The Alternative Number Ones: Everclear’s “Everything To Everyone”

December 20, 1997STAYED AT #1:1 WeekIn The Alternative Number Ones, I’m reviewing every #1 single in the history of the Billboard Modern Rock Tracks/Alternative Songs, starting with the moment that the chart launched in 1988. This column is a companion piece to The Number Ones. The column is now biweekly, alternating with The Number Ones on Mondays. A few months ago, Patrick Stickles from Titus Andronicus cannonballed into some Twitter grunge discourse with a great point about Everclear. The terms "Everclear" and "grunge" don't often appear together, but they fit. In the early '90s, the band came out of the Pacific Northwest (Portland, not Seattle) with big riffs and bigger hooks, the latter growled out in a weatherbeaten rasp. Their first album came out on Tim/Kerr, the same Portland indie label that released the experimental record that Kurt Cobain made with William S. Burroughs. Everclear were in the grunge mix, but they were also outside of it, at least partly because of the quality that Stickles points out.Big facts, also the only band of that bunch where every song is actually about a real life topic that might matter to a regular person rather than a bunch of “imagistic poet...