In My Footsteps: A Gen-X Nostalgia Podcast

Episode 190: When Grunge Killed Hair Metal, Garfield, 1960s Passing Fads, Halley's Comet(4-9-2025)

• Christopher Setterlund • Season 1 • Episode 190

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The battle between Hair Metal and Grunge. The effect of Garfield on my childhood. Some passing fads of the 1960s.

Episode 190 is filled with fun old school nostalgia to help you feel young again, briefly.

It starts with a look at the rise and pop culture relevance of Garfield the cat. From his humble beginnings as a fat, lazy orange cat in a comic strip to television, movies, and gobs of merch, Garfield has been making childhoods, including mine, better since 1978.

We go way back in the day to look at a clash of styles. The battle for supremacy between hair metal and grunge music. One dominated the late 80s with screeching arena rock and unique looks. The other burst onto the scene in the early 90s, unpolished and raw. Which one won?

A brand new Top 5 will showcase some 1960s passing fads. These things were briefly popular and ultimately flamed out. Clothing, hair styles, toys, odd inventions, they're all here, and a few were directly impacted by The Beatles.

There is new This Week In History and Time Capsule looking back at the last time Halley's Comet passed by the Earth.

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Speaker 00:

Hello world, and welcome to the In My Footsteps podcast. I am Christopher Setterlund, coming to you from the vacation destination known as Cape Cod, Massachusetts, and this is episode 190. It's wacky, wild, fun, foolish, filled with nostalgia. That is this week's show. It's a lot of things that I've wanted to talk about for a while, and we're finally getting to them. We're going to kick it off with a look back at one of the staples of my childhood and probably a lot of yours if you grew up in the 1980s, and that's Garfield the Cat, the comics, and everything that goes with it. We're going to go way, way back in the day and look at how grunge music killed heroin There'll be a brand new top five. This is the top five passing fads of the 1960s. And there'll be a brand new This Week in History and Time capsule looking back at the last time that Halley's Comet passed by the Earth. All of that good stuff is coming up right now on episode 190 of the In My Footsteps podcast. So what are we going to talk about this week? Maybe this? Oh, it spilled everywhere. Hold on. Oh, man. All right. After that cleanup on aisle two, that was not expected. That was a little energy drink, low caffeine in it. But still, well, that's a nice professional way to kick off the podcast. So how are you all doing out there? Leave it to me to put this podcast off the rails within the first minute of recording it. Well, we're going to have a lot of fun this week. An hour to escape from present day, looking back at Gen X nostalgia, the good old days. Yes, I'm that old that I can do that now. I hope wherever you're listening from, whenever you're listening to this, that it's the best day it can possibly be for you. I appreciate all of you that tune in, that share any of my content, really. As much as I appreciate all of you, the ones I appreciate the most, of course, are my Patreon subscribers, the ones that actually put their money where their mouth is to support me, my content, my dream of being a self-sufficient content creator. So thank you to Laurie, Mary Lou, Ashley, Kevin, Leo, Marguerite, Neglectoid, Crystal, Matt, you too can become a Patreon subscriber for $5 a month. It's like one Starbucks coffee or Dunkin' Large coffee per month. And you get access to bonus podcast episodes, access to the remastered Without a Map live streams. The third one will be going up next week. I'm always trying to come up with new things to put up there for my Patreon subscribers, and I came up with a pretty good new idea. As you know, I've mentioned it already, this is episode 190, which means in 10 weeks it'll be episode 200. I've tried to do special things for the big episodes. Episode 150 was listener's choice. I put out polls for every segment of the podcast, and people got to vote on social media what they wanted to hear. Episode 100 was the supersized Lady of the Dunes retrospective episode. It was a four-part podcast that I stapled together into one amazing show. Episode 50 is basically a retrospective of the first 50 episodes. It's not that special, but I'm not saying don't go listen to it. It's just not some big over-the-top celebration. That being said, for episode 200, I'm going to do something similar to episode 150, listener's choice, but it's going to be strictly for Patreon. What I'm going to do, though, is I'm going to make it for any Patreon member, paying or free. Which means if you go and sign up at Patreon to become a free member, I've got a growing free tier over there of content. But you'll be able to vote in the listener's choice for episode 200. So there's a little spoiler. I should have the choices up there within the next few weeks. Because I want to have it done in time so that I can do my research and fudge the numbers if I have to. No, I'm kidding. It'll be all legit. There's plenty more of the housekeeping type stuff to get into at the end of the podcast. But I've waited 190 episodes to talk about Garfield the Cat, and I can't wait anymore. So let's start it off right now with a look at a huge part of my childhood, Garfield the Cat. So in full transparency, kind of of how I put the podcast together, I do my research. I have several Word documents just of lists of things for different segments. And what I do, I've got some topics still to come that I can't wait to talk about, but I try to parcel them out. I think you can tell that I have a passion for this type of content, nostalgia. But you can also tell when I talk about something I'm really, really excited to talk about. So I try to save those and sprinkle them in. Because for all I know, I'll be doing this podcast for another 5, 10, thousand years. It'll be just my head in a jar talking into the microphone. One topic that I can't believe I made it this far into the podcast without talking about was Garfield the cat and the comic strips, the books, the TV shows, all of that. To say that the Garfield comics were a big part of my childhood would be really selling it short. I was pretty obsessed. I loved everything about Garfield. His laziness, his lasagna fetish, the way he would beat up Odie the dog or beat up his owner, John. Garfield was the first reason I had to read a newspaper. I know, actual paper newspaper in print. I would read the comics every day. But it's not just me. The fact that Garfield is still around now shows his staying power. The very first Garfield comic strip debuted June 19th, 1978. And since then, Garfield has become one of the most recognizable and beloved characters in pop culture. Maybe you got into the comics in the late 70s, early 80s. Maybe you started following Garfield through the TV specials in the late 80s. Maybe you know Garfield with Bill Murray as his voice. I'm going to guess that there's a very small percentage of you listening now that don't know who Garfield is. Garfield the Cat was a creation of Jim Davis, who was an Indiana-born cartoonist. And Garfield was conceived as a response to the overwhelming popularity of dog-themed comics, like Snoopy from Peanuts or Marmaduke. Was Clifford the Big Red Dog a comic? I think he was more just children's books. Anyway, there were way too many dogs in comics, and dogs are great. I'm more of a cat person, so maybe that's part of it. Jim Davis designed Garfield to be a fat, sarcastic, orange cat with a love of food, mostly lasagna, a distaste for Mondays, and he was named after Jim Davis's grandfather, James Garfield Davis. Garfield was originally developed alongside his owner, John Arbuckle, who is basically Garfield's foil. And the early years of the comics saw battles between Garfield and John and John's stupid dog, Odie. Besides the funny jokes, the battles between Garfield and Odie, there were other reasons why the strip became so popular. Like I said, relatable humor. Garfield hating Mondays, a lot of us can relate to that. Loving food, a lot of us can relate to that. Preferring sleep over work, boy you're really speaking my language. But yet through all of that, Garfield was definitely more of the protagonist in the comic strip. He wasn't bad, he was just lazy and fat and wanted to sleep. A big thing, though, that helped it stand out to me was the three-panel comic having very little dialogue. It was simple setups for jokes that kids of my age, I mean, I was probably eight years old when I first discovered Garfield. These were very easy to read. It would be like a Monday and Garfield would be wrapped up in his little box bed with his blanket over his head. John would just say, time to get up. And Garfield would have some quip about how terrible Mondays are, and it was simple like that. Another great thing about Garfield that made it so popular was that the strips are evergreen. They're not centered around current events. It's not like you can look at a Garfield comic from 1978, 88, 98, and immediately know when they're from. Well, the first few years of Garfield, yes, you can tell. He's fatter now. And he's got this different shaped nose, like he has an oval shaped nose now. These are little things that as a Garfield fan, I noticed. So I guess you could notice the first few years of the comic strip. But overall, the humor doesn't rely on current events, so it's timeless. Another big reason Garfield was popular was it being everywhere. The merchandising and marketing everywhere. I know I had a Garfield plush toy, except he had hard plastic eyes. I don't know any of you out there in the 80s, early 90s, do you remember that? A lot of you, if you didn't have the plush toy, maybe you had that suction cup one that you would put on your window in your car. I used to see those everywhere. And then the irony was when I got my first car, I didn't buy one of those. But I mean, I was 18, 19, so it was a little bit different. In 1985, Garfield crossed over into television with Garfield's Halloween Adventure, which that explains why I remember Garfield when I was eight years old, because I was eight in 1985. Then there was Garfield's Thanksgiving, Garfield's Christmas, and one of my favorite things, the Saturday morning cartoon Garfield and Friends. Ladies and gentlemen, Garfield and Friends. It was like if you were a fan of Garfield, you couldn't get enough. Although I will say that Garfield and Friends had that terrible U.S. Acres, like, spin-off comic strip that Jim Davis did, and he just shoved one of those in between two Garfields to try to make it popular. It's like eating your favorite dessert and then having to eat a piece of raw broccoli to get to your favorite dessert again. That's what U.S. Acres was to me. Raw broccoli. It didn't stop there, though. Once I was in college and I didn't really read the Garfield comics daily like I did when I was younger, that didn't mean that Garfield went away. They had the Garfield show that was out from 2009 to 2016. But in the early 2000s, Garfield went to the movie theater. With Garfield the movie in 2004, Garfield A Tale of Two Kitties in 2006. They didn't get great reviews, but Garfield had two movies. So, God, I'd love to have that problem. I'll take the problem of bad reviews of my movie if it means that I starred in a movie. More recently, last year in 2024, there was the Garfield movie that starred Chris Pratt as Garfield. I have not seen that yet. Maybe I will check it out. Today, Nickelodeon owns the rights to Garfield. They bought out Jim Davis's Paws, Inc. in 2019. Those of us that grew up in the 1980s remember Garfield's voice, and it was by a man named Lorenzo Musick.

Speaker 02:

What could be worse than Monday? What could be worse than Monday, Garfield? Oh, how about Monday with normal around?

Speaker 00:

He was the voice in 12 Garfield specials, including Here Comes Garfield in 1982, Garfield on the Town in 1983, and Garfield in the Rough in 1984, which were ones that I forgot about when I was just talking about his debut into TV. Back in episode 180, I did a segment about the crash test dummies. Lorenzo Music was the voice of Larry the crash test dummy from all those commercials in the late 1980s to the mid-90s. For some of you that might not recognize his voice. If it wasn't on television watching the shows, the Saturday morning cartoon... For me, and I still have these, I have a huge collection of Garfield books. The smaller rectangle ones that were the chronicles of all the comic strips. The first one came out in 1980. It was called Garfield at Large. The book was on the New York Times bestseller list for almost two years. And it also introduced something called the Garfield style, which is how comic strip compilation books were put together. So that's something that came from the Garfield book, The Rectangular Shape. There were so many Garfield books from the 1980s that I loved that I still love the colorful covers. Garfield Gains Weight, Garfield Rounds Out, Garfield Loses His Feet, Garfield Chews the Fat, all the fun titles. I would either get the new Garfield book through the Scholastic Book Fair, because it seemed like almost once a year, or even more frequently than that, there was a new Garfield book put out. So I'd either get it through the Scholastic Book Fair, or my Uncle John used to manage a bookstore in Hyannis, which is the next town over from me. You Cape Codders might remember Dwyer's books in the 80s, early 90s. The rest of you are going to say, I don't understand. But that's not the point. The funny thing is I used to get the Garfield books and my uncle, I didn't know you could do this. You tear the cover off and you send it back to get credit like there was damage done to the book. So what I would get, and it was only a couple of them, but I would get Garfield books without the cover because they were free. Sorry, Uncle John, for ratting you out. I mean, it's been 35 years. I'm pretty sure it's fine. I loved Garfield so much that I would invite friends over and we would just read the books. Like we'd read them out loud to each other. I had a friend named Dan. He was the one. He would always come over. We would read alternating strips to each other. I think a big part of why Garfield is so special to me still, besides the huge connection to my childhood, is what I said earlier about the content being evergreen. I can go and just throw a dart at a date over the last 47 years and find a Garfield comic and probably have a good laugh at it. There's no, oh, you had to grow up in the 80s to like it, but oh, so many days, Saturday mornings, evenings, Garfield was a big part of my life. I got to live out my dream, kind of, when we came into possession of a kitten that was an orange striped tabby cat. He was the son of our current cat at the time in the late 1980s. I wanted to call him Garfield. I was voted down. He was named Tigger, like the Winnie the Pooh character. He was very much like Garfield. He wasn't as fat, but he was definitely larger. He was not the friendliest cat, although he loved me. He hated most everyone else. And he was always willing to throw down with one of our dogs. He didn't care. Tigger is definitely a unique cat, my favorite pet I ever had, and I'm thinking I may have to do a segment on him because his story you probably won't believe is real. Although I said that about my cat Solo back in episode 148. Maybe I just had a bunch of special cats. From his humble beginnings, though, as a newspaper comic strip character to a worldwide phenomenon, Garfield's legacy proves a grumpy, fat cat with a sharp wit and an endless appetite can endure for decades. I think maybe tonight I'll watch me a couple episodes of Garfield and Friends, knowing I can fast forward through the U.S. Acres ones. No thanks. This Week in History, we're going back 39 years to April 10th, 1986. and Halley's Comet making its closest pass to Earth. I can't believe this is almost 40 years ago. When Halley's Comet last passed by Earth, it was more than just an astronomical event. It was a moment of global anticipation, scientific discovery, and public fascination. Halley's Comet is probably the most famous comet in history. It's considered a short period comet, which means it becomes visible from Earth approximately every 75 to 76 years. It's the only comet visible with the naked eye that can potentially be seen twice in a human lifetime. And I have no memories of seeing it the first time, so I'll have to wait. The comet was named after Sir Edmund Halley, the English astronomer who, in 1705, figured out that the comets seen in 1531, 1607, and 1682 were actually the same object returning periodically. He then predicted the comet would return in 1758, and that was correct. When the comet passed by Earth in 1986, it was its 30th recorded visit. And oh boy, was there a lot of hype. In the years leading up to it, media coverage created a swell of excitement. Schools, science museums, observatories planned viewing events. Telescopes sold out. Travel agencies offered comet cruises and trips to the Southern Hemisphere where viewing conditions were more favorable. That was a big issue up here in the Northeast, living in the upper third, maybe, of the northern hemisphere meant that we were on the downside of the best viewing platforms for Halley's Comet. It wasn't just me and my family on Cape Cod that suffered, though. The actual appearance of Halley's Comet was seen as underwhelming to the casual observer. It was written that the display in 1910 was brilliant. This time it was relatively dim due to the geometry of its orbit and Earth's position. It was said that city dwellers often needed binoculars or a telescope to get even a glimpse when it's supposed to be visible to the naked eye. One of the most famous stories dealing with Halley's Comet also deals with Mark Twain, the author. He was born in 1835 when Halley's Comet passed, and he has quotes saying that he came in with the comet and he would likely go out with the comet. And he did. He died in 1910 when Halley's Comet was passing by the Earth. For all of you out there that were alive and missed Halley's Comet, or those of you that are looking forward to it, its next predicted return is 2061. So 36 years from now, I will be 83 years old. Hopefully they can wheel me out of my nursing home and have me look up at the sky to see it. Knowing my luck, I'll have cataracts or I'll forget my glasses. So it'll be the same. I won't see it the first time or the second time. Halley's Comet is anticipated to be approaching closer to Earth than it did in 1986, meaning that those of you that are alive then to see it will be able to actually get a better view than we did in 1986. Even though its visit in 1986 was dimmer than anticipated, Halley's Comet continues to hold a special place in human history. It's a celestial wanderer that bridges generations, cultures, and centuries. And like a familiar traveler on a long orbit, Halley's Comet will return again. But Halley's Comet's most recent pass by Earth occurred 39 years ago this week in history. Oh, and it's time for a brand new time capsule. We're going to stick with the same day. Halley's Comet is passing by the Earth. I am not seeing it, or at least not remembering seeing it. What was going on in the world of pop culture back then? Well, let's find out. The number one song was Rock Me Amadeus by Falco. Boy, what an 80s name that was. This was off of his 1985 album Falco III. It was Falco's only number one hit and only hit period, although he did write the song Der Kommissar, which you may know, but it was covered from German to English, so the English version by After the Fire is the one you out there may remember. The number one movie was The Money Pit, and you could get into the theater with a ticket costing $3.71. This was a comedy starring Tom Hanks and Shelley Long as a couple who attempt to renovate a home they just purchased. The movie made $55 million on a budget of just over $18 million. It's 50% fresh on Rotten Tomatoes and got kind of middling reviews. But it's 80s Tom Hanks, so you can't go wrong checking it out if you haven't seen it. The number one TV show was The Cosby Show. Because as I've said before, if my time capsule is from the late 1980s, The Cosby Show is very likely number one. I could probably do it and not research it and just put Cosby Show in and I'd likely be right. This is the show about the Hoxtables living in Brooklyn and all of their antics. It's a sitcom, slight drama at times. It was on for eight seasons between 1984 and 1992. It also spawned the spinoff A Different World, which I also enjoyed. And if you were around back then, April 10th, 1986, maybe you want to spruce up your yard for the arrival of Halley's Comet, well, you got to mow your lawn. And you're in luck. You can get yourself a Craftsman Riding Lawn Mower with a 30-inch blade, 6-speed, 10 horsepower. It weighs 311 pounds, but you're not going to have to lift it. And you could get that all at Sears for $1,199.99, meaning over $1,200. You like how they trick you with that? Ooh, I know all those tricks. Anyway, if you want your Craftsman riding lawnmower, it'll be waiting for you at Sears. When adjusting for inflation, the price of that lawnmower is almost $3,500. Now, I'm no expert on riding lawnmowers, but I've seen ads where you can get what look like good lawnmowers, for between $1,000 and $2,000. So I don't know if that means this one back in 1986 was a ripoff. But whether it was or whether it wasn't, that's going to wrap up another time capsule, another This Week in History. If you don't like the 1980s riding lawnmower talk, well, I got a new top five. We're going even further back. As we look at some passing fads of the 1960s, I hope none of you partook in any of these. So I don't consider people who grew up in the 1960s to be old, but I will say some of the information I got for this top five was off of a Reddit thread named Old People. And it was specifically a question about fads you remembered growing up in the 60s. Don't be too upset though, because it's not going to be too long before I'm considered old. I'm only 70s. In the past, I've done 1970s, 80s, and 90s passing fads. You can find those episodes in the archives. And with me doing more 1960s based content on the podcast for 2025, it became an obvious choice to do passing fads of the 60s. This was a lot harder than I expected. I have really no knowledge of what the passing fads were from the 60s. With the 70s, 80s, 90s, and likely 2000s at some point, I grew up in those times. So you out there who grew up in the 60s listening to this segment, you'll have to let me know how accurate my passing fads top five is. As with most of these top fives, there are some honorable mentions. They are in no particular order. And yeah, let's get into them. So we'll start with the honorable mentions for passing fads of the 1960s. They include inflatable furniture, which was cheap but not that durable. Banana seats, which were specific for bicycles, the long seat with the little hooked end on it. Another honorable mention was clackers. The little pair of hard balls. The pair of balls. Boy, how do I get out of this? Attached by a string and you would whip them up and down and they would smack together. It's too late to save that part of the segment. There were also sea monkeys, which were not monkeys. They were brine shrimp. And the last honorable mention is the beehive hairdo that a lot of women had in the 1960s. Don't take offense if you grew up and had a beehive hairdo. When I was a little boy, I had the Dutch boy, paint boy, bowl cut. So I'm no different. But those were the honorable mentions, so let's get into the actual top five. This starts off with number one, Super Balls. God, I put this at number one after just a minute ago talking about the Clackers Balls. Superballs are still around to this day, but they're not in the same way as they were in the 60s, where people were obsessed when they came out. It's a tightly packed synthetic rubber ball, usually kind of a pale pink shade. A chemist named Norman Stingley invented the Superball in 1964, and this was way different than a typical ball you would have back then. They would say you could bounce it over a house. That was one of the selling points of it. The Super Bowl was so popular in the late 1960s that the NFL-AFL football championship game was named the Super Bowl after the Super Bowl. I feel like Super Bowl is something that it was so popular that it was going to be impossible to maintain that. So even though it's still around today, it's just another toy on the rack you'd see at a dollar store. Number two is smoking banana peels. This was something kind of an urban legend that I had remembered hearing when I was young, 11, 12 years old. This was a hoax basically set up where there was supposed to be this fictional compound in the peel of the banana called bananadine. It was supposed to have psychoactive properties. So it would be like burning and smoking a banana peel would be like dropping acid or doing LSD. So that was a cheaper alternative, and it was briefly a thing. The Berkeley Barb newspaper published this story in March 1967, and it led to younger people buying bananas and burning them, trying to get the banana dean out of it to get high. But yeah, I can remember, even into the late 80s, early 90s, hearing that urban legend on the school bus that if you... smoked a certain part of the banana peel you could get high. And no, I never tried. So don't worry about that. Number three is the Scopatone Video Jukebox. That's a bunch of big words. It is what it sounds like. A jukebox that had videos in it. It actually featured 16mm film inside the jukebox that would play video versions of some of the songs. At its peak in 1966, there were approximately 800 of these Scopatone video jukeboxes located in various bars around the United States. There were a lot of well-known acts from the early 1960s to create these videos for the Scopatone. Neil Sedaka, Procol Harum, Nancy Sinatra, Dionne Warwick... Their downfall came in 1965 when the Beatles started putting out music videos and they bypassed the Scopatone, choosing to distribute their videos via television. So when the biggest band in the world says, now we're all good, that was kind of the beginning of the end of the Scopatone video jukebox. Number four is surf music. This refers to a super popular version of music In the early 1960s especially, the surf culture, the inventor, if you want to say, of surf music was a guitarist named Dick Dale. If you look him up on YouTube and just play one of his songs, you'll get the gist of what surf music was. Even though Dick Dale is the king of surf guitar, the kings of the surf music sound had to be the Beach Boys. That was practically their identity at the beginning of their careers. They've got four different songs with surfing in the title, which it just blew my mind when I saw that. Yes, the Beach Boys had songs Surfing, Surfing USA, Surfing Safari, and Little Surfer Girl. I guess you could say the Beach Boys loved surfing. Much like they killed the Scopatone video jukebox, surf music was killed by the Beatles in 1964 when they showed up. Number five on the list of top five passing fads of the 1960s is paper clothing. This was also destroyed by the Beatles. No, I'm just kidding. The paper clothing, paper dress craze came around with the creation of cellulose-based bonded fiber textiles. So it's not paper per se, but they're marketed as virtually the same thing, equivalent to paper. The Scott Paper Company, not to be confused with the Michael Scott Paper Company, created these fibers. And so they made two paper dresses, kind of as a promotion in 1966. And this sparked a craze with people wanting their own paper dresses. At its peak, there was one American manufacturing company that was making up to 80,000 paper dresses a week. But you couldn't really wash them properly. So it's like you buy this dress and what? Wear it until it's dirty and stinks and is stained? Or wear it once and throw it out? This craze was dead and gone by the end of 1969. But there you have it. The top five passing fads of the 1960s. They are of varying degrees of popularity and obscurity. But you could literally do four of these five passing fads at the same time. Smoking your banana peels while wearing paper clothes, listening to surf music, and bouncing a Super Bowl. Look at that. 60s all wrapped up like that. So I spent much of this Top 5 talking about how the arrival of the Beatles ruined all these passing fads. Let's jump again to another musical influence that destroyed what I would consider a passing fad. When grunge music killed hair metal right now. Ah, yes, I grew up in an interesting time. Let me regale you with the story of the battle for the ages. The established music versus the up-and-coming music. The setting was the early 1990s. In one corner, you had the established hair metal style of music, and in the other corner, the up-and-coming grunge music scene. Who came out on top? Well, based on how I've described this segment already, you know. But just act surprised. So in the late 1980s, the music scene was dominated by the flashy, high-energy sounds of what's called hair metal. Mainly because a lot of the bands, they had the huge, teased-up hair. Some of them wore eyeliner, makeup, whatever. There were bands like Motley Crue, Poison, Warrant, Cinderella, Skid Row. These bands and others that were part of hair metal, they had the anthemic choruses, over-the-top guitar solos, like I said, the interesting costuming, and of course the decadent lifestyle, see Motley Crue again. With all that flash and glitz and glamour, by the early 90s, a darker and more introspective style of rock began to take over called grunge, a.k.a. the Seattle scene. It was led by Nirvana, Pearl Jam, Alice in Chains, and Soundgarden. The ultimate battle between hair metal and grunge took place, I would say, in 1991. Those of you that were around at the time, would you agree? We've got to establish hair metal's dominance. So we've got to go back to the early 1980s. Hair metal, glam metal, arena rock. All that kind of stuff makes up this music, whatever you call it. There were bands like Van Halen, early Bon Jovi, Def Leppard. They're not hair metal per se, but they kind of represent that larger-than-life persona. Definitely big hair and big sound. Even though... Van Halen, Bon Jovi, Def Leppard, Guns N' Roses. They're not seen as the stereotypical hair metal, which is almost seen as kind of an insult to your musical talent. But those other bands I named, they led the way for a lighter, shinier, glitzier version of metal music. So this new kind of offshoot of metal that was hair metal, glam metal, glam rock, whatever you want to call it, It had its peak in the late 80s. Motley Crue had the huge album Dr. Feelgood in 1989. Poison had their album Open Up and Say Ah in 1988, which had Every Rose Has Its Thorn. You had Warrant with their album Dirty, Rotten, Filthy, Stinking Rich in 1989 that had the song Heaven. You had Whitesnake with Here I Go Again on My Own. or Skid Row with 18 and Life to Go, or all these arena rock power ballad songs that dominated MTV. The problem was, as you started to see success with Motley Crue, Poison, Warren, etc., you had a lot of imitators that were not as good. And for those of you that think the bands I just named weren't good, imagine the ones that were like bootlegs of those. Now, if you go online and you type in worst hair metal bands, you'll get kind of a list that will span probably every one that's considered hair metal. But some of the lesser knowns, you know, that felt like they diluted the product. That's what led to the end because it felt formulaic, oversaturated. If you've heard one hair metal song, you've heard them all. So it was time for a new kid on the block to knock the old one off the roof of pop culture, whatever that means. In September 1991, everything changed with the grunge revolution led by Nirvana's massive single Smells Like Teen Spirit. It was that song that ushered in Pearl Jam, Soundgarden, Alice in Chains. I mean, they'd all been there to varying degrees, but hearing that one riff from Smells Like Teen Spirit got me looking for what else is out there in the world of grunge music. I felt at 13, 14 that I had found my identity. It's like up until that point, I couldn't tell you who I was, what I was, what I wanted to be. Well, besides a writer, that I've wanted since I was eight. But my first identity really in life came with grunge music in 1991. It wasn't just me. In early 1992, Nirvana's Nevermind album knocked Michael Jackson's Dangerous album off of the number one spot on the Billboard charts. This was really when it cemented grunge as the new big thing, kind of put the nail in the coffin of hair metal. For me, I didn't mind a lot of hair metal, but when you hear Smells Like Teen Spirit, or Pearl Jam's Jeremy, or Evenflo, or Soundgarden's Rusty Cage, or Alice in Chains' Man in the Box, or Rooster, these are all songs that were out in 1991-92. For me, once I heard that raw sound, I was like, I don't need hair metal anymore. I like the dirty, the unpolished. There were big differences between grunge and hair metal. The lifestyle was different. Grunge people were into their drugs. But it's nothing like what you hear about in the hair metal days. It was all written about in their songs, too. Hair metal, the hedonism. Whereas grunge bands, because they spoke to me, they spoke about depression, social alienation, and personal struggles. Which, come on, that's more real. There's a better chance of you having a battle with depression than riding 20 deep in a stretch limo, surrounded by drugs and alcohol. Grunge and hair metal, they had their own styles, but honestly... If you were growing up then, would you rather go to school looking like Vince Neil from Motley Crue or Eddie Vedder? T-shirt with a flannel over it, kind of long cargo shorts you could have, some kind of casual shoe, vans, airwalks. That was the grunge look. You can see the divergence in culture from hair metal to grunge based on yearbook photos. Pictures from yearbooks in the late 80s with people with the huge teased up hair. I don't know, leather jackets, maybe skin tight pants. Then you get into the early 90s and there's so many kids with longer, kind of stringier hair, flannel shirts, ripped jeans. I know I saw it everywhere in high school, the grunge influence. So grunge surged in popularity. Hair metal didn't just go away. They kept trying these bands to recapture the glory days of like two years prior. But there were a lot of failures by some former big-time people from hair metal. Warrant's Dog Eat Dog, 1992. It was darker than their beloved Cherry Pie. Poison's 93 album, Native Tongue, with a more bluesy sound and new guitarist. Perhaps the king of all hair metal fails was Motley Crue's 94 self-titled album, where Vince Neil wasn't even in the band as the singer. It was John Carabi. I mean, even though I said they weren't really considered hair metal, Guns N' Roses even in the early 90s, think about it. They had User Illusion 1 and 2 in 1991, and then they had that weird spaghetti incident, covers of 1950 songs album, and then the band was basically dormant for 20 years. By the mid-1990s, hair metal was gone. Some of those types of acts, like Def Leppard or Bon Jovi, they continued to have success. They just adapted and became less hair metal and more just regular rock. Much like hair metal, though, grunge didn't have a large time in the spotlight. The death of Kurt Cobain in 1994, 31 years ago this week, started the beginning of the end of grunge. So it was a reign of three years, maybe four at most, if you want to count some of the bands still around in 95. Grunge was highly impactful. Hair metal was highly impactful. What's interesting, so hair metal was killed by grunge. What do you think out there was what replaced grunge as the big next music trend? Late 90s? Is it boy bands? I kind of feel like that's what it was. that it was Backstreet Boys, NSYNC, 98 Degrees. It's an interesting thing to see how tastes in pop culture and music change over a period of a few years. For me, I can find something good in any kind of musical style. I think it's I appreciate the ability to be a musician or a singer-songwriter or even a boy band where you can dance choreography like that. I was someone that I thought for a while that I could become a singer-songwriter. It just turned out that I wasn't good at guitar. I was kind of tone-deaf. So I was never going to be Nirvana. I was never going to be Bon Jovi. I wasn't even going to be White Lion. But I still got to immerse myself in the grunge culture. In fact, I still even have my red flannel shirt that I wore in my senior year high school photo in 1996. And yes, it still fits, which is good being almost 30 years out from high school. But before I run to my closet just to make sure that that flannel shirt still fits, that's going to wrap up episode 190 of the podcast. Thank you so much for tuning in, for making it to the end, for getting your weekly dose of Gen X nostalgia. I do my best to stay on the lookout for interesting topics that those watching that grew up in the 60s through the early 2000s enjoy, want to reminisce about. Next week is episode 191, and we're going to have a classic educational short film review. This is one I remember still being in heavy rotation as I was a kid in the 1980s, and that was Donald Duck in Math Magic Land. I remember seeing this in elementary school. So that'll be part of next week's show. And like I said, episode 200, I'm going to be doing a listener's choice, but it's going to be Patreon members only. But like I said, I'll make it for the free tier. Maybe episode 300, I'll do it just for the paid tier. Be on the lookout coming up this week on my YouTube channel, the video of me and my friend, producer Frank Durant, and our friend Brian Mazzilli hiking out to Race Point Lighthouse. It was the first time both of them had been out there. And for Frank, it was the completion of the Henry David Thoreau hike, which started down at Coast Guard Beach in East Ham all the way up to Race Point. So we have a fun old time walking the four or so miles round trip to get out there. Also, for those interested in my wacky, foolish sense of humor, go to my YouTube channel, subscribe, and then go to my shorts page and look at my latest ending of my Halloween pumpkin video. It definitely has a dark sense of humor to it. It's only two minutes long, so come on. Go over there when the podcast is done and watch. You can find me on social media, on Instagram. I have a Facebook fan page for the podcast. I write blogs every week. Initial Impressions 2.0, the look at my weekly random life podcast. For a long time, Cape Codders, I recently wrote an article about the legendary John Morgan and his Puffer Bellies nightclub in Hyannis. So you can go find that on my blog. The link's in the description of the podcast. Some of you may have heard, I am now looking for voice acting work. I have joined a site, Voices.com, that has voiceover work that you can do. In addition to my first movie role with the film coming out, I think in June. I'm looking to add voiceover stuff. I'm trying to be as well-versed and well-rounded in all kinds of content creation. If I can be an author, podcaster, video creator on YouTube, blogger, actor, voiceover actor. Oh man, I just pulled my shoulder patting myself on the back. I'm sorry. But I digress. As I said at the beginning, I hope wherever you are listening from, whenever you're listening to this show, that it's the best day, the best week it could possibly be. God knows we need it. It's a big reason why I do this podcast. I feel like there are a lot of you that listen that just want to escape for a little while. I always feel better when I do these podcasts. I feel like I'm sharing something positive out there. People my age, a little older, a little younger. And don't worry, I'll keep going with the content. I mean, this was episode 190. I feel pretty safe saying that unless something catastrophic happens, I'll be back here for episode 300, maybe 400. Now at episode 299, my head's going to explode like scanners just so I can't fulfill my promise. So let's wrap this up as I always say. Remember, in this life, don't walk in anyone else's footsteps. Create your own path and enjoy every moment you can on this journey we call life because you never know what tomorrow brings. This has been the In My Footsteps podcast. I am Christopher Setterlund. You already knew that. And I'll talk to you all again soon.

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Christopher Setterlund

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