The '90s Alt-Rock Wave Crashes Manhattan

Cue the harmonica solo and dust off your flannel: for one strange, wonderful week in mid-August, Manhattan has been colonized by the ghosts of modern-rock radio circa 1996. It starts tonight, when The Wallflowers roll into Irving Plaza, and it crests over the weekend with two more heavyweight bills of acts who once ruled MTV, college dorms, and the CD changer in your first car. Call it a coincidence of touring routes. We prefer to call it a reunion the whole city is invited to.

Tonight's opener — literally and figuratively — is Jakob Dylan's Wallflowers, at Irving Plaza on Wednesday, Aug 12 (doors 7 p.m.). Formed in Los Angeles in 1989, the band spent years as an also-ran before Bringing Down the Horse detonated in 1996, spinning off "One Headlight" and "6th Avenue Heartache" and winning Dylan the younger a pair of Grammys. Thirty years on, he remains one of the more underrated songwriters of his generation, and Irving Plaza — a 1,200-capacity room off Union Square that has hosted everyone from U2 to Bob Dylan himself — is exactly the right size to feel the sweat.

Then the weekend turns the nostalgia dial to eleven. On Saturday, Aug 15, Central Park SummerStage hosts a bona fide '90s summit: Blues Traveler and Gin Blossoms co-headlining, with Spin Doctors as special guests. That is three multiplatinum bands and roughly a dozen songs you know every word to. Blues Traveler brought John Popper's motor-mouth harmonica to the masses with "Run-Around." Gin Blossoms, out of Tempe, Arizona, turned jangly heartbreak into "Hey Jealousy" and "Found Out About You." And Spin Doctors — this is the local angle we will die on — are a New York band, hatched in the West Village club scene in the late '80s before Pocket Full of Kryptonite made "Two Princes" and "Little Miss Can't Be Wrong" inescapable. Watching them play Central Park is a homecoming, not a tour stop.

The same Saturday night, down at the Seaport, The Rooftop at Pier 17 hosts The Psychedelic Furs with Living Colour — a bill that stretches the "'90s" label but earns its place in the wave. The Furs, Richard Butler's velvet-throated British post-punk institution, gave the era "Pretty in Pink" and "Love My Way." Living Colour, another proud New York outfit, formed here in 1984 and detonated the whole "rock is white" myth with Vernon Reid's guitar and the 1988 sledgehammer "Cult of Personality." Two bands, two boroughs of influence, one river view.

Why does any of this still draw? The easy answer is nostalgia, and there is no shame in it — a $50 ticket buys a two-hour time machine to whoever you were when these songs first found you. But the better answer is that these bands can still play. Popper's harmonica hasn't slowed. Butler's croon hasn't cracked. Reid remains one of the most ferocious guitarists alive. This isn't a heritage act phoning it in from a casino; it's road-tested musicianship meeting a crowd that already knows the choruses.

There is also something fitting about it happening here. Two of these bills feature bands born in New York clubs, returning as elder statesmen to play the park and the pier. The '90s alt-rock boom was, in no small part, a New York story, and this week the city gets to collect on the debt.

So string the week together if you can: Dylan tonight, the double-header of '90s radio on Saturday. Bring earplugs, bring your teenage self, and bring cash for a beer you're now legally allowed to buy.

Sources: The Wallflowers — Irving Plaza (Live Nation); Irving Plaza — JamBase; Blues Traveler / Gin Blossoms / Spin Doctors — City Parks Foundation; The Psychedelic Furs w/ Living Colour — AXS