THE SEVEN WEEKS THAT CHANGED ROCK
In rock history, 1991 is most often seen as The Year Everything Changed. Anecdotally, grunge crashed down like a meteorite to annihilate the hair-metal dinosaurs that had dominated the rock landscape over the previous decade. But in truth there was no instant annihilation event for LA glam (or thrash, or just about any other form of popular guitar music of the 80s). Instead, a procession of landmark releases from August to September 1991 helped transform alt. rock’s steadily growing snowball into an all-enveloping avalanche.
“By the end of the late eighties, the whole scene needed a massive shake-up,” Kerrang! editor at the time Geoff Barton told Classic Rock. “Something was needed to turn the tide in rock, but I don’t think we anticipated the fallout.”
Rock journalists may have grown tired of glam’s increasingly cartoonish hedonism, but it was still big business as far as the record-buying masses were concerned. The summer began inauspiciously. On June 17 Van Halen released their ninth studio album which shot straight to No.1 in both the UK and US. Two weeks later Canadian pop-rocker Bryan Adams began conquering the singles charts with the massive . The power ballad may
