That more or less jibes with the conventional wisdom on Third Eye Blind, which filtered through the coverage of the band’s eventful show in Cleveland this week.
Overall, I didn’t have a strong opinion about 3EB one way or the other, other than viewing them strictly as a ’90s band. But still: Don’t sleep on Tonic, fellow bubble-grunge appreciators.) To this day I find it far more tolerable than the Verve Pipe’s “The Freshmen” or the Goo Goo Dolls’ “Iris.” (I almost inserted Tonic’s “If You Could Only See” into this discussion, but after revisiting it just now, the song is probably too fast to be classified as a ballad. Since I had a soft spot for bubble-grunge even back then, I couldn’t resist the likes of “Jumper” or my favorite 3EB track, “How’s It Going to Be,” which for me ranks as the finest bubble-grunge ballad ever. (For the sake of comparison, another notable rock album from 1997, Radiohead’s OK Computer, has only gone platinum twice.) Even if you didn’t own the record at the time, anyone who cared remotely about pop music probably knew several Third Eye Blind songs, as the band was inescapable on the radio. Third Eye Blind was among the biggest of these acts - its 1997 self-titled LP went platinum six times and spawned five singles. This was the “cash-in” stage of alt-rock that unwittingly hastened the genre’s end, signified by Collective Soul, the Goo Goo Dolls, Eve 6, Matchbox Twenty, Marcy Playground, The Verve Pipe, and other bands of that ilk. And, in this case, those gatekeepers happen to really dig Third Eye Blind.įor people like me in their late 30s or early 40s, who likely encountered Third Eye Blind while in college, the band is commonly associated with what I call “bubble-grunge,” which refers to the class of alt-rock bands that infiltrated radio in late ’90s in the wake of Nirvana’s implosion and Pearl Jam’s retreat from the mainstream.
I couldn’t believe my ears, but eventually I couldn’t argue with it, because this is how music history gets written (and rewritten). Sometimes, the bands you least expect to endure wind up going the distance, thanks to a new generation of gatekeepers. They seemed to revere Third Eye Blind beyond all reason. But over time I noticed that Third Eye Blind came up consistently whenever I talked about ’90s music with people at least five to 10 years younger than me. My friends, I am here to report that this will not be the case, because Third Eye Blind is more beloved and important than you might realize. The tone of this coverage tended to vary between grudging admiration for 3EB’s trolling and bemused bewilderment that we were all talking about that band, which most people remember (if at all) for the irritating/indestructible ear worm “Semi-Charmed Life,” a top five hit from 1997 that was recently described by the Los Angeles Review of Books as having “everything you might have hated about the ’90s, there in one place.” Implicit in this discussion was the assumption that after a few days the world would go back to forgetting that Third Eye Blind ever existed.
I even saw it on my local evening TV newscast. What would normally be a low-profile gig for a journeyman rock band went viral when frontman Stephan Jenkins mocked attendees (“Raise your hands if you believe in science”) and pointedly prefaced the anti-suicide song “Jumper,” the only hit in the set list, with a call to “move forward and not live your life in fear and imposing that fear on other people.” When the audience responded by booing Jenkins, he replied, hilariously, “You can boo all you want, but I’m the motherf*ckin’ artist up here.”īecause someone shot a video of these shenanigans, the Third Eye Blind story was picked up by pretty much every media outlet. For those who missed it: the group performed at a fundraiser earlier this week in Cleveland for an audience of Republicans in town for the party’s convention. Of all the strange, unfathomable events that we’ve had to process during this exceedingly strange, unfathomable summer, among the most peculiar is the unlikely resurgence of ’90s alt-rock band Third Eye Blind.