Revisiting the seven weeks in 1991 that changed music history forever
The 80s weren’t dead and the 90s hadn’t really begun. This is the story of how seven weeks of summer in 1991 belonged to rock (and not just grunge)
In rock history, 1991 is most often seen as The Year Everything Changed. Anecdotally, grunge crashed down like a meteorite to annihilate the hair-metal dinosaurs that had dominated the rock landscape over the previous decade. But in truth there was no instant annihilation event for LA glam (or thrash, or just about any other form of popular guitar music of the 80s). Instead, a procession of landmark releases from August to September 1991 helped transform alt.rock’s steadily growing snowball into an all-enveloping avalanche.
“By the end of the late eighties, the whole scene needed a massive shake-up,” Kerrang! editor at the time Geoff Barton told Classic Rock. “Something was needed to turn the tide in rock, but I don’t think we anticipated the fallout.”
Rock journalists may have grown tired of glam’s increasingly cartoonish hedonism, but it was still big business as far as the record-buying masses were concerned. The summer began inauspiciously. On June 17 Van Halen released their ninth studio album For Unlawful Carnal Knowledge which shot straight to No.1 in both the UK and US. Two weeks later Canadian pop-rocker Bryan Adams began conquering the singles charts with the massive Everything I Do (I Do It For You). The power ballad may have been a slice of 80s rock cheese, but it was an undeniable commercial sensation as it topped international charts, including a record-holding 16 weeks in the UK and a flabbergasting 39 weeks in Canada. And this, in the year that was supposedly all about grunge?
