Modern Rock No. 1s: Silverchair and "Tomorrow"
Silverchair keeps grunge alive just a little bit longer with "Tomorrow," a song presumably about rich people, places in small towns without bathrooms, and difficult-to-drink water. Or something.
Silverchair - “Tomorrow”
Weeks atop the Billboard Modern Rock chart: 3 weeks (September 3 to 16, 1995)
Previous Modern Rock #1 hit: Green Day and “J.A.R.”
Next Modern Rock #1 hit: Bush and “Comedown”
Billboard Hot 100 chart toppers during this time:
Michael Jackson - “You Are Not Alone” (9/3/95)
Coolio featuring L.V. - “Gangsta’s Paradise” (9/10/95 and 9/17/95)
Have any of you had the pleasure of listening to Alan Cross? If you haven’t, I highly, highly recommend you listen to his long-running “Ongoing History of New Music” series at your podcast outlet of choice. You will learn so much about the history of music and connections between different artists and genres, and I’m indebted to him for sparking my interest in the history of music, indirectly leading to the creation of this newsletter.
If you’re someone like me who had the pleasure of listening to Alan Cross in the 1990s and 2000s on terrestrial radio — his show was initially broadcast out of Toronto in 1993 and then became syndicated, and I was fortunate enough to hear many episodes during its run on FM96 out of London, Ontario) — then you probably heard several of his multi-part shows about different bands and genres. Many of those are free to download on the Internet Archive, and I highly suggest you peruse the catalog and listen to some of the oldest episodes, complete with full music tracks. This was podcasting before podcasting, and few are better at it than Alan Cross.
I mention it because he did a particularly insightful six-episode series called the “History of Grunge,” from its proto form in Seattle all the way to its watered-down derivations in the late 1990s. In episode 4 of that series, he talks about how grunge effectively ended with the death of Nirvana frontman Kurt Cobain, and what remained splintered off into different versions of grunge, something presumably inauthentic compared to the “original” Seattle sound. He referenced bands like Bush and Silverchair, non-American acts who sounded enough like grunge that U.S. record companies quickly snapped them up to squeeze out the last bits of money from that grunge-soaked cash cow.
Cross’s description of Australian group Silverchair in that episode has lived rent free in my head for 25 years for some reason:
“Everything about Silverchair seemed to be descended directly from Nirvana. The guitar tuning, the song arrangements, the vocals. The debut was called ‘Frogstomp,’ and it became a major hit around the world. They ended up becoming the biggest Australian rock export since INXS, despite songs with — how should I put this — questionable lyrical quality.”
All of this is to say that Silverchair managed to keep the grunge movement alive just long enough to score a major #1 Modern Rock Tracks chart hit in the U.S. with “Tomorrow,” which to some represents the last gasp of the grunge era that ended a year earlier with Cobain’s untimely death.
Silverchair as a band comes with an interesting story. Formed in 1992 with the original name Innocent Criminals, Daniel Johns, Ben Gillies, and Chris Joannou took on the name Silverchair, which depending on the interview or Wikipedia reference you believe most, came from either the title of a C.S. Lewis “Chronicles of Narnia” book or from the combined titles of Nirvana’s “Sliver” and You Am I’s “Berlin Chair.” Still, when the band was formed, all its members were not yet teenagers, and it didn’t take them long to become one of Australia’s better-known rock acts.
In 1994, they won an Australian “Battle of the Bands” style competition behind the strength of their original demo for “Tomorrow.” Before long, the song became part of a four-track EP that took off on the Australian charts, hitting #1 there for six weeks in late 1994. This caught the attention of U.S. record label folks, hungry for more of that sweet, sweet grunge, and they signed Silverchair to produce a full-length album. After nine days, the band’s work on their major label debut Frogstomp was complete, and the album rocketed into the top 10 of the U.S. Billboard 200 Albums chart, peaking at #9 in 1995.
Not bad for a bunch of 15-year-old kids from Australia, right?
But it’s true what Alan Cross said in his original mention of the song in his “History of Grunge” review: the song’s lyrics are weirdly questionable, not because of anything abhorrent, but because they’re just … silly.
It's twelve o'clock and it's a wonderful day
I know you hate me, but I'll ask anyway
Won't you come with me to a place in a little town?
The only way to get there's to go straight down
There's no bathroom and there is no sink
The water out of the tap is very hard to drink
So the song is about getting together with someone you hate to go to a place that has no plumbing, yet has water, but that water is difficult to drink.
Like I’ve said before in this space, I’m not really one to dive deep into the “poetry” behind alternative rock lyrics, so it never really bothered me much that “Tomorrow” is a weird song with weird lyrics. It could be because I was roughly the same age as the band members at the time the song was released, and we weren’t yet infused with the Gen X angst that made earlier grunge hits resonate with the older cohort of our generation. Besides, if you ask Johns the meaning of the song, he’ll tell you it’s a lot deeper than the lack of potable water in that place in a little town, as he did in this reprint of a 1996 interview with Rolling Stone Australia, published in 2015:
Also, as a lyricist, Johns is, at 16, drawing on a limited range of life experiences. He wrote the words to “Tomorrow” after seeing a TV program, he says, “about this rich dude and I was thinking about what a cock he was. It’s just a song about any rich dickhead.”
But what’s amazing about “Tomorrow” is that the lyrics really didn’t matter; for U.S. music fans holding on to the last gasps of grunge rock, Silverchair hit all the right notes. The track relies heavily on the stylings of Nirvana and Pearl Jam to create a sound that is both emblematic of those bands’ early ‘90s peaks while also adding some modest flourishes to make the sound uniquely their own. Johns and Joannou, backed by the Dave Grohl-inspired drum stylings of Gillies, really put 110 percent into the driving guitar riffs and bass movements. In particular, the slow, mellow guitar strumming that leads into the first chorus of “You wait until tomorrow” gives me chills to this day — it’s so well placed and effective as a counterbalance to the massively heavy guitar work that propels the rest of the song.
The song topped the Modern Rock Tracks chart for three weeks in September 1995, riding the charts for 26 weeks total weeks before being listed by Billboard magazine as the top alternative song for 1995. While the grunge movement that began in Seattle in the early 1990s was certainly past its prime by the time Silverchair topped the charts, it’s probably safe to assume that “Tomorrow” is the last true “grunge” song to reach the peak of the alternative charts in the 1990s. Correct me if I’m wrong in subsequent #1 hits that will be forthcoming in the weeks and months that follow this, but it really feels like “Tomorrow” is a page-turning moment in the history of grunge rock.
Alan Cross had the same argument. He concluded the fourth episode of his six-part “History of Grunge” series by talking about the end of grunge, as the bands that followed — acts like Green Day and Offspring and Alanis Morissette — were mere shadows of the grunge movement, commercially similar but stylistically quite different. “Post-grunge,” if you will.
But Silverchair and “Tomorrow” hold up as a last stand of sorts for the original intent and feel of grunge rock, a replication not necessarily borne out of the angst that drove much of the grunge movement, but rather an appreciation of that music and what it meant to the band members growing up in Australia. The band would go on to score several more U.S. top-20 alternative hits throughout the 1990s — including “Pure Massacre” off of Frogstomp, which peaked at #17 in November 1995 — but never quite replicated the lightning-in-a-bottle moment that sent them to the top of both the U.S. and Australian rock charts.
I love “Tomorrow” and think it holds up nicely, even if I hear Cross’s snarky disdain for the song’s uniquely juvenile lyrics in the background of my mind whenever the song pops up on classic alt-rock radio stations. I’ll be sure to highlight some of Silverchair’s other hits when they peak on the alternative charts, because they were pretty good, but “Tomorrow” remains the band’s gold standard.
Rating: 9/10
Chart Check
Other notable MRT chart songs from this time period
Chart Check is chock full of former Modern Rock Tracks #1 artists coasting on the fumes of their previous successes and attempting to reinvigorate that spark that made them #1 artists in the first place. And somewhere in the middle of all of these superstars is … Dandelion, a band that briefly considered naming itself Cat Food, but managed to score a top-20 alternative hit before fading into obscurity.
“In The Blood” by Better Than Ezra (#4):
Former Modern Rock Tracks #1 artists Better Than Ezra crack the top 5 of the alternative charts again with “In The Blood,” arguably the best radio single from Deluxe and probably my all-time favorite track from the band. Up tempo, unrelenting and an interesting take on the HIV/AIDS discussion (the song is obstensibly about a person asking a potential lover about their sexual history), “In The Blood” peaked at #4 on the MRT chart and #48 on the U.S. Airplay chart.
“Warped” by Red Hot Chili Peppers (#7):
Former Modern Rock Tracks #1 artists Red Hot Chili Peppers return to the charts with “Warped,” the first single off the band’s follow-up to their mainstream breakout Blood Sugar Sex Magik, titled One Hot Minute. The release was met with somewhat tepid reviews at the time, with former Jane’s Addiction guitarist Dave Navarro taking over for troubled guitarist John Frusciante for this release. The song peaked at #7 on the MRT chart behind Silverchair, which was pretty remarkable at the time — usually the first single from a band’s new album, coming off the success of the previous one, does significantly better than #7. Fear not, though: Red Hot Chili Peppers will be back in the top spot soon enough, with a song that’s legitimately much better than this one.
“Galaxie” by Blind Melon (#8):
Former Modern Rock Tracks #1 artists Blind Melon follow up the success of their previous album with “Galaxie,” the first track from their 1995 album Soup. It’s pretty good, though I’ll admit that I don’t recall this song getting a bunch of radio airplay in my market. The song peaked at #8 on the chart in September 1995; one month later, lead singer Shannon Hoon would be dead from a cocaine overdose at the age of 28.
“Weird-Out” by Dandelion (#14):
Philadelphia grunge-rock outfit Dandelion (which would have been named Cat Food were it not for the drummer reading a Ray Bradbury novel .. I guess) released a song in 1995 called “Weird-Out,” a song I swear I never heard a single time before today. It’s actually pretty catchy! According to our friends at Wikipedia, Trouser Press said this about Dandelion and their album Dyslexicon: “Dyslexicon is bland, and an anticlimactic false ending provides a poetic inkling of the sputtering fade-out soon in store for this over-hyped band.” Damn, Trouser Press. Anyway, “Weird-Out” managed a #14 peak on the MRT chart behind Silverchair, and then Dandelion disbanded soon after.
“White, Discussion” by Live (#15):
Former Modern Rock Tracks #1 artists Live release the final radio single from their Throwing Copper album, and even though it’s long and largely uninteresting compared to the rest of their radio hits, “White, Discussion” still managed an impressive #15 MRT chart peak behind “Tomorrow.”
Alot of people (wrongly) assume Better Than Ezra were a one hit wonder, but In The Blood received quite a bit of airplay back in the day. Dare I say it's better than Good....it's great.
It’s still stunning to me that three 15-year old KIDS could put together such an excellent album in nine days! So perhaps some of the lyrics are a little juvenile (they were kids after all) but the album still holds up very well with standout tracks like “Pure Massacre” and “Israel’s Son” joining “Tomorrow”. I think it was a brilliant debut and still go back to it from time to time.