: Sophie B Hawkins, Sarah McLachlan, Third Eye Blind, and so on. These songs would show up on those 90s shows like Dawson's Creek and Felicity as mood music for a melodramatic scene, and they'd end up on the charts. "The Freshmen", a track that was actually much older than the album (it had showed up in a rougher form on a 1992 EP), got major airplay because of those shows.

I for one didn't really mind the selling-out of alternative rock, as there was quite a lot of it out there that still wasn't getting played on the radio. Other alt.rock fans out there hated it, of course, and considered that the genre had sold out. By the last 90s it had faded back into semi-obscurity to be overtaken by rap-metal, Girl Power, and boy bands, but it left its mark. You can still hear elements of alt.rock in the rock music of today.