Sounding astonishingly like Nirvana, remarked John Peel after playing this track from Gravel’s Break-A-Bone LP on Estrus Records. In the short term, I have to admit that the similarity swung it for me in terms of including Lone Ride on this blog, but I’m sure that at the time, there would have been Nirvana fans who were incandescent with rage at how blatantly and shamelessly Gravel had ripped off Nirvana’s sound, while vocalist Bryan Elliott channelled Kurt Cobain’s every vocal tic, seemingly down to the last octave. Surely, the only consolation was that with their unprepossessing name, Gravel were destined to remain fixtures only on John Peel playlists or those of obscure rock music stations heard via W or K fuckknowswhere in America, meaning they would be unable to perpetrate their audio con on an unsuspecting, wider audience.
In trying to be fair to Elliott and Gravel, I wondered whether they were merely victims of unavoidable local issues. After all, they were formed in Washington state in a city called Anacortes. I wondered whether maybe the Cobain-style drawl which Elliot sings the majority of Lone Ride in was in fact, an all-purpose Washington state singing voice. Maybe Cobain wasn't so special or unique after all if every 15th person in the state sounded like him whenever they sang. Did college state football games throughout Washington periodically open with someone giving a Kurt-a-like rendition of The Star Spangled Banner? Given the state of some of the renditions which poor American sports fans are subjected to then this may not have been an entirely awful prospect. Were there male voice choirs in which the harmonies were split among tenors, baritones and Cobains? It's an intriguing thought but alas it doesn't hold up when listening to other tracks recorded by Gravel over the brief but busy period they released records over 1991-93.
It turns out that in the main Bryan Elliott sounded very different from Cobain on most of Gravel's material. As a case in point, listen to Bucket of Blood, the opening track on Break-A-Bone or anything from their 1993 album, No Stone Unturned Therefore, we must conclude that the Nirvana stylings in Lone Ride were an intentional decision, but was it a pastiche or a parody?
I'd say the former, because what cannot get lost in all this is recognition that Lone Ride is a good song on its own terms, regardless of who it sounds like or what its inspirations may have been. It's a coin toss as to whether the lone ride of the title refers to an introspective trip to find oneself, a drug journey or perhaps a route to suicide. The reference to a letter that can't be sent in the lyrics provides a potentially chilling portent, though that could be me reading too much into the Cobain connection. Regardless, I listened to a lot of Gravel's music in order to find out how they sounded when testing out my Washington state singing voice theory. I have to say that while their name sucked, their music didn't, especially their version of Pissing in a River originally recorded by Patti Smith.
Video courtesy of s142057
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