We may not see their like again.
Smash Mouth singer Steve Harwell has died at 56, apparently from complications resulting from years of alcohol abuse, a common enough problem in the rock ‘n’ roll lifestyle. Smash Mouth never aimed to be the coolest kids at the table, but they made some very fun music that sounds as lively and distinctive today as it did in the Nineties.
Harwell’s death also has me thinking about the 1990s pop-rock scene, after I attended a free concert last night by Sugar Ray, a band somewhat similar to Smash Mouth that had a handful of big hits late in the decade. (The band still sounds good, although they played a very short set.) The show was part of Nassau County’s annual free-concert series, which typically features a few once-big names as tentpole acts for the summer season; last year’s Labor Day act were the Gin Blossoms. The last full concert I attended back in July was another 1990s pop-rock band, albeit one that never broke through in the United States: the Irish band the Saw Doctors.
There is a legitimate case that the 1990s was the last golden age of pop-rock bands. In addition to the Gin Blossoms, the Saw Doctors, Smash Mouth, and Sugar Ray, there were Counting Crows, Fastball, the Cranberries, Matchbox Twenty, Hootie & the Blowfish, Fountains of Wayne, the Spin Doctors, No Doubt, Third Eye Blind, Barenaked Ladies, Blink-182, the Goo Goo Dolls, Ben Folds Five, Oasis (more of a rock band, but with a strong Beatles-esque pop sensibility in their best work), the Old 97’s (an alt-country band but really fundamentally pop-rock oriented), and the teen group Hanson (which matured into a much better band in later years), as well as bands on the margins that poked through with a hit or two (Toad The Wet Sprocket, Del Amitri, Better Than Ezra, Jesus Jones, the New Radicals, Sixpence None The Richer). There were also rock bands that occasionally made pop-rock-style hits, such as Blues Traveler, Weezer, the Wallflowers, the Foo Fighters, and Garbage. One of the most iconic pieces of Nineties popular culture was “I’ll Be There for You,” the pop-rock theme to Friends performed by the Rembrandts.
Not all of these bands were to my taste, and many of them didn’t last very long, but collectively they produced a significant body of guitar-driven popular music and left a big imprint on the culture. For my money, the Saw Doctors were the best of these bands, and the Gin Blossoms were the best that reached the American market. The latter’s breakout hit “Hey Jealousy” was the best pop-rock song of the Nineties and arguably the best song of the entire decade:
Sadly, its writer, Doug Hopkins, committed suicide before the band hit it big, a story too common among musicians of that era.
There is something of a pendulum swing in popular music: The Sixties and Eighties were decades of convergence, when various genres were moving towards each other, feeding off each other, and adopting each other’s technological innovations, while the Seventies and Nineties were decades of musical diversity, with a lot of different genres going their own ways. So when we think of the Nineties music scene, we may think of grunge bands, the rise of popular and gangsta rap and modern R & B, or the explosion of the Lilith Fair scene of female solo artists with decidedly feminist perspectives. But the pop-rock bands were a big scene of their own. They were less angry or angsty than the Nirvanas and Alanis Morissettes of the day, but that didn’t mean they had nothing to contribute or say.
We may not see their like again. The following decade still produced some bands working in the pop-rock space (e.g., Coldplay and Maroon 5), but, in the past decade or so, radio has become increasingly allergic to anything containing the sound of a guitar. Which means that the Nineties may have been the last stand of the pop-rock band as a major force in popular music.