As 1990s kids have aged, it’s only right that ’90s music has become the new classic music. Turn on a “classic rock” radio station, and in between ’60s and ’70s staples from Black Sabbath, Led Zeppelin and the Beatles, you’ll hear ’90s classics from bands like Pearl Jam, Tool and more.
Local tribute-concert venues like The Rock Yard have gone from Pink Floyd and The Who cover bands with older crowds, to Foo Fighters and Beastie Boys tributes with younger audiences. In the desert, the ’90s are certainly in. Now, one new local band is performing all ’90s covers—and is inviting the community to sing along with them.
Each Smashing Muffins performance is a love letter to some of the best hits of the 1990s, from Nirvana to Stone Temple Pilots. They share this love through their monthly “Grunge Night” residency at Snake Bite Roadhouse in Yucca Valley. Every third Thursday of the month, the band performs grunge covers alongside attendees who sign up. The next edition of this live-band karaoke will take place on May 16. Signups to sing start at 7:30 p.m., and music starts at 8 p.m.
Pauline Pisano (vocals, guitar and keyboards), Stone Clement (lead guitar) and Greg Quinn (bass) recently sat down for a Zoom interview. (Drummer Matthew John Julliet couldn’t make it.) The band members explained how Smashing Muffins came together, fittingly, while performing a ’90s cover onstage.
“Stone and I met, and we were trying to start another band, and things just didn’t work out,” Quinn said. “… We went to a party/open-mic situation, and we decided to play one of the songs we had been playing with this other band, but we didn’t have a singer. We just invited anybody who wanted to come up and sing to play with us—and Pauline came up. We just really had a great time playing ‘Man in the Box’ by Alice in Chains, and a bond formed between all of us.”
Pisano said she’d been dreaming of an opportunity to spontaneously sing with a band.
“I actually went to an open mic to just listen, and all of a sudden, Greg turns around and says, ‘Hey, Pauline, do you know “Man in the Box?”’ Which, of course, I do,” Pisano said. “I feel like I’ve been dreaming of this opportunity since I’ve been 17 years old. He called me up, and we did ‘Man in the Box,’ and then it all kind of started from there.”
The Grunge Night concept is simple: People sign up to sing one of the songs in the band’s 20-plus-song set, and then hop onstage when it’s time for that number.
“I feel like the music and the issues that we’re talking about now in this nation, in this moment, are very relevant to the work and the art that was being spoken about in the ’90s,” Pisano said. “There is a consciousness around this material that’s really calling a lot of people in, and that’s why I’m also really excited about the live-band karaoke stuff that we’ve been doing, because it’s just expanding this larger conversation. I think about collective identity-building and who we are, so I feel it’s great to be in this community and doing that work.”
A feel-good energy is in the air during Grunge Night—despite the genre’s often-depressing themes.
“There’s a positive feeling to it, which is kind of weird, because a lot of the songs are about pretty dark stuff,” Clement said. “I think the vocal harmonies especially, that’s what a lot of people connect with. In the desert here … with the stoner-rock thing, some of the emotion, there’s an impersonal feeling to it sometimes, because it’s just this wall of sound, and you’re just supposed to be all stoned and hypnotized by it. It’s great, and I was one of those people for a long time, but there’s a human aspect to the songs that Layne Staley sang, or Eddie Vedder. There’s a certain human aspect that I think has been lacking (in music), and that is refreshing for people, and I like to think that’s part of what people are connecting with, with us.”
Not only is the Grunge Night audience able to re-live the ’90s for one night; the Smashing Muffins themselves can reminisce.
“I think we all get to be teenagers again, and I feel like we lift that up in shows,” Pisano said. “There’s something about that, and there’s something about people meeting people with that framework, when you activate those memories in that way. There’s a humanizing element, because all of our (inner) teenagers get to be re-awakened, and we just get to celebrate this music that we all love.”
Letting anyone come up and sing can be nerve-racking for both the singer and the band—especially when considering the gravelly and powerful voices of the grunge era.
“I’ll say that I was actually really surprised at how many people stepped up and killed it,” Quinn said. “We did have a lot of local musicians show up—ringers, as we call them—to support us, and it was great. They did a great job, and everybody had fun, which is really the most important thing. They’ve been really supportive, beyond what we can even imagine.”
Pisano hopes the Smashing Muffins’ presence as a ’90s cover band in the desert will inspire local musicians to tap into some grunge sensibilities.
“I wonder about song form,” she said. “It’s a very interesting song form—so will song form in Joshua Tree change a little bit, and be influenced by people singing the ’90s music, since a lot of artists are coming and hanging out with us? Also, when you unlock … this inner freedom from when you’re a teenager, how does that affect the writing? I think it could, and it’s an honor to be a part of it to really shift the collective conscious writing that’s happening in this area, and just to see the amount of people activated.”
Quinn said ’90s music is indeed their generation’s classic rock.
“For me, this is my childhood,” Quinn said. “It wasn’t Led Zeppelin and the Rolling Stones and all that—it was the ’90s. This is what was playing when I was coming into life and starting to enjoy life and enjoy music and feel it.”
Smashing Muffins will perform Grunge Night at 8 p.m., Thursday, May 16, and every third Thursday, at Snake Bite Roadhouse, 55405 Twentynine Palms Hwy, in Yucca Valley. Signups start at 7:30 p.m. For more information, visit instagram.com/smashing_muffins_.
