#Pearl jam unplugged worldwide sales tv#

Some guy with a goatee had a brother in the US, who owned all the CDs, and had all the information about what he was listening from Rolling Stone magazine.

#Pearl jam unplugged worldwide sales tv#

Else, you had to be lucky to have cable TV, and luckier to catch the video on MTV - the first TV station of its kind for music from the West.īut to know the background and lineage of Nirvana and the Seattle scene (which meant getting to know other bands from the '80s that inspired a Cobain like Meat Puppets and The Melvins), all that came from personal conversations. You bought or borrowed the tape to rewind-and-play Cobain's voice and Krist Novoselic's watery riff. If a Nirvana song called Come As You Are caught your ear, it was because Pepsi released a mixed tape featuring the track. There was no going back, as we now do on YouTube or MP3 services. It was a time when things leapt out at us from TV - not the mobile phone. Grunge slipped into liberalised India, at the fringes when it did, thanks to cable television. But the word 'grunge' was liked more by fans, than musicians of the '80s and '90s who practised the craft. Even as the sound wasn't as heavy as in the metal tradition, the words evoked anger and rage. The melody never betrayed the sound, though grunge could never escape the shadow of drugs and alcohol. The lyrics were introspective, and self-deprecatory. In contrast, grunge was evolving as an expression of more difficult themes like hunger and single parenting (Neil Young's Rockin' in the Free World), abusive relationships (Pearl Jam's Better Man). It was a departure from 'glam rock', whose videos were characterised by band members in leather jackets, pants and boots.

That's why the everyman-vocalist like Cobain caught the eye - they dressed like the young. It was distinguished from hard rock because of the heavy distortion of the electric guitars, to go with a clean and piercing voice.

'Grunge' was denoted a sub-genre of rock in the late '80s.