Gay4Grunge: Collective Soul

Collective Soul is the band I have seen live the most & I saw them in a pretty condensed period of time. I saw Collective Soul live 4 times between 2005 & 2010 and I was accompanied with friends or family for each of the four shows too. So, as you can imagine I have lots of good memories attached to Collective Soul. That said, I also have one very painful memory attached to Collective Soul. That memory is so painful for me that I rarely talked about it with anyone besides those who were there at the time. I feel such a sense of shame and embarrassment from that incident that I never spoke of it again until very recently when I was talking with one of my favorite queer artists Zach Benson at one of his concerts. At that point it was my third time seeing Zach live and I told him if I saw him again live (which I did 6 months later) he would tie with Collective Soul as the act I've seen the most times live. Zach's boyfriend then mentioned how his dad loves Collective Soul and how they thought Heavy was the best song of all time when they were younger. Eventually this conversation got to the point where I brought up my painful Collective Soul memory and as I was telling the story my husband said that he had never heard this story before. I told him that he was correct, because that story still stings a bit. 

Before we get to that story though let's start at the beginning. I got into pop music in 1997 thanks to the Spice Girls. Soon I was watching MTV and listening to the radio every single day. Now where we lived in California, we didn't have a straight up top 40 pop station. Instead, we had a station that played more rhythmic music such as Dance Pop, RnB and Hip-Hop that was called KDON and an adult Alternative station that only played Alternative Rock that your parents would like called CD93. My parents definitely preferred CD93 so that's the station we listened to the most back in the late 90s. I would know the new music on CD93 thanks to MTV, but some of the early to mid-90s songs that played on the station I wasn't as familiar with. 

Looking back now I can see how CD93 was really the first time I heard bands like The Gin Blossoms, Toad the Wet Sprocket and the Counting Crows. It's also how I was introduced to Collective Soul though I didn't know it at the time. All these 90s songs kind of blended together for me back then and I wouldn't come to know who sang all these songs until the early 00s. Now I realize that CD93 loved Collective Soul because they played them all the time back then. The first song I knew Collective Soul sang was The World I Know, because it was a compilation CD called Absolute Hits, which I remember buying at the Borders in San Francisco in 1998. I recognized the song pretty quickly, because it was played on CD93 all the time and I liked it. I didn't really think much else about Collective Soul at the time since I was much more into pop divas and MTV by that point. 

Now fast forward a few years to 2002 and I'm living in Rhode Island and I'm starting to get into Grunge and 90s Alternative thanks to Stone Temple Pilots. I slowly started transitioning away from the local top 40 pop station in Rhode Island and I began listening to the rock stations instead. That summer I started working for the Newport Marriott in the restaurant as a busboy. I was 16, but I still didn't quite have my license yet so I would commute in every day with my dad who was also the food & beverage director at the Newport Marriott. My shift always ended before my Dad got out of work so I would either go shop for CDs at the record store around the corner with my new disposable income or I would wait in my Dad's office listening to the radio he had in there. One day after work I was listening to the rock station 94HJY with a friend and Shine by Collective Soul came on. My friend was about to change the station and I told him to stop, because I recognized the song. As Shine continued to play, memories of CD93 came rushing back to me and I remembered hearing this all the time back then. After the song finished the DJ said that it was Collective Soul with Shine and that's when I put two and two together that this was the same band that also did The World I Know. Now I had a mission and that mission was to find out more about Collective Soul, because I now wanted to get into as many Grunge & 90s Alternative bands as possible by that point. 

Now remember this is still 2002, so we had the internet but it was still dial-up internet so it was slower. This was also before iTunes and YouTube so if I wanted to hear songs from artists, I had to go to CD Now's website because they allowed you to hear a 30 second clip of each song off an album. Even Amazon wasn't doing that quite yet and it wouldn't be until Amazon bought out CD Now that they then had 30 second song clips on their website as well. So, I went to CD Now and saw that Collective Soul had a greatest hits CD already called Seven Year Itch 1994-2001. So, I started making my way through each song clip starting with Heavy which I knew immediately. Then came She Said, which I also recognized immediately because it's the song that plays at the end of Scream 2, which is from my favorite horror franchise of all time. Then I recognized Run, because it had been used in all the ads and previews for Varsity Blues that I saw constantly on MTV back in early 1999. By the time I got to December and recognized that one too I knew I needed to buy this greatest hits ASAP! 

Now at the time I was still making mix tapes for the car and I would make collaborative mixes with my parents where I would alternate between songs I liked and songs my parents liked. I had been gearing up to do another mixtape, but I told my Dad I wanted to hold off until I got Collective Soul's Greatest Hits because they had so many hits. My Dad at the time said "Who Cares?" but I knew he'd care once he heard Collective Soul. I ended up putting Shine on one of those mixtapes and I remember when my dad heard it, he liked it A LOT! He was glad I had waited to add it and soon I started playing him the rest of Collective Soul's Greatest Hits and a funny thing happened, my dad ended up becoming an even bigger Collective Soul fan than me. Don't get me wrong I really liked Collective Soul and love a few of their songs, but my dad went a step further and really ended up becoming a Collective Soul Stan before Stanning was a thing. My dad ended up buying most of their albums on CD and eventually I would buy him the latest Collective Soul album for Christmas or his birthday whenever they came out. 

I started college (Ithaca College) in the fall of 2004, which was around the time Collective Soul put out their album Youth. I remember hearing Counting the Days on the radio and really liking it. I also remember listening to an Ithaca rock radio station one day and a boy requested Counting the Days because it reminded him of his girlfriend and their long-distance relationship. I picked up the album when it came out and I reviewed it for the school paper. Then I remember Better Now being the second single and I liked that one even more, possibly because it had a sax solo at the end, which was rare for the 2000s. For some reason we shunned the sax in the 2000s so it was refreshing to hear Collective Soul bring it back.  Soon Collective Soul announced a tour to support their new album and I knew I needed to attend that show and that my dad needed to be there as well. So, for an early Father's Day present I bought us two tickets to see Collective Soul in Boston. By that point my dad was working in Boston even though we all still lived in Rhode Island so I ended up going with him to work that day and hanging out in his office all day until it was time to go to the show. 

When we arrived at the show it was standing room only, but we found a pillar near the back that had an elevated stone you could sit on so we placed ourselves on that pillar for the show. Collective Soul put on a damn good show and it's probably still my favorite concert with them not only because it was my first, but because they played all the hits and I really liked the Youth album too so I enjoyed hearing all the new songs off that album as well. My Dad and I both had a really good time though that would be the last time we both attended a Collective Soul show together even though we both saw Collective Soul three more times each in the years that followed. 

My second time seeing Collective Soul live was in the fall of 2005 when they were coming to Cornell University. By that time, I was not only writing reviews for the school paper, but I now had my own radio show called Alternagold on the college's internet radio station, which means the name Dougystyle had just become my new DJ name. I got tickets to the show and a lot of friends I had just made at the time, many of whom I'm still my good friends with to this day, were going to accompany me to that show. It was a no-brainer that I was going to review the concert for the Ithacan newspaper, but thanks to my connection to the radio station I could also do an interview with one of the band members too. I remember Collective Soul's manager was pretty open to us giving the band as much coverage as possible so an interview was set up through the school radio station with the band's bassist Will Turpin. Now since I ran the 90s Alternative radio show that played Collective Soul all the time it made sense for me to be the one to conduct this interview. 

Now you have to remember that this is 2005 so this is before zoom, streaming and even smart phones. At the same time the radio station at Ithaca College had been around for decades so the equipment to record a phone interview was pretty ancient even by 2005 standards. What this means is someone from the radio station was going to train me on how to record a phone interview using the school's old equipment. When I went down to train it became clear that this wasn't going to be as simple as just hitting a record button. There were multiple buttons that needed to be pressed in an exact order and at exactly the right time in order for this interview to be captured and recorded. There was even reel to reels attached too. The girl who trained me told me that she would accompany me the day of the interview to make sure it was done right, which made me feel a bit better. 

In preparation for the interview, I came up with a series of questions about the band, their recording history & the new album. I even wanted to ask questions about their change in clothing style over the years since they dressed in grungy flannel when they first arrived in the early 90s but by 2004, they were dressed much more slickly. I was a little nervous, but mostly excited to be conducting this interview since this was going to be the first time, I got to talk to a musician from a 90s Alternative band. Plus, the interview would be a great thing to add to my own resume going forward within radio or journalism. 

On the day of the interview, I remember getting a text from the girl who trained me on the recording equipment saying that she wasn't going to accompany me on this interview after all. She had something else come up and felt I could handle it on my own after our training. This made me a little nervous, but I figured I better make the best of it. Now where I recorded was in a big room and there was someone across the room working on something else at the same time. I did my best to set up everything for the interview and hit the right buttons. I remember getting a call from Collective Soul's manager who then patched me into Will and I hit a button and the interview began. Overall, the interview went very well. Will was very good at answering all my questions and was very friendly too. He was a perfect interview subject and by the time the interview ended I felt it went really well, which was confirmed by the other person sitting across the room from me who told me that I did a really good job and that I had come up with some really good questions. 

So now it was time to get the recording and hear how it sounded, but when I tried to hit playback there was nothing! It's then that I realized that I had forgotten to hit one button in the recording process. So even though it looked like the tape had been recording the whole time, not one second of the interview had actually been captured! I WAS DEVASTATED!!! All of a sudden, a flurry of emotions came over me where I not only felt disappointed, I also felt so stupid and idiotic at the same time. I had completely dropped the ball on this interview and the shame and embarrassment I felt was becoming overwhelming for me. I remember having to call their manager right after and apologize and she sounded so disappointed and that cut me really deep.

Now back then I wasn't prone to crying, mostly because I had been in the closet for so much of my life that I had suppressed a lot of my emotional responses, which continued for years even after I had come out of the closet, which had been at the start of 2005. I remember tearing up though as I kept thinking about it and I just went back to my dorm, which during my sophomore year was a single dorm so I lived alone. I remember locking myself in my dorm and just stewing in all the feelings I was feeling. To date myself again, I also put up a pretty cryptic but depressing away message on my AOL Instant Messenger, which raised red flags for my friends. I remember one of my friends coming over to cheer me up which helped a little but not a lot. I also remember she said that her mom liked Collective Soul's newest single Better Now, but she didn't know much else so I played a bunch of their 90s hits for her and she recognized all of them. I remember her saying oh my god is this my favorite band now. Even then when I felt so low, I still converted another person to liking Collective Soul mostly through just proving to them that they knew most of the band's hits even if they didn't know who sang all those hits beforehand. 

Still, I had a concert to prepare for that weekend and I wasn't going to drop the ball again so my friends and I went to see the Collective Soul and Lifehouse show at Cornell. Collective Soul was great as expected and the setlist was the same as the one I had seen with my dad earlier that year. Lifehouse was OK, but they are a band where I only like a handful of songs by them and two of the songs, I like by them had not come out yet in 2005 so the only song of theirs I liked at that point was Hanging by a Moment. I wrote a great review for the school paper, which everybody really liked so I at least had that if nothing else. I remember talking to my mom about everything that weekend and she said it was just a mistake, but that this was also probably going to sting me for years. She was right of course, which is why after I submitted my review to the school paper, I never talked about that botched Collective Soul interview ever again. So, unless you were my parents, my brother or part of my immediate circle of friends at that point in college, I didn't tell anyone else this story for years because of the shame and embarrassment I still felt for a long time afterwards. It wasn't until I saw Zach Benson live for a third time in late 2021 that I recounted this story to anyone since 2005.

Enough about that though, let's move on to 2007 which is when I ended up seeing Collective Soul for a third time. In the summer of 2007, I was actually living in New York City doing an internship for a nationally syndicated radio show called the Ryan and Caroline Show. They described themselves as the Will & Grace of radio, which goes to show you where we were with queer visibility at that point. In order to promote this show to a mass audience, they had to try and appeal to straights by comparing themselves to the most popular TV show on air at that time that featured gay characters that straight people could tolerate, but I digress. While I was living in New York City, my good friend Josh from college came to visit me a few times and we attended two concerts together that summer. The first concert was a solo Chris Cornell show, which I'll go into more depth with when I get to Soundgarden on Gay4Grunge. The second show was a double bill with Live and Collective Soul at a small club in Times Square. 

The show was plagued with a lot of sound issues, which really marred Collective Soul's set unfortunately. I remember another friend of Josh's came and they were both not too impressed with Collective Soul, but I had to remind them that they were much better when I saw them before, it was the sound that threw everything off. When Live took the stage there were still sound issues, but their lead singer Ed Kowalczyk kept giving some pretty aggressive side eye to the side of the stage constantly because he was PISSED about the sound issues. I thought he was going to punch someone's lights out if it didn't get fixed. Eventually they fixed the sound halfway through Live's set and Live then sounded great. I'll talk more about Live though when I get to them at some point on Gay4Grunge. 

By the fall of 2007 Collective Soul was set to release a new album and I was excited because I had loved their 2004 album Youth quite a bit. At the 2007 concert I attended, Collective Soul previewed the album's first single Hollywood and I remember thinking it was a pretty limp song overall. It wasn't terrible but it wasn't terribly memorable either, but I just chalked it up to the poor sound design at that show. The album was eventually titled Afterwards and it was coming out the same week as Britney's album Blackout. For those who have been following my blog since the beginning you're well aware of how important Blackout was for me my senior year of college and how it's one of the biggest watershed moments for me as a Britney fan, a pop music fan and a gay man. Collective Soul's new album was always going to struggle to measure up to Blackout for me, but I didn't expect it to be so bland and forgettable. None of the songs grabbed me at all, not even the singles, and while I tried to get into it on multiple occasions, Afterwards just never clicked for me. My Dad liked it though and from that point forward I kind of dropped off with Collective Soul's albums for myself, but I always bought them for my dad on his birthday or at Christmas. So, I was still supporting the band, I just wasn't listening to their post Youth material anymore, but my dad loved them all. 

Collective Soul put out an album in 2009, which meant they were on tour on again. I wasn't really planning to see them again at that point, but then I heard about the Whole Foods Festival in Boston Massachusetts, which was taking place early summer of 2010. This show had Collective Soul headlining, but Marcy Playground and the Gin Blossoms were both on the bill too and I hadn't seen either of those bands yet and I really wanted to see The Gin Blossoms. At that point I had just started dating my future husband Cory and he was a Marcy Playground fan so he was interested in going and the best part was that this show was free! That's right Whole Foods made it a free show and they even had free drinks and food samples too! The only thing I had to pay for that day was parking. At the show we met one of Cory's friends from high school who used to be such a big Marcy Playground fan that she eventually became their PR person. The show was fun and all the acts were great and it was the first concert I attended with my future husband and it wouldn't be the last either. It's also when I realized I never went with the same person twice for all 4 Collective Soul shows I attended, but every person I went with loved it with the possible exception of the 2007 show, but again I blame that more on the venue than the band. 

After the 2010 concert I stopped keeping up with Collective Soul, but my dad continued to keep up between the new albums I bought him and the multiple shows he attended with my mom and friends of theirs. Between the two of us we've each seen Collective Soul four times, which is pretty darn impressive. That record held for me for years until I ended up seeing Zach Benson again for a 4th time in May of 2022. I'm honestly happy about that because if anyone should break the record, I'm glad it's a queer artist since they are now my main focus at this point in my music fandom. Still, I continued to listen to my favorite Collective Soul songs from 1994-2004 through the 2010s and into the 2020s. Songs like Shine, Heavy, Run, December, Where the River Flows, The World I Know, Better Now and more never fell out of regular rotation for me. Whenever those songs came on the radio, I'd always crank it up and Collective Soul was still placed on countless mix CDs and playlists and I still listen to my favorite songs by them on a regular basis. I'll be discussing those songs in more depth next week when I count down my top 15 Collective Soul songs on Gay4Grunge.