E-Mail This Article to a Friend Discovery How does our relationship to a band change as they go from cult favorites to mainstream darlings? BY MIKE MILIARD

MY BUDDY WILL turned me on to the Ramones when I was 15. And, as I was lucky enough to tell Johnny Ramone himself just a couple weeks before he died, they changed my life. That’s the most hideous of clichés, of course. But it’s true. Those simplistic songs changed the way I heard music. They were the gateway drug to punk rock. And they had the same effect on millions of other fans. Still, the weird thing about the Ramones was that they never got huge. Despite their legendary reputation, despite their now being ensconced in the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame, they never broke through to the level of limos and filthy lucre. Which is only appropriate, of course. They were the Ramones. Just like their uniform of leather and denim and their simple three-chord formula, their status as modest unit-movers remained more or less unchanged over two decades. The anomaly of playing gargantuan stadiums in South America notwithstanding, until they broke up in 1996 they pretty much slogged it out on the road and played modest venues such as the Hampton Beach Casino and the Central Maine Civic Center. So the Ramones were beloved, and they were influential, but they were also dependable.

What happens, though, to a band when they do "break," when the nature of their professional existence changes fundamentally, and their fan base increases exponentially? What happens to their music, and their fans’ relationship to it? The most striking — and instructive — example, of course, is Nirvana. In 1988, Kurt Cobain and Co. were a bunch of yokels from the Northwest woods. They recorded their debut record, Bleach, for $600. As much as I wish I could claim — as many now do — that I owned that record before the earth-shattering explosion of "Smells Like Teen Spirit" introduced Nirvana to the world, I cannot. I caught on to the band at the same time everyone else did, in 1991. They changed everything. They knocked Michael Jackson off the top of the charts, and rewrote rock history. Punk was not supposed to rank in Billboard, but there it was. For better or for worse, they ushered in the "alternative music" heyday, and I was happy to be along for the ride. But they also changed — and I don’t think Kurt Cobain was aware just how profound and dramatic those changes were until it was too late. A lot of it came with the enormous increase and demographic shift of their fan base. Who were these asshole jocks at shows, groping girls in the mosh pit, pummeling people to the power chords of "In Bloom," oblivious to the fact that it’s a dig at them? Cobain never expected to have fans like these. And you could hear it: if the booming, big production of Nevermind showed the effect of playing music for major-label paymasters instead of a tiny Seattle indie label, the grating, grotty sound of the 1993 follow-up, In Utero, represented a willful effort to alienate those unwanted fans.

For all his personal demons, I think it could be argued that fame killed Kurt Cobain. He was a sensitive guy, completely unready for its demands. "[W]hen we’re backstage and the lights go out and the manic roar of the crowd begins it doesn’t affect me the way in which it did for Freddy [sic] Mercury who seemed to love and relish in the love and adoration from the crowd," he wrote in his suicide note. "The fact is I can’t fool you. Any one of you. It simply isn’t fair to you or me. The worst crime I can think of would be to put people off by faking it and pretending as if I’m having 100% fun. Sometimes I feel as if I should have a punch in time clock before I walk out on stage."

There’s a weird aspect to the tour movie 1991: The Year Punk Broke. In hindsight, it’s almost tragic. It shows Nirvana in the summer of that year, touring Europe with their heroes Sonic Youth and Dinosaur Jr. Cobain cavorting backstage with Kim Gordon and Thurston Moore, loose and happy and young, is sad to watch. He didn’t realize that Nevermind was exploding in the US. When he got back, everything would be different. Less than three years later, devoured by the American fame machine, he would be dead. Listening to Nirvana was always a little harder after that. You heard things differently in the corrosive chords and cracked voice.

Some bands handle it better. When I was a sophomore in high school, a month or two before I heard Nirvana I read a tiny item in Rolling Stone about a band from Seattle with a weird name: Pearl Jam. I bought a cassette of their debut, Ten, and promptly hated it. After two listens, I threw it into the darkest recesses of my closet and thought no more of it — until several weeks later, when the band positively blew up. "Alive" was all over the radio, "Jeremy" ubiquitous on MTV. The fact that everyone loved Pearl Jam didn’t make me want to like them, too. But they were my first experience of being hip to a band before they made it big. Almost 15 years later, Pearl Jam are still around, and Nirvana are not. Pearl Jam’s fame has ebbed a bit, of course, but they seem to have played the game on their own terms. They’ve maintained a pared-down group of true fans, and exist on a more livable level.