Clarence Clemons | January 11, 1942 - June 18, 2011
Such sad news. The legendary sax player in Bruce Springsteen’s E Street band has passed away today from complications to a stroke he suffered last Sunday.
I’ve been to many concerts over the years and few ever reached the level of energy and pure joy the Springsteen, Clemons and Company achieved. A big man and a great loss.
On Alternative Nation
The A.V. Club is currently running an ongoing series of articles on the 1990’s music scene entitled “Whatever Happened to Alternative Nation?” that so far has been an engaging look at the period from a critical, historical and fan perspective. With the chronological series, author Steve Hyden doesn’t endeavor to write a definitive critique of grunge exactly, but rather to take a critical look back on an important period in his own musical life from a necessary distance. He says:
More than an exercise in nostalgia—or, worse, an excuse to pick on bands that haven’t aged all that well—I hope to give those who deserve it their due, and maybe figure out how something that seemed so promising at the time went so wrong.
After an introductory article ostensibly about 1990 (a prologue, he calls it), the set gains momentum with a look at 1991, through the lens of the contentious relationship between Nirvana’s Kurt Cobain and Axl Rose of Guns N Roses. And the most recent installment uses the following year as the back drop for a critical look at Pearl Jam (a band the author doesn’t view very favorably, from what I can tell).
