Modern Rock No. 1s: Live and "Lightning Crashes"
Live chronicles the circle of life with "Lightning Crashes," a nine-week Modern Rock chart topper that solidified the band's legacy as a top '90s alternative act
Live - “Lightning Crashes”
Weeks atop the Billboard Modern Rock chart: 9 weeks (February 25 to April 22, 1995)
Previous Modern Rock #1 hit: Green Day and “When I Come Around”
Next Modern Rock #1 hit: Better Than Ezra and “Good”
Billboard Hot 100 chart toppers during this time:
Madonna - “Take A Bow” (2/25/95 to 4/8/95, 7 total weeks)
Montell Jordan - “This Is How We Do It” (4/15/95 and 4/22/95, 2 weeks)
“Lightning Crashes” is about abortion.
Or, at least, that’s what I was told.
In 1995, a then-15-year-old Matt was just awakening to both alternative and pop music, and so much of that growth was driven by people in my life who were far more “musically savvy” that I could claim to be at that time. There were people in my cohort who were awakened to modern pop and alternative music years before I was, and those people became the gateway to my own interest in music.
These kids all knew their stuff, and could interpret music on a deep, esoteric level that extended far beyond what my relatively pea-brained knowledge of popular culture had the bandwidth to allow. What’s interesting is that everyone was certain these songs meant something more verboten and controversial than the songwriters and performers intended.
This came up when we discussed “Mmm Mmm Mmm Mmm” by Crash Test Dummies, and how some people in my generation interpreted the song to be about child abuse, when it really was just about three individual kids going through the standard-issue crap that kids go through. I’m certain the erudite teenage music aficionados of my era all bought into the child abuse narrative, just as they were all certain that “Mr. Jones” by Counting Crows was about masturbation (it wasn’t).
Keep in mind that my generation was smack dab in the middle of the grunge and post-grunge wave of popular music, so everything felt laced with a little bit of the verboten and unspoken tragedies of the lead singers. Raw emotion took center stage with songs about eating cancer and blowing up Ireland and how everyone was a loser, so it wasn’t completely out of the realm of possibility that EVERY popular song of the era had some hidden meaning that dare not speak its name directly. And as a teenager with the attention span of a thumb tack and the emotional depth of a wet sponge, who was I to doubt the prophetic wisdom of the teenage zeitgeist?
I should have doubted it, as Live’s enduring vision was not, in fact, about abortion, but rather the enduring circle of life viewed through the microcosm of a hospital, and that vision was so well encapsulated in both song and verse that “Lightning Crashes” topped the Modern Rock Tracks chart for a then-record-tying nine consecutive weeks in the first half of 1995.
Actually, I was far too young to appreciate the poetic turn that Ed Kowalczyk and the members of Live put together in “Lightning Crashes,” and, to be honest, they were probably too young to have the experience necessary to view life with such complexity and depth. When this song was created and produced as part of the session work for the album Throwing Copper, longtime band friend Barbara Lewis was killed by a drunk driver. She was 19 years old at the time, and as a registered organ donor, she was able to help others live through her donation.
Kowalczyk reflected on this and the creation of the song in an interview with Spin magazine in 1995, as re-written in an article on udiscovermusic in 2024:
“It was something that we hoped would honor the memory of a girl we grew up with and help her family cope with the sorrow – which it seems to have accomplished – keeping with the theme of the song.”
The events reflected a cyclical pattern, with one life ending and another set to begin; one of the individuals who received an organ from Lewis was a 10-month-old infant. That “circle of life” aesthetic resonated with Kowalczyk and became the inspiration for the song, told from the perspective of the song’s narrator witnessing a birth and a death in a hospital emergency room. This imagery didn’t completely translate over into the music video for the song (it looked more like a house than a hospital), but Kowalczyk and company still felt the visuals reflected the proper meaning behind the song. From the udiscovermusic interview:
“While the clip is shot in a home environment, I envisioned it taking place in a hospital, where all these simultaneous deaths and births are going on, one family mourning the loss of a woman while a screaming baby emerges from a young mother in another room,” said Kowalczyk. “Nobody’s dying in the act of childbirth, as some viewers think. What you’re seeing is actually a happy ending based on a kind of transference of life.”
While I was definitely an avid music-video watcher in the last half of the 1990s, this video passed me by. Before today, I’m not sure I ever sat down and watched the entire video from start to finish, but having done so in preparing for this writeup, it’s pretty clear to me that the song is in no way about abortion. Quite the opposite: The mother in the video is crying because she’s happy to hold the baby, and the very-alive baby seems comforted and warmed in the presence of its mother.
And while I’ve admitted in the past to being very lazy about divining the meaning of songs from their lyrics, I think I was pretty lazy in interpreting this one. I hear things like “placenta falls to the floor” and “a new mother cries” and just assume the new mother is sad. “The confusion sets in” makes it seem like there’s something amiss with this new birth. For a group of teenagers who have no idea what childbirth is, and who would be terrified at the idea of giving birth at that age, it’s pretty easy to see where misinterpretations can take hold.
With 30 years of hindsight and a completely different take on life, however, the song rings true: One life ends, another begins, and all the passions, confusions, experiences and emotions felt by one life become transferred to the other, and the cycle begins anew. It’s pretty beautiful, actually, especially when you consider it was penned by a 20-year-old guy.
Lightning crashes, an old mother dies
Her intentions fall to the floor
The angel closes her eyes, the confusion that was hers
Belongs now, to the baby down the hall
Oh, now I feel it comin' back again
Like a rollin' thunder chasing the wind
Forces pullin' from the center of the earth again
I can feel it
It’s really a brilliant line: “The angel closes her eyes, the confusion that was hers belongs now to the baby down the hall.” And the chorus takes that transference of “confusion” and turns it into a visual of a storm’s energy, rolling with all the power of the Earth from one individual to another. It’s pretty rad, in its own way, and I hate that 15-year-old Matt couldn’t quite appreciate it on the level that his 30-years-older counterpart can today.
What I did appreciate, both then and now, is Live’s musical arrangement, the slow build leading into the explosive chorus and bridge. The soft guitar strumming and Kowalczyk’s meditative vocal stylings are intentionally reflective of the moment his narrator is witnessing. When the full band comes into play a couple of minutes into the song, they explode with the same energetic transference that’s referenced in the song’s lyrics, and it plays to good effect throughout the second half of the track.
“Lightning Crashes” would become Live’s signature track, its legacy cemented by its nine-week run atop the Modern Rock Tracks chart and its ubiquity on both pop and alternative radio. In addition to hitting #1 on the MRT chart, it also finished at #6 on the Billboard Pop Airplay chart (it was not released as a commercial single, thus was ineligible for the Billboard Hot 100 at the time) and peaked in the top 40 in several countries worldwide. The song has more than 254 million streams on Spotify, more than double any of the band’s other tracks, and it’s generally considered to be one of the best modern-rock tracks of all time on lists created by outlets like Billboard magazine. It’s found its way into popular culture even through the present day, as part of the soundtrack to movies like “Kodachrome” and TV series like “Yellowjackets” and “One Tree Hill.”
While I certainly appreciate the artistry of Kowalczyk’s lyrics and how the song builds around the depths of that imagery, the song is not my favorite from the band and perhaps suffers in my mind from over saturation on alternative radio. It’s not my favorite single from Throwing Copper; that distinction belongs to “I Alone,” which I stumped for when it finished at an unfairly low #6 on the MRT chart several months back. While I don’t know that I can hold “Lightning Crashes” in the highest of esteems when considering my favorite alternative rock tracks, I feel more positive and uplifted by it than I did before. What I once considered a dour recitation on the trials and tribulations of life, I now find considerably more uplifting and energizing, which I think is what Live was going for with this track.
We’ll see Live one more time in this space before the ‘90s end, with a song that shows how a good preceding album can turn a subpar new track into a #1 hit.
Rating: 7/10
Chart Check
Other notable MRT chart songs from this time period
When the #1 song tops the chart for nearly 2.5 months, you’re going to be stuck with a lot of songs that are great but didn’t make it all the way to the top. This week, we see #2 peaks from Oasis, Bush, and PJ Harvey; chart debuts for Sponge and Dave Matthews Band; and the final MRT chart appearance from Siouxsie and the Banshees, the band who topped the very first iteration of this chart.
“Live Forever” by Oasis (#2):
Future Modern Rock #1 artists Oasis return to the charts a few weeks after their debut with “Live Forever,” which pushed the band into the public consciousness both in the U.S. and the U.K. and cemented the beginning of their influence on the MRT charts in the U.S. I’d argue “Live Forever” is one of Oasis’s best commercial singles, if not their very best, as it not only became a staple on ‘90s alternative rock radio but also a very fun track to replay on games like Rock Band in the late 2000s. “Live Forever” peaked at #2 behind Live and would be Oasis’s best-charting track for a few months until their signature track dominated the radio at the end of 1995.
“Everything Zen” by Bush (#2):
Any discussion about the emergence of post-grunge alternative rock in the U.S. in the mid 1990s has to include future Modern Rock Tracks #1 artist Bush, whose multi-platinum album Sixteen Stone debuted in late 1994 and generated several hits for the band. The first of those tracks, “Everything Zen,” catapulted Gavin Rossdale and the British rockers into the stratosphere and made Sixteen Stone a must-have album for U.S. alternative fans.
“Down By The Water” by PJ Harvey (#2):
Polly Jean Harvey, better known to the masses as PJ Harvey, notched her biggest U.S. alternative hit with “Down By The Water,” which peaked at #2 on the MRT chart behind Live. I heard it for the first time today, and it’s … fine. I have no recollection of this song receiving any airplay on the radio stations I frequented in the ‘90s and seems to come up very infrequently in retrospective stations today. While she’s a relatively unknown commodity in the U.S., her work dazzled British audiences for many years and yielded seven top-40 U.K. hits, including this one.
“Plowed” by Sponge (#5):
Sponge is a band that benefited greatly from the post-grunge wave of alternative rock in the mid 1990s, and they took full advantage of that brighter spotlight with a handful of tracks that became ‘90s alt-rock standards. The first of those tracks, “Plowed,” peaked at #5 on the Modern Rock charts behind “Lightning Crashes.” The band would go on to have three top-20 hits in a two-year span and then ultimately faded; we’ll discuss the biggest of those three hits in short order.
“The Man Who Sold The World” by Nirvana (#6):
Nirvana’s presence in the alternative realm persisted long beyond the passing of Kurt Cobain, and nearly a year after his death, his quietly haunting cover of David Bowie’s “The Man Who Sold The World” managed to peak at #6 behind Live. It would be the last commercial single from Nirvana to reach the charts from their Unplugged album, though the band would appear on the charts a couple more times throughout the ‘90s.
“Star 69” by R.E.M. (#8):
R.E.M.’s Monster is so good that its unofficial singles still find their way into the top 10 of the Modern Rock charts. “Star 69,” a reference to a telephone reverse-dialing system that is a relic of a bygone time, is a legit alt-rock banger, and it peaked at #8 behind Live. This song *feels* like college-rock-era R.E.M. with modern sensibilities, and it’s honestly one of my favorite tracks on the album.
“Here & Now” by Letters To Cleo (#10):
Letters To Cleo found lightning in a bottle in 1995, and that lightning crashed into the alternative rock charts (see what I did there) with “Here & Now,” the band’s signature track. It peaked at #10 on the charts behind Live, though its legacy as a solid alternative/pop rock confection continues to be strong even into the present day. The band broke up in the mid ‘90s, and the members continued with other pursuits, but they’ve re-emerged reunited in the 2020s and have performed several lives shows throughout the decade.
“What Would You Say” by Dave Matthews Band (#11):
Dave Matthews Band makes its alternative chart debut with “What Would You Say,” a track that built up slowly on alternative radio and eventually crossed over into mainstream pop, making the band a household name. This track, which peaked at #11 on the MRT chart, was my gateway track to the band’s larger catalog, and like most teenage boys in the ‘90s, following the band’s live performances became a rite of passage for me into college and my 20s. We’ll see more of this band on the chart in the coming weeks and months.
“Dancing Days” by Stone Temple Pilots (#11):
While Nirvana was paying tribute to David Bowie, STP took a break between albums to participate in a comparable tribute album for Led Zeppelin, titled Encomium: A Tribute to Led Zeppelin. The band’s cover of “Dancing Days” reached #11 on the Modern Rock charts behind Live, and is arguably the most recognized cover from an album that includes performances from 4 Non Blondes, Hootie and the Blowfish, and Duran Duran, among others.
“Gel” by Collective Soul (#14):
Collective Soul took the alternative and pop music world by storm with their all-time great “Shine” track in 1994, a top 5 hit on the Modern Rock Tracks chart and a #11 pop hit on the Billboard Hot 100. Their follow-up self-titled album would make the band a household name, though not really because of the lead single. “Gel,” the first track off Collective Soul, finished at a modest #14 on the MRT chart behind Live, and didn’t crack the top 40 on pop radio. It’s not a terrible song, but it’s also not the best off the album; we’ll talk more about those in the coming weeks.
“O Baby” by Siouxsie and the Banshees (#21):
This is it, you guys. Siouxsie and the Banshees, the band who topped the inaugural Modern Rock Tracks chart in 1988 and then again a few years later, drop their final U.S. hit with “O Baby,” the lead single off their 11th studio album The Rapture. The song peaked at #21 on the chart, and much like PJ Harvey’s single, it didn’t get a lot of radio airplay on the stations I listened to at the time. It’s a pretty good track, one that could have found a place in the U.S. pop music environment but somehow came up short. The group disbanded shortly after the release of this album, but their legacy was firmly cemented before this.
Nice review! This song sparks very specific memories for me too; it’s such a poignant moment in our lives to have heard it that the moments around it are also linked together. I mean, that’s generally how memories work, but usually it’s the moments that fix the song to the time, whereas this one is the reverse - not many songs can claim that for me.
I remember after the Oklahoma City massacre this song was played over the PA I’m homeroom at my school in Ohio. It was a confusing thing