Time &
Place

I imply in this show that we'd be back to 1994, and we will be - probably more than once. There was simply too much happening in alternative rock that year for one hour to contain it. This is just the first pass.

The year opens with an embarrassment of riches. Dookie. The Downward Spiral. Parklife. Definitely Maybe. Crooked Rain Crooked Rain. Weezer's blue album. Hole's Live Through This. An entire generation of bands, all arriving at their peak, all at the same time.

I built this hour as a series of dispatches from different corners of 1994. It starts with the Beastie Boys because every good party should, then we move through the industrial noise of Nine Inch Nails and Pop Will Eat Itself, before heading over to Seattle, including Todd Snider's affectionate and extremely funny autopsy of Puget's sounds.

Then there's a reminder that not everything in 1994 was dark and depressing. Pavement, They Might Be Giants, Weezer, and MC 900 Foot Jesus were all operating with a wry intelligence and a light touch that often gets overlooked when people talk about the year. The punk revival gets its due - Green Day, Rancid, and the Offspring were selling millions of records in the States while Oasis and Blur fought what seemed at the time like a war for the soul of Britpop.

We finish with Nirvana. Kurt Cobain died in April 1994. "Where Did You Sleep Last Night", Leadbelly's song, the closing song from Nirvana's MTV Unplugged taping in November 1993, feels like the right place to leave things. Not a period. More of an ellipsis or a question mark.

We'll be back to 1994. There's much more to say.

Some cities have a scene. Athens, Georgia has had several of them, sometimes simultaneously - and unlike most places that get one moment and spend the next thirty years living off it, Athens keeps reinventing itself without ever quite leaving the past behind.

The first wave announced itself to the world via the B-52s and R.E.M., but if you ask members of either of those two bands, they'll tell you everything started with Pylon. Spare, angular, slightly off-kilter - they showed a generation of Georgia musicians that you didn't need to sound like you were from somewhere else. R.E.M. were famously in the audience at Pylon's second ever show, and the influence runs in one very clear direction.

Then, twenty years later, Athens did it again. The Elephant Six Collective, including Neutral Milk Hotel, the Olivia Tremor Control, Elf Power, of Montreal and a constellation of interrelated projects, produced some of the most inventive and emotionally overwhelming music of the 1990s, almost entirely outside the mainstream and almost entirely on their own terms. Jeff Mangum recorded In the Aeroplane Over the Sea in Athens. That one album alone would be enough to make Elephant Six significant, but there's so much more.

Running alongside both waves is a thread of songwriting that belongs specifically to the town: Vic Chesnutt, an acoustic bard who was as much a part of Athens's identity as any band, and Drive-By Truckers, who used the city as a base from which to shine a spotlight on the entire American South.

Athens, Georgia is about sixty miles from Atlanta and a world away from everywhere else. You can hear it in every record made there.

If 1977 is the only logical time to start traveling through alternative rock history, Seattle is the obvious place to go next.

Everyone knows the grunge chapter: Nirvana, Pearl Jam, Alice in Chains, and Soundgarden combined to dominate alternative radio for the first half of the 1990s, and their shadow is long enough that it's easy to miss everything around them. But the Seattle scene - expanded here to include Tacoma and Olympia as well - runs much deeper than those four bands.

It starts earlier than most people think. The Sonics and the Wailers were making raw garage rock in the early 1960s, decades before anyone coined the word grunge - and you can draw a straight line from them to everything that follows. Mother Love Bone and the Gits were doing essential work before the major label gold rush arrived. And at the edges of the scene, Flop were writing perfectly constructed power pop that inexplicably didn't find an audience.

The post-grunge years brought their own rewards: the Posies' sense of pop melody, the goofy absurdism of the Presidents of the United States of America, Harvey Danger's perfect debut album. And then there's Car Seat Headrest. Everything Will Toledo recorded before How To Leave Town belongs to Leesburg and a bedroom and a Bandcamp page. Everything after belongs to Seattle - and we'll come back to Leesburg when we get to DC.

Seattle contains multitudes. This is an hour's worth of them.

If you're going to do a radio show highlighting places and times in alternative rock, there's only one candidate for the first show: 1977. It's the year the fuse gets lit.

Punk is exploding in the UK — the Clash are sharpening their politics into something that will outlast the movement by decades, the Jam arrive fully formed and furious, and Wire are deconstructing punk rock before it's even finished being built. Meanwhile, across the Atlantic, the scene around CBGB is at its peak: Television release Marquee Moon in February, Talking Heads are finding their art-school groove, and Richard Hell has already written the rulebook that London is now tearing pages from.

Over in Berlin, Iggy and Bowie, burned out and struggling with addiction, hole up in Hansa Studio by the Wall and make The Idiot and Lust for Life back to back — records that sound like nothing that came before and cast a shadow over everything that comes after. Low comes out the same year. Three landmark albums in twelve months, from two men who needed to disappear to find out what they were capable of.

At the edges of alt-rock: the Kinks and Slade, written off as relics, both turning in some of the sharpest work of their careers. 1977 had room for everything.

This is the year modern rock becomes modern. This is where it starts.