We were parked at the Meijer gas station on Plainfield Avenue outside of Grand Rapids. Jake was gassing up the black 1976 Datsun 280Z his mother had finally let us take out and I was in the passenger seat listening to classic rock radio station WLAV’s resident hipster Steve Aldridge do the lead-in to his weekly “alternative” music slot, Clam Bake. We’d read all about them in British weekly music rags and had seen a handful of pictures, which was almost enough to sell me on the spot. They were snotty faces and shaggy hair and flared jeans and bucket hats. Aldridge paid them the proper amount of respect as the “next big thing” out of Britain and then cued up the first Stone Roses song I ever heard, “Made of Stone.”

The Stone Roses were an odd band from the beginning. Ian Brown doesn’t exactly have range, or even pitch, and his live recordings are proof of that. But on record—and without the aid of digital pitch correcting tools, thank you very much!—he exudes a sort of foreboding and danger within that somewhat fey whisper of his. When he sings “I don’t have to sell my soul, he’s already in me,” you believe it. There is something menacing about this skinny Mancunian with a slightly simian look and a Christ complex. He’s the street hustler who is underfed and over drugged with a knife in his backpack. It doesn’t take much to imagine him as the scooter boy he claimed to be in interviews and if you’ve been to the rougher parts on Manchester, England you know how raw the inhabitants can be. Their sissies will kick your ass.

We knew from reading the articles that they were obsessed with the Beatles and that guitarist John Squire was a disciple of The Smiths’ Johnny Marr, which made for two references you simply could not beat with us then. You can hear the strains of the Fabs in the backing vocals and Marr’s hand in the 12-string guitars throughout but the Roses were more than the mere sum of their collective influences. The inspirations weave and blend like the paint on their album covers, which could just as easily be dismissed as Jackson Pollack knock-offs just as some would dismiss any band who hews a little too close to their musical heroes. But the Roses took those clear references and created a new sound, and that was extremely exciting for two Anglophile Midwestern boys whose favorite bands were in the past. The Stone Roses were different…and they were ours.

I vividly remember the cover of Newsweek that celebrated the twentieth anniversary of Sgt Pepper’s 1967 release. The Summer of Love seemed more like a million years away in 1987 and I couldn’t fathom what the 60s were like. The Civil War years of the 1860s were as easy for me to grasp as the Cultural War years of the 1960s. Today, more time has passed since the publication of that cover story than had passed since the story it was promoting—and that blows my mind. This summer marks 20 years from the release of the Stone Roses’ debut album. Anyone old enough to remember that summer can meet me at the bar it talk about the Good Old Days.

The late 80s were a weird time for music and a weirder time for production. The Hit Parade was clogged with shiny pop and shinier metal ballads. The Top Five songs from 1989 are:

1. Chicago – Look Away

2. Bobby Brown – My Prerogative

3. Poison – Every Rose Has It’s Thorn

4. Paula Abdul – Straight Up

5. Janet Jackson – Miss You Much

Now, I don’t want to pass judgment on the merit of those songs (except “My Prerogative,” which rules!), but you must remember this is a few years before “alternative” music was swept in on the plaid coattails of some losers from Seattle. To live in Midwestern America was to be surrounded by people who made these songs popular. It was awful.

So it was by the Grace of God that our mid-sized burg had what was arguably one of the best record stores in the United States: Vinyl Solution. For a brief moment it was the perfect record store with racks of British imports and a girl behind the counter named Karen whom I loved immensely for the time it took to browse the aisles and pay my bill. That she loved the Roses too and later gave me a bootleg of their unreleased demos cemented her place in my heart forever. We never dated; we barely spoke. But she was perfect.

I vividly remember opening the plastic wrap from my imported CD of the Stone Roses’ debut—the one that RIGHTLY ends with “I am the Resurrection”—and staring at the photos inside. There was scruffy Ian Brown in a polo shirt and jeans next to the guitarist who would capture my imagination for twenty years and counting. Bassist Mani was decked out in what looked like a referee’s shirt playing his paint splattered Rickenbacker while drummer Reni peered out from that bucket hat. These guys knew how to create an image, and dismiss it if you will but image is part and parcel with rock and roll. How you look is as important as how you sound and this band looked fantastic. There were no “French rolled” jeans pegged to their ankles, there were no Swatches on their wrists, there were no Ralph Lauren logos to be seen. They were British and they were awesome.

The album opens with a frank an honest declaration: “I Want to Be Adored.” Oasis front man Noel Gallagher has said that the Roses’ Spike Island gig is what inspired him to start a band and it’s clear that he took more than musical cues from his fellow Northern punters. The Stone Roses wanted to be famous; they wanted to be the biggest band in the world…and they acted like it. It’s not often you hear an album as ambitious as this. You NEVER hear it in a debut album. The production is a masterful pastiche of guitars and harmonies and backward tracks. It does not sound like any other album of its time. It was only after a hundred listens that we realized the reason “Waterfall” segues so seamlessly into “Don’t Stop” is because it’s the same Goddamn song played backwards with new lyrics and a few added tracks. Mani’s hypnotic bass playing lulled me into a druggy stupor that let me forget to think and simply follow. The realization was an epiphany and became the source of conversations with like-minded teens at Denny’s for months.

It’s not just producer John Leckie’s wizardry that makes the album though, the melodies are simply undeniable. Despite the fact that they end their debut album with over eight minutes of pure rock bombast, the Stone Roses had a healthy reverence for the British tradition of pop music. The songs are carefully crafted but surprise you with their subtle and confounding changes. The debut was more subtle than their much maligned and preposterously titled follow-up, The Second Coming, and as a result it is closer to genius.

Like any band, the Stone Roses was possible because the right four people came together at the right time. John Squire is universally hailed as a guitar genius for his work with the band and you’d be hard pressed to find a tighter rhythm section than that of Mani and Reni. And while Ian Brown’s vocal limitations have already been noted, I think he’s criminally overlooked as a lyricist, at least as it concerns his work on this album. The cover of the Stone Roses debut is a Pollack inspired splatter piece with three stripes on the left and three lemon slices strewn across the canvass. The stripes are red, white, and blue but are not a reference to Britain’s reciprocal love affair with the USA, it’s a tribute to the French student uprising in 1968; the lemons they sucked to counteract tear gas. With that in mind, read the lyrics to “Bye Bye Badman” and tell me they’re not brilliant:

Bye Bye Badman – The Stone Roses

Soak me to my skin

Will you drown me in your sea

Submission ends and i begin

Choke me smoke the air

In this citrus sucking sunshine

I don’t care you’re not all there

Every backbone and heart you break

Will still come back for more

Submission ends it all

Here he come

Got no question got no love

I’m throwing stones at you man

I want you black and blue and

I’m gonna make you bleed

Gonna bring you down to your knees

Bye bye badman

Ooh bye bye

Choke me smoke the air

In this citrus sucking sunshine

I don’t care you’re not all there

You’ve been bought and paid

You’re a whore and a slave

Your dark star holy shrine

Come taste the end you’re mine

Here he come

Got no question got no love

I’m throwing stones at you man

I want you black and blue and

I’m gonna make you bleed

Gonna bring you down to your knees

Bye bye badman

Ooh bye bye

I’ve got bad intention

I intend to

Knock you down

These stones i throw

Oh these french kisses

Are the only way i’ve found

I’ve got bad intention

I intend to knock you down

These stones i throw

Oh these french kisses

Are the only way i’ve found

What at first seems to be a simple pop song with thinly veiled references to violence on par with our favorite murder ballads is instead a powerful paean to a failed but influential political uprising. Take THAT, Paula Abdul!

It’s been a long time since the Stone Roses took over my life. I’ve since discovered (and re-discovered) new musical obsessions and sharpened my own historical and political viewpoint, but I can’t help but fall back into the sticky hot seat of that Black 280Z whenever I hear the band that would mean so much to my early adulthood. And so it’s appropriate I am writing this from the City of Roses since I’ve been living in their world since 1989.

VIDEO:

Stone Roses – Made Of Stone live

Live Forever: The Stone Roses live at Spike Island

Stone Roses: iTunes, Amazon, Insound, wiki