The 1990s West Coast was an integral setting for grunge and alternative rock, with bands like Nirvana, Red Hot Chili Peppers, Jane’s Addiction and Sublime filling the airwaves with loud male angst, distortion and guitar fuzz. In this large pile of alt-rock bands is Everclear, who is celebrating the 30 year anniversary of their most popular album Sparkle and Fade, featuring some of their biggest hits such as “Santa Monica” and “Heartspark Dollarsign.”
Everclear will be performs at The McDonald Theatre on Sept. 12. This comes just in time for the 10 year anniversary of their 20 year anniversary tour for this album.
Sparkle and Fade is an angsty, yet competent project that fits in perfectly with its contemporaries. Even with the radio-friendly “Santa Monica,” it is loud, catchy and reflects a period in music that embraces coming from the wrong side of the tracks.
Like music of the aforementioned groups, as well as Bush, Everlast, The Verve Pipe and many others in the Gen-X nostalgia groups, Sparkle and Fade fittingly rejects mainstream ideas of yuppiehood, instead focusing on themes of poverty, domestic violence, depression and drug abuse.
The group’s leader, and only remaining original member, Art Alexakis, however, remains firm about the singularity of his music and theming. “In the ’90s, songwriters weren’t singing about stuff like that. They weren’t storytelling. I was kind of the dark horse of songwriters writing about stuff like that,” he tells Eugene Weekly. He says that though Everclear was an alt-rock group capturing those bleak subjects, “I don’t know if that encompasses the genre per se.”
Alexakis formed Everclear in 1992 in Portland. Based on their numbers alone, they are the most famous band to ever come out of the city. However, Portland’s relationship with the band has always been quite tumultuous, with alt weekly Portland Mercury even calling Alexakis “The Most Hated Musician in Portland” in 2009. The widespread local belief is that Alexakis moved from his home in southern California up to Portland to capitalize on the Pacific Northwest’s burgeoning grunge scene, while still maintaining his California sound and aesthetic.
Alexakis has always maintained that this is not why he moved to Portland. He tells Eugene Weekly that he moved up north because his girlfriend was pregnant and they both had family over here, but not a lot of money. “When you have kids, you need to have a network. Plus they had the Oregon Health Plan. It just made sense to move there,” he says. “So I didn’t move up there for the music scene.”
He says he is excited to come back for his four Oregon shows, especially for the time of year and the weather, but also “I’m 63. I’ve been traveling for so long I don’t get excited about stuff. I’ve learned, through my sobriety, to take everything pretty even keel.”
That being said, at the time of publication his Portland show is sold out (and the matter of whether the California transplants are the ones buying the tickets is not for Eugene Weekly to investigate). The Eugene show, however, still has plenty of tickets for sale.
He had been involved in music groups for years before coming to Portland in the early ’90s. “Once I was there, I thought I could walk away from the music, but I couldn’t. I was 30 years old.” he says. He told his girlfriend that he wanted to start one more band and try out the scene. “And if it doesn’t work, in a couple years, we’ll move back to California and I’ll work for a label,” he told her.
He put out an ad in Rocket Magazine, got a response from two musicians, and Everclear was born.
After getting their first album World of Noise published, he had a whole list of songs which he thought could make a “pretty good record.” Alexakis says their publisher had them perform a showcase of these songs for record labels in New York. “It was horrible,” he says. “The band got super baked before the show. We forgot everything. We started one song and played another one.” He remembers the people from the label leaving after five songs.
They continued their tour, and concluded with a more polished showcase for labels in LA. After this, Alexakis says they left with 28 offers. He says he subsequently sent faxes out to each label “saying, ‘OK, I want this much money. I want this many albums. I want tour support, I want marketing money. I want this. I want that.’”
Most of the labels, he says, were incredibly receptive to his demands. Then he sent out another fax. “Oh yeah,” he adds, “I have total control on everything, and I produce my own records.” And just like that, “20 of the labels just disappeared.”
Of those that stayed, he signed with Capitol Records. With the money they received, they rented a house-turned recording studio in Southeast Portland and wrote Sparkle and Fade on the porch.
The first single released was “Heroin Girl.” Due to its title and dark subject-matter, the song received seldom radio play. As a result, the second single, “Santa Monica” was a slow burn, taking several months to hit the charts. But when it did, though it arguably got too much airplay. “It changed my life,” Alexakis says. “I’ve been fucking dirt poor, right?” When it took off, he found himself thinking back then that “It’s just crazy that I’ve made more money in one year — not easily, but in one year — than my mom made her whole life.”
While Alexakis has a certain conviction about his music’s uniqueness, it was this same conviction that gave this group a legacy, even if Portland continues to reject ownership. Even still, the album, and the band, have all come back to reflect itself. “When you’re younger, there’s so much promise,” Alexakis says of the album’s name Sparkle and Fade.. “As you get older, you’re fighting the shadows more and more all the time. That’s why we have pictures of us as a band (on the cover), young and happy and pretty.”
Everclear performs their 30th anniversary tour of Sparkle and Fade at 8 pm on Saturday, Sept. 12 at The McDonald Theatre, 1010 Willamette Street. Box office 5:30 pm and doors 7 pm. Tickets begin at $57 in advance and $62.25 day of the show, and are available at McDonaldTheatre.com.