1990: "Bone China", Mother Love Bone

Grunge seems like as good a place as any to start the dawn of the 90s. It's funny: we look back now and see grunge as a fairly cohesive sound (due in large part to a lot of grunge-influenced bands that later sprung up, consolidating hard rock radio into a post-grunge landscape that narrowed it all down to the heavier Seattle groups like Alice In Chains and Soundgarden; see Bush, Sponge, Stone Temple Pilots, etc). But at the time the Pacific Northwest was hardly in agreement on what "grunge" should sound like (or even that there should be such an umbrella term at all). The common denominator was that it was once again OK to be into metal as well as punk... but the format and the proportions with which that alchemy was sought varied wildly from one group to another.

Perhaps the most traditional of all the bands retroactively described as capital-g Grunge were Mother Love Bone. The band had already outgrown any overt hair metal leanings before making it to record, but their solution wasn't so much a punked up hybrid of Sabbath and Black Flag as a modernized, contemporary updating of the bombastic 70s arena rock sound (a musical vein Janes Addiction had been mining on their own terms further south). This was a far cry from Stone Gossard and Jeff Ament's prior band, Green River, but following MLB frontman Andrew Wood's heroin overdose in March 1990, the duo would go on to form Pearl Jam, itself a successful marriage of dirty punk squalor and soaring arena rock.