I am too cool to listen to Everclear. Everclear, those crap mongers who would live beside the ocean leave you far behind in like 1995. During they're heyday I was listening mainly to Screeching Weasel, whose heyday was occuring at about the same time. Three weeks ago I was inexplicable drawn like a moth to a fucking lightbulb to the Everclear official website. And ladies, it's bad, too. I would not recommend a visit. Lots of soul patchery and fake fade jeans and band logo thongs--what Matt Dillon's character called "beer and lifestyle music" in the movie Singles just a few years before the mutual Everclear, Screeching Weasel heyday. I suppose I did appreciate them then for ushering out grunge, which I found and still find unrelatable. The radio was not so unsafe anymore.
But last month Art Everclear dove head first into Ben Weaseldom with a new album called Welcome to the Drama Club. Isn't that a cool name for an album? Yeah, I thought so too. It's on a small lable, features a new lineup and lots of personal songs about how it is to be a man with a band and a personal crisis. The similarities between this album and the last few Screeching Weasel works are vast, and I think we can now name it a genre of it's own--autobiographical albums by the frontmen of bands once popular beyond their comfort zone but since receeded into memory while remaining heralded for their earlier work, eager to express themselves and selling primarily to an audience of loyalists who liked them before the initial heyday or people who "got it" the first time, or freaky converts like me.
Now for the similarities. Everclear, after not putting out any significant albums for a while put out The Best of Everclear, which-- the website mentions repeatedly-- was given four stars by Rolling Stone. (!)
Screeching Weasel, after a similar hiatus following a few good but not that popular albums, put out Thank You Very Little, which was at the time the closest thing to a best of there was unless you cound Anthem for A New Tomorrow, which just had all the best songs on it. But that was a digression.
Everclear frontman Art Everclear, in the off time, went on Loveline all the time and, between giving good advice about sex and drugs, ranted periodically about those of us who resented bands like Green Day for signing with commercial representation blaw blaw blaw you know this discussion it's not very interesting. He bitched with the same tone and outlook as Ben Weasel was doing all over the internet. Band guys hate people who think like that. They take it so personally. I don't give a fuck man, I still resent Green Day. It felt special at first when they were small time, and then all the sudden they were on the crappy radio station and the stupid girls liked them and it just didn't seem that special anymore. I'm sorry, it's how I feel. It's a adolescent punk thing, ok?
So apparently Everclear had fans before they lived beside the ocean and left us far behind and those fans felt like we did when Green Day and NOFX got big and those fans wrote some nasty letters to Art Everclear expressing their feelings of loss, which he responded to on Loveline, and which Ben Weasel responded to on the internet. Which is odd, because SW never got that big. I mean, who was freaking out about them getting too big and why? They stayed pretty small time, so far as I know. There was that Blink 182 cover, but the stupid girls didn't know it was a cover, so what's the problem? Not sure. On with the similarities.
So Art and Ben have both been small, bigger, reviled for their biggerness, taken a stand against the revilement, lost their tenuous grip on pop radio, had a Sandy Bates period, got it back together, put out a compilation album of old stuff and b-sides, seen there was still some love out there, taken a small tour--one show for SW, a colleges tour for EC-- and gone back into the studio with a new band, in almost that order. And for Everclear, this bore Welcome to the Drama Club, again, such a cool name. For Screeching Weasel, it was an album called Fidatevi billed to Ben Foster, eh, less cool in the name department.
WTTDC and Fidatevi cover similar ground--lots of women problems, money problems, fame issues, image management, feelings, and new girlfriends who maybe haven't unleashed their personal pathologies yet. And I am eating it up, against my own better judgement. I assumed that I only put up with Fidatevi because I love Ben Weasel. But I most certainly don't love Art Everclear! I don't even know his real name, I don't care, I have no loyalty, no history, but here I am. I'm listening to Everclear all the damn time, like it was a goddamn Screeching Weasel album. Now I don't have WTTDC, I ripped it (and if Art Everclear has something to say about it--say it on Loveline!) so I don't know if the liner notes include the lyrics translated into Greek, but if they do I will go ahead and say that that is totally gay. So, since Art bitched on nationally broadcast radio, but Ben Weasel did that ridiculous Italian thing in his liner notes (like we're suppose to think he thinks in Italian and sang a shoddy translations of his real wordage) we can call them even.
In conclusion, Art Everclear and Ben Weasel should be friends, they have so much in common they could discuss late at night on the phone. So someone go recommend them to each other on MySpace!
Sorry to hear about your friend.