How Nirvana Ruined The 90s: The Posies And School Of Fish Edition!

School of Fish in happier times

When Nirvana's "Smells Like Teen Spirit", a song from the group's second album Nevermind, catapulted the scrappy, yet largely-unknown trio into the national spotlight, there was something different about it. For reasons that we will try to explain, the success of that one song didn't just change the lives of the three members of Nirvana, it changed the lives of everybody who heard it.

By "everybody", I do mean everyone:  You, me, the members of Firehouse, Winger, Kix, Ratt, the Cure, Def Leppard and even School of Fish, whose first album had been fortunate enough to be released five months before Nevermind hit store shelves.

I say "fortunate" because one can safely say that, had School of Fish's self-titled debut album come out after "Teen Spirit" had made its way onto Top 40 radio formats and MTV's heavy rotation, we might not be talking about them at all because, for some odd reason, Nirvana's first hit single made everything that had come before it seem trite and inconsequential.

Kids whose music collections had consisted of MC Hammer, Vanilla Ice and Roxette cassingles just months before didn't just run out and buy Nevermind, they began to view their own musical pasts with a disdain normally reserved for imprisoned ax murderers and began restocking their collections with Pearl Jam, Soundgarden, Alice In Chains, and Stone Temple Pilots.

For School Of Fish, led by guitarist/singer Josh Clayton-Felt and lead guitarist Michael Ward, 1991 had started promisingly enough when their first single "3 Strange Days" was added to influential L.A. modern rock radio station KROQ's playlist. From there, the hallucinatory tale landed on modern rock and alternative rock radio playlists across the country while picking up a respectable amount of MTV spins for good measure.

Before they knew it, Clayton-Felt and Ward had a hit on their hands that turned them from one of their label's latest signings to a "priority act", meaning that all eyes were on them as their next album began taking shape.

In the two years between that next album and their successful debut effort, however, grunge hit and, in doing so, labels didn't want polished pop gems, as they had when the band went into the studio to record their debut album with producer John Porter (Roxy Music, Billy Bragg, The Smiths).

No, now they wanted tons of loud, distorted guitars, just like the ones heard on Nevermind.

School of Fish, ever eager to please their label, took those suggestions to heart and came out of the studio with the noisy, barn-burning Human Cannonball.

Execs at the label felt they had an album that contained the best of both worlds - the introspective pop sound that had already yielded one hit in "3 Strange Days"and the blown-out guitars and propulsive drumming that would help the band compete with the Pearl Jams and Nirvanas of the world.

The change in tone, both lyrically and musically, was a stark one that both fans and critics noticed immediately.

Reviews of the album at the time tended to be brief, unlike, say, a new Nirvana record, which would command at least an entire page or two. Whereas In Utero's release would be a national event, the release of the second School of Fish record was just one of many lesser events that the press and radio barely had time for in the great scheme of things.

By playing their label's game of trying to match Nirvana, Stone Temple Pilots and Alice In Chains blow for blow, School of Fish had taken themselves out of the game entirely.

Why did adjusting their formula to be competitive achieve the opposite result, you ask?

Because it wasn't honest. The band had gone from being themselves to trying to be somebody else to make their label happy and, in the process, they made themselves miserable.

When the band got dropped by Capitol after the commercial failure of Human Cannonball, Josh and Michael could not wait to put the band behind them and go their separate ways.

For Josh Clayton-Felt, a deal with A&M Records led to the even more intimate and introspective solo album Inarticulate Nature Boy, which did not even attempt to keep pace with the grunge bands of the day and, as a result, didn't so much bomb as fizzle.

Michael Ward, meanwhile, seemed convinced that the Human Cannonball formula was worth another try so, with new band Tiny Buddy, he reunited with producer Matt Wallace (who'd produced Human Cannonball) and recorded the loud, but otherwise forgettable Ginormous.

Ward was also tapped by John Hiatt when the veteran roots-rocker made his own clumsy attempt at keeping up with the grunge bands of the day on Perfectly Good Guitar before joining Jakob Dylan's Wallflowers.

The Posies

While it is impossible to say how things might have turned out differently for the band had Nirvana and grunge not changed the musical landscape midstream, it is safe to say that the band's second album would have been a completely different animal. At the very least, it would have been a natural development of the band's sound as opposed to the artistic about-face that had been forced upon them.

Of course, they were not alone.

Two months before Human Cannonball's release, Seattle's very own The Posies had released their second major label album, Frosting On The Beater.

Whereas the band's 1990 DGC Records debut Dear 23 had been an elegiac masterpiece loaded with clever guitar interplay and soaring vocal harmonies between Jon Auer and Ken Stringfellow, Frosting On The Beater was a noisier, grittier affair that had Nirvana's fingerprints all over it.

While the members of Nirvana didn't physically appear on the album, their presence is felt throughout and, to this day, it remains a vaguely disturbing listen because, at the end of the day, it just doesn't sound like the next logical progression in the Posies' development. If anything, it remains a bit of an artistic regression, for better and worse.

On one hand, the album is not without its high points as the band's songwriting remains stellar, but the sophisticated arrangements, lovingly-detailed production and belletristic prose of Dear 23 were haphazardly replaced by distortion, spit and vitriol in an obvious attempt to fit in with what was being played on rock radio at the time.

Being signed to the same exact label as Nirvana probably didn't help, I suspect, because the band's third album - completed in late 1994 - was an even more obvious attempt to emulate Nirvana's rage and disillusion.

DGC Records' response, amazingly enough, was to sit on the album for almost three years before finally begrudgingly releasing Amazing Disgrace with little to no promotion.

Only weeks after the album hit the stores, this writer caught the band in L.A. at a soon-to-be-defunct venue called Hollywood Grand where the band tore into multiple selections from the album to an audience comprised of more management and A&R types than actual fans of the band.

Watching Auer and Stringfellow struggle to fill the emptiness of the room with rage and profanity instead of the beautiful harmonies and introspective prose that were their biggest strength and main calling card filled this fan with a certain level of sadness at what the band had allowed themselves to become.

They'd sold out only to find that nobody was buying and, in doing so, they would soon be waving goodbye to the major label portion of their career.