It had a needling guitar line, a horn riff that would burrow its way into your brain and stay there forever, and a huge, widescreen chorus that made for a fun big-room shout-along. “The Impression That I Get,” which came out 20 years ago today, was a three-minute capsule of everything the Bosstones did well. All they needed was one big song, and then all the groundwork they’d laid would finally pay off. By the time the Bosstones got around to releasing their fifth album, Let’s Face It, in the spring of 1997, the runway was clear for them. Rancid’s “Time Bomb.” Sublime’s “Date Rape.” And then Reel Big Fish and Goldfinger and Buck-O-Nine and Save Ferris and every other thing. And after that Lollapalooza tour, the floodgates opened. In their matching plaid suits, their high-kicking live show, and their instantly memorable horn-blat melodies, they presented themselves as entertainers, which made them stand out in the enforced drabness of the alt-rock landscape.
Still, the Bosstones were a living indicator of a coming thing. And the Bosstones’ sound - soupier and more groove-oriented than its West Coast counterpart - was capable of transmitting emotions other than exuberance and snotty irony. Like many of the other Bosstones, he’d spent his formative years in Boston’s notoriously violent hardcore scene. Lead Bosstone Dicky Barrett’s voice wasn’t a nasal whine it was rumbling, Lemmy-esque growl. That wave was built around California bands who sounded California as fuck - Reel Big Fish, Goldfinger - or bands from Detroit (the Suicide Machines) and Gainesville (Less Than Jake) who also sounded California as fuck. The Bosstones weren’t exactly typical of the wave of ska-punk that would follow in the next few years. They were made for that type of thing, and we just weren’t.”)īut on that Lollapalooza tour, they contrasted so starkly with all the insular, gnarled underground rock around them that you can almost pinpoint it as the exact moment that kids like me decided to turn their attention to something faster and brighter and more cheerful.
(Pavement’s Bob Nastanovich, in that oral history: “The Bosstones were so pumped, and their act was so physical, it was like an aerobics class. It was the dawn of the Mighty Mighty Bosstones Era. Lollapalooza ’95 was an ending in a lot of ways, but it was a beginning, too. The only early Lolla lineup that has really aged poorly is 1993, the Alice In Chains/Primus/Arrested Development year, and even that had Rage Against The Machine and Tool opening the show.) In a fascinating oral history a few years ago, The Washington Post called Lollapalooza ’95 “Alternative Nation’s last stand.” But even with all the past and future underground icons on display, the band that seized the imaginations of me and my friends when we went to that show - the band we couldn’t stop talking about on the long ride home - was the main-stage opening band, the one that wore plaid suits and had a horn section and a guy whose entire job was to dance. (That 1994 lineup also seems improbably cool in retrospect, but that’s ’90s alt-rock culture for you. The whole show was conceived as a rebuke to the previous year - the Smashing Pumpkins/Beastie Boys/Breeders year, the year that Nirvana were slated to headline until Kurt Cobain killed himself - because people thought that things were getting too pop. As headliners, it had old underground gods Sonic Youth, opening their set, the night I saw them, with “Teenage Riot,” only seven years old at that point but already a classic. It had Cypress Hill, performing in front of a gigantic inflatable Buddha with a pot leaf on its belly and, at the climactic moment of their set, wheeling out a 10-foot bowl with a smoke machine inside it. It had Superchunk and Helium and Redman and Built To Spill, all playing over on the side stage. It had Mellow Gold/”Loser”-era Beck, gawky and unsure and not yet ready for stages that size, though he’d get there soon enough. It had Hole, performing under silvery stars and openly feuding with other bands on the bill.
It had Pavement, so sloppy and aloof the day I saw them that the West Virginia crowd pelted them with chunks of mud. The 1995 edition of Lollapalooza had a lineup that, in retrospect, seems almost inconceivably cool.
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