That Obscure Band I Saw Back in 1991

Late summer, 1991. I don’t remember the period as being something particularly memorable. It wasn’t what I would characterize as a period of time from which I have many cherished memories.

I had just graduated from college the previous spring and spent a forgettable summer in my hometown of Houston, Texas. I had also just extricated myself from the dysfunctional relationship I had been trapped in for the last two-plus years of my undergrad experience. (This was long before I met my wife.)

I wanted to be single and left alone. I had no intention of being in any sort of relationship. The only plan this time was I was not going to approach, seek out, or date anyone. I wasn’t going to make any affirmative effort to pursue anyone, because that had always ended badly for me, it seemed. I was going to wait until the person I was meant to be with walked into my life one day and struck me like a thunderbolt; I figured I would know it when it happened, and this prediction (and hope) would actually come true out of the blue one day two years later when I met my wife for the first time. She was indeed the thunderbolt, and I would learn what a normal, healthy relationship was like for the first time in my life.

But in the late summer of 1991, I was entering a period of freedom, introspection, and at times, isolation. Truthfully, I had no idea yet what I wanted to do with my life. That’s why I had applied for both graduate and law school. I figured, what the hell, I liked Fayetteville (at that time, still the Fayetteville of old; a small, breezy and sylvan town in the hills that had a lot of character), and grad or law school would permit me to continue living like a kid, going to classes, studying, and having no other real, important commitments or actual responsibilities. I had proven pretty good at it, this school thing. I had the thing completely dialed in; I went to class, I studied hard, and I got good grades. If one had not yet figured out what one wanted to do with his life, he could just simply stay in school and accumulate more degrees. And that’s what I was going to do.

So when I rolled back into Fayetteville early that August, I was looking forward to taking my studies to the next level. I had scored free room and board in the athletic dorm, where I had lived while playing baseball and football, as a “Resident Associate.” This was a fancy-sounding title that really meant “former scholarship athlete who is getting a graduate degree who we can keep in the dorm to keep the athletes out of trouble or their names out of the local newspaper.” That was my unofficial job. I was actually told this by more than one person in the athletic department, and they shall forever remain unnamed. And I got paid for doing it with free room and board. It was a good gig, for a while anyway. The NCAA finally outlawed athletic dorms and “resident associate” gigs years later. I was one of the last people to get in on it.

It consisted mostly of the following duties: Keeping females out of the all-male dorm (routinely the source of some high-visibility incidents); making the residents keep their music down, enforcing (loosely) the ban on alcohol in the rooms (if they were 21, this “enforcement” consisted of storing their stuff in unseen places), keeping the overall noise down, and helping our academic director run study hall on week nights for the freshmen and sophomores.

I did all of this while also in my first year of law school.

Most of these guys were my younger former teammates on the football or baseball team, and when — after several warnings — their music got too loud, or they were unable to control themselves after having a few cold beverages, and I confiscated both, I was occasionally accused by a few of the younger guys of being a university “narc” when I called them out for playing AC/DC so loud that you could hear it across campus. But the vast majority knew if they followed the rules they would get very wide latitude in exchange; it was all about being smart and discreet in your decision-making. “Do not be an idiot. You have a good gig here.”

Unbeknownst to almost anyone, August 27, 1991, would become a watershed date in the history of rock music. Then one night in late August (a few days after the aforementioned 27th), I got a call from a buddy to come upstairs to his room.

“What is it?” I asked.

“Dude you just need to get up here right now and listen to this.”

These were the days before i-Tunes and the instant downloading of music; digital music did not yet exist. You either heard something first on the radio or you went and bought a compact disc or cassette tape. Those were your choices.

So I went up there to see what the fuss was about. I walked into the room and said, “What?” Somebody hit the play button, and over the next fifty-three minutes, my music life — the music that interested me — would change trajectory, permanently.

In the quick months that followed, the proverbial “hair bands” and the pop sound that had so thoroughly pervaded the 80s and somehow leaked into the first part of the new decade were dead, never to return.

This new sound employed strange new musical techniques, like starting and stopping, and getting loud — then quiet — then loud again, throughout the songs. It was new, inventive, and ground-breaking; little pregnant pauses, interspersed with screams and whispers in the lyrics, interwoven with layers of driving guitar riffs and percussion that sounded like the drummer was trying to destroy his drums. No keyboards, no pianos, no strings, no horns. Guitars, drums, and lyrics. It was a wall of sound I’d never heard before.

I listened to these new songs over and over again throughout the fall and into the last weeks of the semester, until I knew every chord progression, every base line, and every word.

I finished finals during the first week of December. I wasn’t going home for Christmas for two more weeks. The campus and the town gradually emptied out as the days turned colder. There wasn’t much going on; I would walk down to the weight room in the football stadium and work out. It was one of the few privileges still afforded graduated players. Some nights, I’d walk across campus and over “the hill” to Dickson Street and play pool, watch a few local bands, or grind out a few fledgling stories in one of my innumerable notebooks. It wasn’t much, but it was better than the alternative of spending a month anywhere else in December.

This was the situation when one of my best friends — for purposes of this account I’ll call him Walt, another varsity athlete with very similar musical tastes — walked into my dorm room and proposed something that at the time sounded radical and even dangerous to me. The new, up and coming band we’d heard for the first time back in August was playing the following night in Norman, Oklahoma, and we should get in one of our beaters and drive over for the show. There were still some tickets left, but we needed to decide. Like right then.

What the hell else was I going to do, I thought. I would drive home in a week for the holiday break, and I had nothing on my schedule until then. “Let’s do it dude,” I finally said. A high five followed. “Who else is going?” “Right now, it’s you, me, Brent, and Tom.” All of these other names are pseudonyms. Not because I need to use pseudonyms, but because I don’t know whether they want their names mentioned in this story.

Brent and Tom would be along for the ride. Oh, this was good news.

Brent, a fellow native-Texan and former safety, was a fledgling musician himself, who sang solos in church and who already played in an underground band at some of the more funky and tucked-away dive bars around Fayetteville. He and I had been roommates on the road when we traveled to away games in the old Southwest Conference, and we sat next to each other on the team bus so we could listen to Rush on a two-headphone jack, bright yellow Walkman. He shared my interest in not just listening to music, but researching the backstories of all our favorite bands, their upbringing, schooling, and their path from nightclub act to success and widespread popularity. And like me, Brent was also a voracious reader. We had both been political science and literature majors, and he actually subscribed to Spin and Rolling Stone. Brent had a pretty high energy level, and the fact he was going meant it would be a fun trip, no matter what transpired.

Tom, on the other hand, was another defensive back, and but unlike Brent and me, he was from the Pacific northwest. It always struck me as strange that someone from Washington state had come all the way to Arkansas to play ball. But Tom was just another awesome dude. All of my teammates back then were like that; there wasn’t a certifiable asshole on the entire team, which was very rare. There are usually at least a few.

Like Brent and me, Tom was a huge rock music fan, and he was already into some bands that the media would later call “alternative,” whatever that term meant. His collection included REM, Red Hot Chili Peppers, and a new and unheard of band called Nirvana. Tom was the guy who’d called me back in August to come up to his room to listen to the band we were now going to see play live. He had done the same thing when Nevermind was released one month after that memorable night in late August, and we held another one-hour listening party for Nirvana’s first album.

Thursday, December 12, 1991, dawned gray and cold, the same as most days did from November to about April in those hills. In the days before the internet and iPhones, you used a Rand McNally road atlas to find your way around.

Over breakfast at the venerable Gaylords just off the Fayetteville square, we spread out the atlas and plotted our route. The show was at the old Hollywood Theater in Norman, Oklahoma, a suburb of Oklahoma City. The atlas told us this was about 250 miles away, and we could take highway 412 across and through Tulsa, down interstate 44 to Norman, or drive down the mountain, as it were, on the treacherous highway 71, and pick up interstate 40 all the way into Norman.

We hated 71. These were the days before I-540 and the future I-49, and when we took the team buses down old 71 to football games in Little Rock, it was a nightmare of slinging curves, hairpin turns, and oncoming tractor trailers. But in those days, it was the only two-lane road down the mountain to places in Arkansas. The thing was, we were going over into Oklahoma, not down to Little Rock.

412 was a relatively flat and undramatic road that ran east and west across northwest Arkansas and northeast Oklahoma. Tom clinched it when he remembered that there were still parts of the old Route 66 that still ran between Tulsa and Oklahoma City along interstate 44. We decided we could hit those venerable links in American travel history on the way back; after all, we had plenty of time on our hands until we scattered in a couple of weeks.

By our math, the roughly 250 miles would take about four hours. The show started at 8, so we figured we would take off at noon and get there with plenty of time to park and hang out, and maybe even have a few of our favorite cold beverages. This would require an ice chest in the trunk. And Walt had one. We slapped the table, paid our checks, and left.

At noon, we piled into Brent’s weathered, 1982 Oldsmobile Cutlass and took off west with maybe fifty bucks cash in our pockets. To carry more than that was foolish. I had one piece of plastic in my wallet, and it was an ATM card, only to be used in case of emergencies. Credit cards were for the young and dumb. The few friends I knew that had gotten one in college had either lost them or maxed them out, damaging their credit before even being to establish a decent rating and bringing the wrath of their parents down on their heads. I didn’t want anything to do with that. We had already paid for our tickets and would pick them up at the will call window.

I have no idea how many miles that Cutlass had on it, but it was well over 100,000. The upholstery was coming up in several places, and the cloth along the roof was coming down. Brent had stapled it up around the ceiling at strategic places to keep the cloth from falling down on the heads of his passengers. But he had also installed the obligatory Kenwood stereo system in it, and we’d be able to jam all the way to Norman. That’s all that really mattered back then; did the vehicle get you from one place to another? Could you crank some music in it? If so, that was all you needed.

We got to Norman with plenty of time to spare. But the tailgating we had envisioned was very limited; the show was going in a small theater set in a regular neighborhood. We had to park across the street in some strip center that had a Gold’s Gym, a tax preparer, an arcade, and a burger joint. Norman’s finest were set up and patrolling, making sure no dregs of society had a chance to despoil their midwestern version of Utopia by drinking a few Miller Lites in that parking lot.

So we hung out for a few hours and talked about what people were saying about the band. It didn’t shed much light on what we might see or hear.

Finally, we walked across the road, got our tickets at the will call windows and entered the “arena.”

It was an old theater that had obviously seen its better days. We got as close to the ramshackle stage as we could, standing.

And then, the lights finally went down. A collective, muted cheer went up.

Five slightly disheveled-looking guys about our age sauntered out onto the stage; one took a seat behind the drumkit and the other four picked up guitars of various sorts. They did not greet anyone. They didn’t smile. They didn’t look very happy to be there.

The lights went down and the cheers went up. They started to play very quietly, slowly bringing up the sound and the tempo. The opening song started out quiet and low, like something sinister, telling you that something very serious was about to go down. It told everyone, “We are about to throw down something very serious, and you better pay attention.”

And then, without any warning, it all suddenly broke out into a crescendo. Pounding, unfiltered drums, with an aggressive guitar riff. It was all guitars up on that stage. No keyboards, no other supporting instruments. Loud, unapologetic, driving guitars. All grinding together.

And then the singer came in.

“I admit it, what’s to say?

I’ll relive it, without pain.

Backstreet lover on the side of the road.

I got a bomb in my temple that is gonna explode.

I got a .16 gauge buried under my clothes, I play.

Once upon a time I could control myself.

Once upon a time I could lose myself.”

To be continued.

Glen Hines is the author of six books. His writing on sports, the outdoors, military service, and the bright and dark sides of American culture has been featured in Sports Illustrated, The Concussion Legacy Foundation, Task and Purpose, The Human Development Project, and elsewhere. The Welcome to the Machine podcast was featured on Spotify, Amazon Audible, and Apple and Google Podcasts. He is a member of the Surfrider Foundation and the Family Advisory Board at Boston University’s CTE Center. He was inducted into the Authors Guild in 2022.