Tesla

The police reports say suicide and conspiracy theorists suspect Courtney Love, but has anybody thought to check Kurt Cobain's shotgun for the fingerprints of a member of Tesla? The motive is there: Nevermind is credited as the nail in the pop-metal movement coffin. But it's hard to imagine a band that was hit harder by the post-Nirvana fallout than Tesla. The hard rockers spent ten years avoiding glam-rock generalizations with jeans and T-shirts and a no-synthesizers policy, only to be dwarfed by Pearl Jams and Soundgardens with a similar (but more raw) aesthetic. (And somehow the band's 1994 album Bust A Nut was unable to rekindle the flame.) While its hair-metal contemporaries will always be canonized for their decadence, Tesla's legacy lies solely in its time-tested, blues-infused tunes. Hindsight has proven that the monster ballad "Love Song" has more staying power than David Lee Roth's aerial splits or Bret Michaels' hairline.