The best thing about the 4th of July was the reunion of the UK’s greatest band.
Man, it brings back some memories.
Foremost among them is I think it's obvious that Oasis’s influence is all over Gorky, for better or worse.
When I joined the Army, I had three CDs which I listened to on repeat: Arctic Monkeys’ Whatever People Say I Am, That’s What I’m Not, Abbey Road by The Beatles, and Be Here Now by Oasis.
I knew very few people at that time who liked the Arctics or Oasis, much less Britpop, but Britpop was everything to me. Not because of an Anglophile thing, though that was certainly part of it, but because it was already a part of my mental fiber growing up.
Back in the 90’s there was this thing called Cool Britannia, and America ate it up. Princess Diana. Spice Girls. Goldeneye 007 on the N64. Austin Powers. And yes, Oasis. I remember seeing Champagne Supernova on MTV and blowing my 10 year old mind out.
My deeper gateway into Oasis, Blur, and the rest of Britpop musically didn’t happen until the later 90s, when The Verve exploded with “Bittersweet Symphony.” I went that direction as a young teen because I couldn’t get into what was big in the US. Sure, we listened to Green Day and Red Hot Chili Peppers and the like, but American rock was just plain goofy compared to Britain, because Britain was cool, and we wanted to be cool. Thank God The Strokes came out when we were sophomores. Otherwise, American rock would have ended up all sounding like Creed or something. And we hated all that stuff.
Playing music like Oasis in a small Southwestern mountain town was a hard sell, and we struggled at first to get shows. Jimmy Eat World was who was popular then, and we couldn’t quite get that crowd. But Ben and I definitely saw ourselves as a kind of Gallagher brothers. The American heirs to Oasis and the American answer to the Arctic Monkeys in one. But most of Arizona didn’t care about the Arctic Monkeys musically in 2005.
2005’s Don’t Believe The Truth is my favorite record of theirs and 100 percent influenced the Gorky sound. So heavy was Oasis in the Gorky orbit that I remember when Oasis broke up, thankfully after I’d seen them, I felt a strong calling to level up my songwriting, to fill the void they’d left. By that time, I was heavy into writing the Brian Jonestown Massacre book, and learning about the recording process.
I think I might have simply stayed in that spot, artistically, because by the time all our biggest songs came out and really started working for us, it was the latter half of the 2010’s, and it’d already been a decade since that kind of rock and roll had been popular. “Action Pants” and “Super Drunk” would have had a lot different impact in 2005 than 2015, when the dawn of Trumpism had all but ruined comedy, parody, and satire itself.
As for the rest of the Gorky catalog, “Be In The Now” and “You’ve Got To Learn To Be Lonely” sound like Oasis songs. There’s Oasis in “Roll With Me,” “Boogie Machine”, “Brave New Animal”—I hear it all over the place. I can hear me and Ben filling that void for ourselves in a lot of these songs. There’s more than Oasis going on. There’s some Strokes, some Libertines, some Weezer, but definitely a lot of Oasis.
Yet now, with Oasis back, suddenly it’s like a standard has returned for guitar music, even though it’s been that long. Especially in the age of AI, someone actually playing the guitar has to mean something.
It seems like now, people need to support local bands and artists more than ever. The point of music isn’t just the sound itself, but the experience required to make that sound, and that song.
Oasis appealed to us because they were working class like us, because their songs are the bollocks, and because they are hilarious.
Welcome back, lads!
-JMGV