Big Mountain

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Big Mountain formed in San Diego around the singer and guitarist Joaquin "Quino" McWhinney, and in early 1994 their cover of Peter Frampton's "Baby, I Love Your Way" reached number six on the Billboard Hot 100, number one on Mainstream Top 40 and number two in Britain, carried further by the Reality Bites soundtrack. The album Unity sold over a million. They matter to this archive as evidence of how far the form had travelled by the 1990s: a Mexican-American band from southern California, playing reggae well enough to outsell most of what Kingston released that year, and doing it with a soft-rock cover rather than an original — which is either the music's reach or its dilution depending on who is asked, and the archive holds the question open. The line-up around Quino included Jerome Cruz, Gregory Blakney, Lance Rhodes, Manfred Reinke and Lynn Copeland. No embed: the surviving video upload is a reupload on a nostalgia channel with no identified rights holder.