Something 4 The Weekend # 45

Dylan Carlson and Kurt Cobain were best friends right up to the end, and roommates, once upon a time, in those lean teenage years before the beginning of the end. Somewhere, in some shoe box in the back of some closet in the greater Sea-Tac area, or possibly locked up in a safety deposit box in Los Angeles, are tape recordings of the two of them making heavy abstract music together.

Then Grunge happened, and a few years later Kurt gave Dylan cash to buy a shotgun, cuz Dylan was the one "who likes to shoot his guns", and really, a guy as famous and famously unstable as Cobain just can't go around buying guns - not from licensed dealers or the trunk of a '74 Ford Torino. Not at a gun show or from some dude my cousin Chico knows...

The story kinda sorta ends, as you know, with Cobain and that gun, the slug that killed Grunge...

And it's poetic (or possibly ironic) that Carlson was the one who scored the gun, cuz in my own version of RAWK HISTORY, Carlson was the one who was actually creating and playing actual Grunge music. Soundgarden were cool, but they were more or less a Led Zeppelin tribute band, and Mudhoney were a drunken Garage Rock band, and Pearl Jam still think that they're The Who, and Nirvana, deep down in their sweatered hearts, were a Pop band, or possibly a very sloppy Boston tribute band...

Grunge, if it was anything, was the slow, droning heaviness of Carlson's band, Earth.

It was also, possibly, The Melvins, but for the sake of this post, Grunge was Earth, not Alice In Chains, another Zeppelin tribute band...

So anyways, I could have streamed one of those slow heavy drones that Carlson excelled at, but instead, I'm drinking coffee that's been "Irished up" cuz I'm greasing myself for a late night recording session, and those slow, heavy drones are half an hour long, and if you want that sort of thing, go check out this month's EVERYTHINGATHON!

Instead, here's a lean 5'29" slice of kinder, gentler Earth...Something from their 1996 album, Pentastar: In The Style Of Demons, which mostly explored conventional heavy music of the Pop/Rock variety. After this, Carlson's life became a distracting blur of drug and legal problems that he didn't emerge from until 2003...Nowadays Earth's music incorporates Blues, Country and other traditional styles, while still maintaining the slow, droning qualities that makes Carlson's music much more unique than most people realize or give him credit for...

And again, in my own version of RAWK HISTORY, Carlson has been as influential as Cobain...Without Carlson and his music, we might not have bands such as Mogwai, Godspeed! You Black Emperor, Sunno))), Explosions In The Sky, Sigur Ros, and Nirvana...

Earth: Pentastar: In The Style Of Demons: "Crooked Axis For String Quartet"

Hotcha! Hank