The Vines capitalized on the post-millennium garage rock revival led by
the Strokes and the White Stripes to score their highest charting single, "Get Free."
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The Vines formed in Sydney, Australia in 1994. After dropping out of high school, frontman Craig Nicholls got a job at McDonald's, where he befriended co-worker and bass player Patrick Matthews; the two bonded over shared music tastes and started a band called Rishikesh (after the Indian city the Beatles visited in 1968), playing small gigs around the area before changing their name to the Vines in homage to Nicholls' father's own teen garage band, the Vynes.
The Vines played only a handful of live dates before entering Sydney's A# Studios in April 1999 to demo their best songs. Fortune smiled when Andy Cassell, owner of local label Ivy League, discovered the demo and signed them. After concluding their first Australian tour, the Vines signed to Capitol Records and flew to Los Angeles to record their debut album Highly Evolved in collaboration with producer Rob Schnapf and session drummer Joey Waronker.
The soft-loud dynamics, childlike simplicity and bent distorted guitar notes of "Get Free," the second single from Highly Evolved, immediately bring to mind Nirvana; Nicholls' ceiling-scraping voice cements the comparison. Though it might be a touch derivative, "Get Free" presents Nicholls as a talented songwriter, employing classic tricks like vocal octave layering and call-and-response to switch up a tested formula. Mostly, the song is carried by the sheer energy of the performance: note Nicholls' Iggy Pop-like scream after the second verse.
Fervor around the Vines exploded after the Strokes reinstated rock's relevance, and the band mounted an international tour and (bewilderingly) landed the cover of Rolling Stone in October 2002. "Get Free" went on to reach number seven on the Billboard Modern Rock chart, and soared to number 24 in the U.K. Yet tour pressures led Nicholls to develop a heavy dependence on cannabis, and his chaotic on-stage presence and erratic rapport with the media culminated in a self-sabotaging performance of "Get Free" during an infamous 2002 spot on CBS's The Late Show with David Letterman.
Years later, Nicholls would be diagnosed with Asperger's Syndrome, but without the clarity of that diagnosis, the Vines sputtered, and during a 2004 tour with fellow Aussies Jet, Matthews abruptly quit the band after another of Nicholls' violent outbursts. Nicholls continues to release music under the Vines brand, though his condition keeps the act from touring with any frequency.
~ by Rob Moura for KORD
