90s alt rock

Spring Break 1995: The Mighty Mighty Bosstones Have the Pictures to Prove It

This is the story of four boys from Queens making their way to Cancun, Mexico for Spring Break in the 1990s. With a legal drinking age of 18, going south of the border was the only viable destination.

Thanks to an old school travel agency, the kind where you sit on the other side of a desk from a human being and plan a trip, we were able to make our booking and pay in installments. Without the “layaway” option, that $600 trip would have never been a reality.

Every other week, I would stop by Empress Travel in Bayside to drop off an envelope filled with cash. All told, I probably had to work over 100 hours to pay for the trip. But as we all learn, the sacrifice to make “forever” memories are always worth it.

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Tom Petty’s “Walls” Paved the Way for the 1996 New York Yankees Championship

By Drew Rosen Leave a Comment

Sports and superstitious rituals go together like baseball and chicken.

Well, that’s true if you ask Hall of Famer Wade Boggs, who correlated his hitting success to chowing down on pre-game chicken.

And that’s not even the strangest sports ritual.

We can pick apart Wayne Gretzky’s baby powdered hockey stick, Jason Giambi’s golden thong, and Moises Alou’s “pee hands.” But today, we are here to talk about how I single-handily helped the New York Yankees win their 23rd world championship after an 18-year dry spell back in 1996.

OK, OK. I didn’t help the Yanks win alone.

My sister helped.

Tom Petty helped, too.

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Kmart Radio Network: The Soundtrack of Minimum Wage

By Drew Rosen Leave a Comment

As a Kmart employee back in the 90s, I spent many days and nights having my ears infiltrated by the Kmart Radio Network.

It was never a smooth transition from Bryan Adams, “Everything I Do” to an ad for two-ply paper towels. There was no easy way to shift from the Muzak version of “Always” by Atlantic Starr into “Save with Layway!”

But that was the Kmart way.

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Mother Love Bone’s “Chloe Dancer” Is Always With Me

By Drew Rosen Leave a Comment

Almost 30 years later, and the opening piano notes of “Chloe Dancer / Crown of Thorns” still give me chills.

While most songs ebb and flow from the playlist of my life, Mother Love Bone remains a constant. When you find a song that still gives you the feels decades later, whisking you away to another time, another place, you hold on–tightly.

No band better bridges the 80s heavy metal era with the emergence of 90s grunge than Sub Pop rejects Mother Love Bone. MLB’s frontman, Andrew Wood, was a fucking legend, and in life and death, a pioneer.

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Ode to the 90s Alternative Compilation CD

By Drew Rosen 1 Comment

It all has to start somewhere.

I’m not talking about the Big Bang or Creationism. I am referencing how we uncover the music that we love, the tunes that shape our souls.

When you’re younger, you never want to admit the source of where you discovered new music. Perhaps we didn’t want our older siblings to get the credit. Or maybe it wasn’t cool to say, ‘I heard that song in a department store’; ‘I read about it in the magazine.’; ‘It came on the radio.’ And so on.

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Third Eye Blind “Graduate”

By Drew Rosen Leave a Comment

I hate clichés. I go out of my way not to use them and not to be one. But clichés are ubiquitous for a reason. Sometimes they can’t be avoided, and sometimes, it can be enjoyable to become one.

So when I turned the volume to high in my forest green 1997 Saturn SC2 coupe and cued up Third Eye Blind’s Graduate, literally minutes after I actually graduated college, I knew exactly what the fuck I was doing.

Cliché Central.

I waited a long time to escape the halls of academia. And while I did enjoy college supremely more than my other educational endeavors, I had no problem waving goodbye and leaving higher ed in the rearview mirror. Not just on that day, but for the rest of my life.

So when Stephan Jenkins posed the question, “Can I graduate?!,” it sounded more like a demand than a quiz, and I could relate. I did the work, now let me the fuck out.

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90s alt rock

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