Grunge

It's not hip to admit it, but the Dishwalla concert on Tuesday at the Theater of Living Arts wasn't half bad. Much as new wavers once delivered their palatable derivation of punk to the suburban masses, Dishwalla takes the venom out of grunge's dirty bite and offers it up to rebellious but not disenfranchised youth (and a few critics enjoying a guilty pleasure). The group's overblown songs might seem strange to more mature ears, but they successfully address the self-importance of teenagers.

If Wednesday night's sold out show at the Trocadero had been the final exam in a high school course, Pearl Jam 101, Silverchair would have earned a perfect score. Daniel Johns, the 16-year-old leader of the Australian grunge trio, has that angst-ridden, stentorian bellow down. He gives good Eddie. Plus, the stringy-haired blond "looks just like Kurt," as one typically enraptured teen enthused. Indeed, Johns and his 15-year-old buddies, bassist Chris Joannou and drummer Ben Gillies, have studied hard at the school of Seattle grunge.

Stabbing squalls of grunge guitar attended the opening number, "Hey Hey, My My (Into the Black)" at the Waterfront Entertertainment Centre in Camden Friday night. It was an exquisite gesture from the "godfather of grunge," Neil Young, reunited with his longtime collaborators in Crazy Horse for this tour. Exquisite, because it both mocked the overblown, uninspired nature of much current grunge and simultaneously transcended it. It also served as paean to the work of Kurt Cobain, whose suicide note contained a line from the song: "It's better to burn out, than to fade away.

Even on a good day - with faces scrubbed, stickup hair tamed, and Sunday- go-to-church clothes on - we four in the Bassman family would never be mistaken for one of those windswept, blond, nuclear groupings who live in the Polo ads. No, at best, individually and collectively, we get by. Barely. What can we say about a father who regularly wears jeans and old T-shirts to work? A mother allergic to skirts and stockings? Two sons, ages 9 and 6, who follow in the family tradition where blazers and rep ties are saved for special occasions when their father has to see clients or go to a funeral?

The informative documentary "Hype" explains that grunge music, to paraphrase Mark Twain, isn't as bad as it sounds. That's an achievement, given the current state of grunge music, where atonal moping has become the dominant form of expression. Songs include "I'm Only Happy When It Rains," "Blow Up the Outside World," and the one where the guy sings "Do You Wanna Die?" over and over. What kind of question is that? And whatever happened to "Do You Wanna Dance?" The answer lies in "Hype," which traces grunge back to its early 1980s roots in Seattle, where, we are shocked to discover, the people playing it and the people listening to it were actually having fun. The Seattle area was teeming with spunky garage bands, all contributing to a vibrant and organic regional music scene.

Few artists within the pop idiom toy with expectations like Erin McKeown. Since 1999, the lesbian singer, composer and guitarist has kept her audiences guessing. She moved first from quirky melodic folk with Beat-inspired lyrics to hard pop. No sooner were audiences accustomed to her confessional lyrics and punky guitar jolts, than did she commence, earlier this year, with a set of Tin Pan Alley covers done as surf, jazz and ambient electronica. So why not follow up Lafayette - a richly appointed big band live record released two weeks ago - with a sold out World Cafe Live show on Friday featuring a tiny power trio that reconfigured her renowned jazzy lullaby into the stuff of chunky funky grunge?

From the very first line of Nirvana's third album, In Utero, which arrives in stores today, the message is clear: Kurt Cobain's circumstances have changed. "Teenage angst has paid off well, now I'm bored and old," Cobain sings on the embittered "Serve the Servants," his disinterested tone miles from the usual paint-peeling shriek. Could he be offering a report to shareholders on the success of his band's once-humble endeavor? Or is he commenting, derisively, on the way the astonishing Nevermind, the 1991 album that brought grunge to the mainstream and went on to sell more than 9 million copies, was analyzed to excess and held up as an all-purpose explanation of the twentysomething generation?

Wow! If you weren't thunderstruck and thoroughly spent on Saturday night, you probably weren't at the Theatre of Living Arts. Portland-based grunge survivors Everclear tore through 20 songs in 80 minutes and didn't hint at a dull moment - hint being the operative word - until the 13th, "I Will Buy You a New Life. For all of its post-punk aesthetic, the band seemed eager to please. Frontman Art Alexakis promised - and delivered - plenty of Sparkle & Fade: That 1995 breakthrough album made up half of the show.

Pretend for a minute you live in Seattle, circa 1992. Imagine that a camera stuck in your face or a journalist asking you to explain "grunge" and your slacker lifestyle are as commonplace as rain and latte. Now imagine you are the guy behind the camera, "Hype!" director Doug Pray. Pray admits that initially media-weary Seattlelites were resistant to him and his camera. Nirvana was exploding, and groups like Soundgarden, Pearl Jam and Alice in Chains were following suit. The lifestyle that surrounded the music had become bigger than the music itself: Flannel was on the fashion runways and irony was commonplace in automobile ad campaigns.

This is how Jeremy Enigk persuaded Sub Pop to fund The Return of the Frog Queen, his lushly orchestrated solo debut, out last week: "I sang the songs with guitar, and at points where I wanted orchestration, I'd just freak out," Enigk recalled the other day. "I'd use my hands to indicate bigger sounds, like a conductor. Or I'd sing something that would be an example: like 'la-da-la-dee,' that's a flute part; and then 'BOOM,' that's where the timpani explodes, right there. "I did everything I could to help them get it without actually having all the parts.

Mark Lanegan "If tears were liquor, I'd have drunk myself sick," Mark Lanegan sings on "St. Louis Elegy," one of several chillingly effective downers on the enveloping Blues Funeral, the first solo album since 2004 from the Pacific Northwest grunge tough guy. The Screaming Trees and Queens of the Stone Age veteran has done excellent work with collaborators Isobel Campbell and Greg Dulli in recent years, and he maintains his minor-key winning...

IN ITS GLORY DAYS as a burlesque house, the Trocadero Theatre in Chinatown ran ads describing performers like Shanda Lear ("lights up our stage"), Lynn Oleum ("she'll floor you"), Jerri Toll ("for men with tired blood") and Della K. Tessen ("a delicious platter"). Yesterday, the Troc, on Arch Street near 10th, a former strip joint that started as an opera house and is now a venue for grunge bands, described itself as bankrupt and specifically asked for protection from Ticketmaster. Its operators, Joon Associates Inc., and president Joanna Pang filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy in federal court in Philadelphia, seeking a "breathing spell" from creditors.

The Good Dog Bar is one tough pub to follow. There is that legendary blue-cheese-stuffed burger, of course, so good that it inspired me to haiku and song. But there is also such an elusive aura of perfected grunge in its cozy rowhouse bones, patinaed by generations of drinkers, that it could never be duplicated. It's "that ancient falling-down character," says co-owner Dave Garry wistfully. He even speaks of the Good Dog's perpetually vandalized toilets with measured fondness. (Well, sort of)

Nickelback, the critically despised, audience-adored quartet that packed Camden's Susquehanna Center on Saturday, has found a way to mash the soft rock and hair metal of the '80s and the grunge and emo of the '90s into something that's sold more than 30 million albums. Seems the cash-outs have gotten better for these post-grunge Canadian dudes who named their band after cheap tippers from one member's first job at Starbucks. With his shouted-out, sullen lyrical platitudes and his hair in full flipping mode, Chad Kroeger made for an odd front man. He scuffed up his clarion-clear vocals as though mangling silk with Brillo pads.

My favorite contemporary acronym is CWOT (Complete Waste of Time). Would that reviews could be four letters long. But since they can't, here's the story on Whiskey Neat by Bruce Walsh, presented by Azuka Theatre, which has, frequently and formerly, done strong, interesting work under the talented direction of Kevin Glaccum: A manipulative guy called Handsome (Luigi Sottile, who is) applies for a job as a valet parker and lands the coveted big-tip Saturday night slot. The repulsive boss, a violent brute named Tommy (Nathan Emmons, who doesn't quite fit the description of a man who could throw a Cadillac over a roof)

Throughout the '80s and '90s, if you were a glammy metalhead or a pretty punk who didn't purchase your wear at Warrior, the clothing and piercing boutique on Bustleton Avenue, you didn't rock. Billy Idol, Michael Jackson and Cyndi Lauper all wore owner Carl Werbock's edgiest designs - from fringed suede to studded leather and beyond. Local metal bands from Heaven's Edge to Cinderella often hit him up for custom-made gear, to wear on-stage and off. In the last decade, the store expanded to locations in Levittown and South Street, becoming a haven for those seeking safe, sterile piercings.

Few artists within the pop idiom toy with expectations like Erin McKeown. Since 1999, the lesbian singer, composer and guitarist has kept her audiences guessing. She moved first from quirky melodic folk with Beat-inspired lyrics to hard pop. No sooner were audiences accustomed to her confessional lyrics and punky guitar jolts, than did she commence, earlier this year, with a set of Tin Pan Alley covers done as surf, jazz and ambient electronica. So why not follow up Lafayette - a richly appointed big band live record released two weeks ago - with a sold out World Cafe Live show on Friday featuring a tiny power trio that reconfigured her renowned jazzy lullaby into the stuff of chunky funky grunge?

Stephanie Edwards should stay hopeful. While she was losing her slot on TV's American Idol on Wednesday night, whittling the number of would-be Idols to 10, another former loser sold out the Theatre of Living Arts in Philadelphia to a crowd of moms and Mohawked kids. That was Chris Daughtry, the shaven-headed, big-singing rocker whose eponymous debut has racked up more sales than Idol '06's winner (Taylor Hicks) and runner-up (Katherine McPhee) combined. Daughtry may not have had wee fans crying, as Sanjaya did. But a few girls had to be led outside to catch their breath.

It's been a dozen years since Pearl Jam, with Nirvana, stood at the center of the culture as Seattle's godheads of grunge. As he made clear during the band's sold-out show Friday at the Borgata Hotel & Casino in Atlantic City, Eddie Vedder is keenly aware of that passage of time. "We don't need to be crowd-surfing like it was some video from 1992," the 40-year-old singer said as he surveyed a sea of jostling bodies. "We're all older, smarter, and perhaps more fragile now. " And, he might have added, still able to command a mass audience hungry for muscled-up rock-and-roll.

Egomaniacal alt-rock stars of the '90s were wise to keep Melissa Auf der Maur on speed dial. First, in 1994, the Canadian bass player came to Courtney Love's aid in Hole after Kristen Pfaff died of a heroin overdose. Then, in 1999, Auf der Maur joined Billy Corgan's Smashing Pumpkins after D'Arcy Wretzky's alleged drug difficulties led her to leave the band. After eight years of backing up outsized personalities, though, Auf der Maur, 32, has just released her debut as a solo artist.