1996 Changed Everything: Pt. 3 - The Message of the Music

This is going to be a series of articles about 1996, as it holds significance for me since it was the year I graduated high school. In this second article, I look at the music of the day and how it impacted my life then and still does today.

1996 in many ways, was a tale of two halves. The first half was all about me trying to finish strong as my senior year of high school drew to a close. The second half was a recalibration. The seemingly endless grind of school had ended. Sure, there was college on the horizon, but for all intents and purposes, that was voluntary.

What I didn’t know then but know all too well now is that when you go hard for a long time, you get calloused. Your body and brain get used to the grind. Once you take your foot off the gas, it’s hard to get the motor running again, or the motivation to do so.

Looking back, it makes the second half of 1996, mostly the fall into winter, a bit of a blind spot in my life. Senior year and all of the events surrounding graduation are seared into my brain thirty years later. That final summer on Cape Cod with my closest friends before they left for college is one of my most cherished memories of my life. Until the actual days they left to start new chapters in their lives, the reality of the situation didn’t set in.

In my world, 1996 still revolved around Grunge music, although now it was a post-Grunge Alternative music world. Long gone was Nirvana as Kurt Cobain had symbolically ended Grunge with his death in April 1994. That didn’t mean that Nirvana’s music wasn’t still a huge part of me and my identity.

The teenage angst that Kurt wrote about in his lyrics only grew stronger in me as the prospect of entering a new phase of life grew closer. My interest in lyric writing, more along the lines of poetry, began early in 1996. However, it was not a Nirvana song that inspired me to jot down my innermost thoughts and feelings. No, it was a real-life event that happened at my school.

As you read in my last article, my English teacher, one of the favorites I ever had, was fired from his job for allegedly soliciting a student to appear in an adult film he was producing. When inspiration strikes, sometimes it comes from the weirdest places.

To process the events surrounding our teacher, affectionately nicknamed Bubba, I bought a steno pad and got to writing. I can clearly remember sitting in my bedroom adorned with posters of musicians and sports heroes alongside my closest friend, Barry, and working on lyrics to a song about what was still a fluid situation at the time.

Music had always made me feel. I can remember listening to Queen’s song These Are the Days of Our Lives in 1991 and getting overwhelmed by its message of looking back on life as you age. I was 14 then and had music making me think and feel beyond my years.

Writing lyrics, or poetry, to certain music made me feel more like an artist. In the first half of 1996, the inspiration came from my Grunge and Alternative roots. Nirvana, Pearl Jam, Alice In Chains, Soundgarden, and others filled my brain.

It was an interesting contrast to try to write about teenage problems that were happening in the present while trying to sound like a weathered adult looking back. My initial year of writing poetry was a lot of simple, sometimes cringe-worthy, attempts at rhyming and explanations of life. College and the music I was exposed to would drastically improve my writing. Well, that and a surplus of new problems.

The music I tried to write to also served another purpose. It was a conduit for creative expression. A dream I had been trying to cultivate in the 1990s was that of being a filmmaker. I wanted to create worlds and share them. I spent around $800 of my savings in 1994 to purchase a bulky camcorder from Sears. That’s equal to just over $1,700 when adjusted for inflation to 2026.

That camcorder got used pretty much daily. By the time it kicked the bucket sometime in late 1997, I had recorded somewhere in the neighborhood of 65 hours of VHS tapes. There were skits, there were family holidays, and random, pointless moments that I captured that I cherish to this day.

The same model camcorder I owned in the 1990s

A major part of those VHS tapes is the music video. Simple, really, my friends and I set up my camcorder, played a song on a stereo, and performed it on camera. In today’s world, we’d call this low-hanging fruit for content. The videos all had a similar vibe. Teenage boys in the mid-1990s jamming out to songs they loved.

We did have our favorites. Nirvana ended up having nearly their entire catalog turned into music videos on my camcorder. It was a who’s who of Grunge, Alternative, and straight-up Rock music. Every now and then, we might switch it up and do something foolish to make ourselves laugh like Milli Vanilli, Color Me Badd, or the Brady Bunch theme. Of course, most of the videos are embarrassing to watch today, but we were kids, what do you want?

It’s a fascinating time capsule to look back at the week I graduated high school in early June 1996 and see what the music charts had to offer. Tha Crossroads by Bone Thugs-n-Harmony was #1. It was eerie as the song talks about losing a friend. Now, we were losing friends as we went our separate ways for college, not death, but still, it was fitting.

The rest of the Top 10 that week was populated by stalwarts like Mariah Carey, Celine Dion, Alanis Morissette, Toni Braxton, SWV, Metallica, and George Michael.

In general, music was trending away from the Grunge-Alt movement and into more polished pop, dance, boy bands, and that song they beat into the ground, ‘Macarena.’ That song debuted right around the time I graduated and dominated the airwaves for the next year or more. I even had to do that foolish dance when at my orientation on my first day of college.

After school ended, my main connection to music came on two fronts: my job and my girlfriend.

I worked as a prep cook at a local restaurant during high school. I was lucky to have a coworker who was a friend and more like a brother at times. We were the same age within a few days, and we had similar tastes in music. What I liked a lot about Liam was that we were just different enough that he might turn me on to a different band, and if he didn’t like something, he had good explanations and not just ‘it sucks.’

I made mixtapes (yes, tapes) called Prep Boys Rock that we would play while working. It was a lot of what I’ve already mentioned, except with maybe a little more REM. We played music loudly, sometimes to the detriment of our job, but again, we were teenagers, what would you expect? Here is a Spotify playlist of some of those classics from the mixtapes.


 

There was a time our music was so loud that we couldn’t hear someone calling to us to bring something to the kitchen. That didn’t go over well with the guy who was a crusty old 60-something who didn’t have time for us crazy GenX kids. He stormed into our prep room, literally tore the radio out of the wall, and took it. We acted worried, but as soon as he left, we made fun of him for the rest of the day, and honestly, still to this day.

It wasn’t all mixtapes. Sometimes we’d get tired of the same old, and we’d listen to the radio. Now we’ll get very specific to where I grew up on Cape Cod. We had some classic stations on the air in the mid-90s, like Rock 104.7 and Pixy 103 (both rock), 96.3 the Rose, and 106 WCOD (both Top 40). But Liam and I tended to choose the stations that felt like they were speaking to us, like Underground 93.5. It was the alternative we enjoyed with up-and-coming bands we might not have heard of yet.

The other connection to music in the back half of 1996 was my girlfriend at the time. I was trying to share my world with her, and the best way I could do that was by sharing the music that made me feel alive. I turned her on to some of the alternative that shaped me. I made her introduction to alternative music mixtapes. For a teenager who didn’t know how to express vulnerable emotions well, sharing music became a love language.

She was one of the select few in my life that I sang for. I always loved to sing, and think I inherited a pretty good voice from my Grampa, who was a jazz singer. So I would put on these concerts where I’d sing a song or two like I was some sort of celebrity. Again, it was a love language to share something so few saw, or in this case, heard.

I turned her on to Stone Temple Pilots, especially. She loved Scott Weiland. In fact, we ended up going to see them in concert later on November 30, 1996. This was only a handful of shows before Weiland got busted for drugs and was eventually thrown in jail, with the tour being canceled.

Concerts were the big new shiny thing for me in 1996. Getting to travel and see bands I loved perform live was something that blew my mind. The first concert I ever attended was AC/DC on March 19, 1996, at Boston’s FleetCenter. It changed my life.

I went with my friends Dan, Pete, and James (aka Butch). It was so liberating to be on our own despite still being in high school. There might have been a little smoke in the car, but for the most part, we were responsible.

My introduction to live music began with Beavis and Butthead on the big screen, segueing into Back In Black, shattering my eardrums. AC/DC was one of the loudest live bands, and I had the proof. For the next three days, it felt like I was wearing heavy earmuffs due to how that music had slapped my ears silly. To this day, I am surprised at how good my hearing still is. I hope I didn’t jinx myself.

I mentioned at the top of this blog that the second half of 1996 has become a bit of a blind spot in my life. I had been going nonstop with school, and as Senior Year wound down, I made a choice to not go away to college. I chose to stay behind and, after taking a semester off, begin my college journey at the local Cape Cod Community College. Why? Possibly burnout, stress, confusion, and the biggest reason, my girlfriend. I will get deeper into that part in the next blog, though.

It’s interesting for me to go back to that time. I know I lived those days, and yet nothing stands out. I believe part of the reason was that as soon as I stopped grinding at school, my mind collapsed in a heap. Not having to be in a constant state of readiness swung me in the opposite direction, and I became soft and lazy. Yes, I was working, but what else?

By the time September rolled around, the vast majority of my friends were gone to their next chapters of life, some never to return. I felt like I hit pause, and once I started up again, I had to try to run to catch up.

I graduated from high school and, within a year, was slam dunked into confusion and desperation about my place in the world. I wasn’t even 20 and was in the quarter-life crisis mode. To this day, I find one of my biggest regrets in life was not going away to college immediately. That stepping off the gas pedal made it easier for me to coast. I don’t think I quite realized that I had shot myself in the foot with my choice to pause my education to bask in the glow of couple’s life.

I look back at the songs that captured my state of mind as 1996 drew to a close. The confusing new releases from Pearl Jam (No Code), Weezer (Pinkerton), and REM (New Adventures In Hi-Fi) seemed to perfectly reflect my own state of mind. The party was ending, but I had only noticed the crowds leaving once my voice was the one left echoing across an empty room.

Music would ease my mind, and it would also influence my writing as I tried to put into words changes I didn’t fully understand. Life was changing faster than I was ready for. January 1996 saw me as a high school student getting ready for the real world. In December 1996, I was in the real world, standing at the starting line and watching it disappear onto the horizon, all while familiar bands played the soundtrack.

The seemingly infinite horizon can be liberating and terrifying all at once.