twenty years ago this month, a generation was woken up from it's slumber by a tsunami that washed over in the form of a debut album by a band called the stone roses. it was the moment everything came together: the soul, the style, the acid, the e, the indie world, the rave culture...all of it. of course it was all happening in manchester england, but the ripple effect reached all the way to south texas.
i don't exactly remember how my best friend and i heard of the band, maybe it WAS from from the waves that travelled the atlantic and into the gulf coast. however it happened, we knew we had to find this album. and we did (via his sister who was in college).
from the moment the steam engine of "i wanna be adored" began circling the djarum smoke filled bedroom, we felt something change. we felt connected to something larger than ourselves. we'd take turns thumbing through the package: a sublime homage to pollock. and in the photo panels of the book we could almost see them moving...performing "she bangs the drums" and "elephant stone". one song perfectly weaving into the other like some crazy ride at the fair. one minute you're riding a "waterfall" then the ride stops and reverses itself into "don't stop". drums and bass establishing a rhythm that allowed guitars to pick up where echoes of marr left off only a few years before.
and what did we know about the monarchy? what did we know about the 1968 riots in paris?...lemons? enough to understand that these were not just dismissible lyrics to dance to (though we still could). and at a point when i had realized the fraud of s-t-e-v-e-n and his ouija board, i welcomed the change.
it was the birth of the chicken rhythms, the pills, the thrills, the bellyaches, there was no other way, for it was the summer of madchester. they were the ones that opened our eyes and will always be adored.
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