Everclear wraps up its tour in the isles along with Vertical Horizon and Fastball

When grunge faded in the mid-’90s, it opened up alternative rock radio to a variety of sounds. That breadth will be on display in Hawaii this weekend as Everclear wraps up its “So Much for the Afterglow” 20th anniversary tour along with opening acts Vertical Horizon and Fastball.

Everclear’s blend of power pop and indie punk, Vertical Horizon’s icy rock and Fastball’s smart pop rock make for a mix that represents much of late-’90s rock ’n’ roll.

They’ve been on tour together for almost two months and, night in and night out, fans of each band have been receptive, Everclear leader Art Alexakis said last week in a phone conversation as he made his way from Moorhead, Minn., to Wichita, Kan., between shows.

“If you love rock ’n’ roll, you’ll love this show.”

Fastball, best known for hits “The Way” and “Out of My Head,” opens, followed by Vertical Horizon, which topped Billboard’s pop chart in 1999 with “Everything You Want.”

Everclear closes the show, including all of its 1997 album “So Much for the Afterglow.” The album was a landmark for the band, following hit single “Santa Monica” from the million-selling album “Sparkle and Fade.”

“Afterglow” went double-platinum off hits like “I Will Buy You a New Life” and “Everything to Everyone.” The success was sweet for Alexakis, who was especially invested in the record.

“I wrote the record I wanted to write. I wouldn’t change a thing,” he said. “It was my baby. I was dragging those guys behind me. … I was hard on them, but I was probably harder on myself.”

Though “Afterglow” is rife with hit songs, one of Alexakis’ favorite tracks is an album cut, the very personal “Sunflowers.”

“I have a hard time not crying when I sing that, I seriously do,” he said. “(It talks) about a father who had a hard time and then watching his child go through it. I felt that way about my mom, who didn’t have a hard time, but I watched her bury her older son, my brother, from a drug overdose. Now I have daughters, and I hope I never have to hear them sing that song or sing that song to them.”

Alexakis’s first-person approach gives Everclear’s songs a pulled-from-his-life feeling, but he said that is not always the case.

“It’s not always autobiographical. A good writer should be able to write in different ways from different places. That’s the goal, to make it sound like you can’t tell.”

That first-person approach to his lyrics comes from a love for storytelling developed from an appreciation for songwriters such as John Prine, James Taylor and Tom Petty, he said.

Musically, Alexakis cites some harder influences, naming bands from his childhood such as Black Sabbath and Led Zeppelin, as well as ’80s indie rockers such as Husker Du and the Pixies.

These will be Everclear’s first shows back in the islands in a few years. Alexakis said bandmembers are looking forward to returning, as are their families.

“We all officially need some aloha,” he said.

He’s been out to the islands so many times that he’s over all the tourist stuff and just wants to relax.

“You know, it’s funny. When I first went over there — the first 10, 15 times — I always tried to do all these activities, the snorkeling and all this stuff, and it’s great. But now I just get into the Hawaii state of mind very easily — ‘No worries, brah.’”

Fastball’s Tony Scalzo has visited Hawaii frequently with his family, but these are the band’s first shows here since 1999.

The singer/multi-instrumentalist was born in Honolulu, but as the son of a Marine was not raised here. He is looking forward to finally performing here again, especially with an album of new material, “Step Into Light,” to share.

“The Hawaii audience is gonna definitely benefit from being the last gigs on this run,” Scalzo in a recent phone conversation from Winnipeg, Canada, “because everybody’s gettin’ real good after playing together every night.”

In the case of Fastball, the members also benefit from having played together for more than two decades. Fastball is the only band on the bill that hasn’t weathered any lineup changes, as Scalzo and his bandmates — guitarist/vocalist Miles Zuniga and drummer Joey Shuffield — have stuck together since they formed in Austin, Texas, in the summer of 1994.

They became a sensation in 1998 when “The Way” spent several weeks atop Billboard’s modern rock chart. Follow-up hits “Fire Escape” and “Out of My Head” helped the album “All the Pain Money Can Buy” go platinum, a bittersweet experience for the band.

“Success brings all kinds of challenges,” Scalzo said. “Mainly, there’s other people working for you and it turns into a machine and you’re getting chewed up by the machine.”

Scalzo appreciates the level of success Fastball has settled into, where members can make a nice living doing what they love without the pressure and thirst that comes with being too big.

“I like the way things are now,” he said. “I guess a certain level of maturity has set in, so the work ethic is geared toward the project, and it’s more fun to do it now too. We’re trying to build something that’s going to generate our business over the next couple of decades.”

Fastball got a nice jump on that long-term plan recently with some unexpected income when rapper Machine Gun Kelly incorporated the chorus from “Out of My Head” into “Bad Things,” his hit duet with Camila Cabello. For Scalzo, it was a flashback to when “The Way” shot up the charts in 1998.

“It was really great because for four weeks or so we watched it climb on the Billboard charts (it eventually reached No. 4), and it was pretty awesome. You know, my kids are excited, and I’m excited. It feels just like it did 20 years ago.”

Vertical Horizon experienced the thrill of watching a track climb the charts in 2000 when the title track from their major label debut, “Everything You Want,” rose all the way to No. 1 on Billboard’s Hot 100 singles chart, helping propel the album past 2 million in sales.

But a leadership change at their label, RCA, dealt their momentum a blow, as the new team wasn’t as high on them as the old one was, leaving their follow-up languishing.

“They kept pushing the record release date back and we tried to get out of the deal,” singer/guitarist Matt Scannell told Lehigh Valley Music in 2014. “It just was too bad, ’cause to experience such highs followed directly by lows was a bummer.” (Requests for an interview with Scannell, the only remaining member from the band’s heyday, went unfulfilled.)

That follow-up, “Go,” finally saw its release in 2003 and spawned a couple of smaller hits, but the damage had been done. Fourteen years later, it’s easy to wonder if things might have played out differently if music was as easy to release on the internet as it is now. Online presence is something the foursome has taken to.

“The presence of the band online is really the focus now, so that people can instantly get to us and get their content directly from us,” Scannell told Music Times in 2013. “We are just encouraging people to listen, and if they like it, great.”

The band’s latest album — 2013’s “Echoes from the Underground — was crowdfunded, which Scannell said gave members more freedom. The result was a more electronic sound.

“I’ve always drawn from singer-songwriters Peter Gabriel, James Taylor, Simon & Garfunkel, The Beatles — the songwriters who have fundamental songwriting nailed,” Scannell told Music Times. “But on this one, I really went back to my Joy Division records, my New Order records, Depeche Mode.”

So that’s even more variety the three bands will deliver. But ultimately, as Alexakis promised, it’s all rock ‘n’ roll.