Tag: I'll Stand By You

1994

We are nearing the end of Max Picks…we still have one more year to go.

R.E.M. – What’s The Frequency Kenneth? 

This song along with Fall On Me is my favorite REM song.

REM really let loose on their album Monster. I love the tone on Peter Bucks’s guitar and the loud in-your-face production. Peter Buck played the late Kurt Cobain’s Fender Jag-Stang, which he plays upside-down because Cobain was left-handed. This to me…is very close to having a REM and Replacements song all in one.

This song is about an incident that took place on October 4, 1986, when the CBS news anchor Dan Rather was attacked on a New York City sidewalk by a crazed man yelling “Kenneth, what is the frequency.” The man turned out to be William Tager, who was caught after he killed a stagehand outside of the Today Show studios on August 31, 1994. Tager, who was sentenced to 25 years in prison, said he was convinced the media was beaming signals into his head, and he was on a mission to determine their frequencies.

Lead singer Michael Stipe says this is an attack on the media, who overanalyze things they don’t understand.

After this song I lost contact with REM’s music for a long time…the same with The Replacements. Those two bands represented the best of the 80s for me.

Weezer – Buddy Holly

This was released to radio on September 7, 1994, which would have been Buddy Holly’s 58th birthday.

The video for this song hooked me for not only the mention of Buddy Holly, Mary Tyler Moore but also the Happy Days set… Plus its a fun song.

Spike Jonze directed the video. Vintage Happy Days footage was intercut with shots of Weezer performing on the original Arnold’s Drive-In set. Al Molinaro, who played the diner’s owner on the series, made a cameo appearance in the video. One of the most popular clips of 1995, it scored four MTV Video Music Awards, including Breakthrough Video and Best Alternative Music Video, and two Billboard Music Video Awards, among them Alternative/Modern Rock Clip of the Year.

Pretenders – I’ll Stand By You

Chrissie Hynde wrote this with Tom Kelly and Billy Steinberg. “I’ll Stand by You” was released as the second single from the  1994 album Last of the Independents. It’s a beautiful song that has been covered a few times.

For Hynde, working with outside songwriters was different, as she was used to writing on her own. It ended up being a very positive experience that led to more collaborations.

Chrissie had said she was uncomfortable about having such a hit but felt better after Noel Gallagher said “he wished he’d written it.”

Chrissie Hynde: “When I did that song, I thought, Urgh this is s–t. But then I played it for a couple of girls who weren’t in the business and by the end of it they were both in tears. I said, OK, put it out.”

Green Day – When I Come Around

This was my first introduction to Green Day. The more albums they released the more I liked them. American Idiot is probably my favorite album but this song was a good introduction to the band for me.

Billie Joe Armstrong, Mike Dirnt, and Tré Cool are listed as writers of this song. It was not released as a single, which was a strategic move by Green Day’s label Reprise to up the sales of the album.

When performing this song at Woodstock ’94, a fan threw a clump of mud on stage and Billie Joe stuck it in his mouth. This caused the fans to keep throwing mud and started the infamous mud fight. Many fans look back at Woodstock ’94 fondly, calling it “Mudstock ’94” largely because of this incident.

Nirvana – The Man Who Sold the World

This version has a charm about it I like. Cobain did a great job on this.

David Bowie liked this cover saying, “I was simply blown away when I found that Kurt Cobain liked my work, and have always wanted to talk to him about his reasons for covering ‘The Man Who Sold the World’.”

What he didn’t like were the kids that came up after his show and said, ‘It’s cool you’re doing a Nirvana song.’ And I think, ‘F**k you, you little tosser!”

Nirvana performed it on the MTV Unplugged episode a few months before Cobain died…it was released on the MTV Unplugged album in November of 1994.