Following contains excerpts from Everybody Loves Our Town (An Oral History of Grunge) (Mark Yarm).
Beginning in the 1980s in Seattle, Washington, young late-teen and early twenty-year-olds on a quest for typical West-coast dissipation, managed to form bands that stayed together long enough to make a significant impact on Rock ‘n Roll. At the time, no one was paying attention to the movement in Seattle, but just a decade later bands like Soundgarden, Nirvana and Alice ‘N Chains would be featured on Saturday Night Live, Vogue Magazine, be a backup band for Madonna, be featured on the cover of Time magazine, have videos on MTV, and be asked to the Oval Office to meet President Clinton.
The most consistent ‘ethos’ in this style was a search for ‘authenticity,’ in which the bands downplayed the notion of the ‘the big show’ and tried (no matter how many thousands came to their concerts, or how big-named they became) to try to stay true to their roots of being ‘common’ and ‘real.’ We teach students in our music school in Odessa, Texas the value of authenticity.
Grunge (sometimes referred to as the Seattle sound) is a subgenre of alternative rock. The early grunge movement revolved around Seattle’s independent record label Sub Pop and that region’s underground music scene. By the early 1990s its popularity had spread, with grunge acts appearing in California, then surfacing towards other parts of the United States and in Australia, building strong followings and signing major record deals.
“The U-men were the first real punk band ever booked at the Bumbershoot Festival.” (Larry Reid)
“The only thing I remember about our shows is getting shut down by the cops over and over and over again.” (Robin Buchan)
“People made records entirely to please themselves because there was nobody else to please, there was no one paying attention to Seattle. It was like a little, isolated germ culture.” (Jack Endino – producer)
“Melvins were the band that inspired the grunge sound more than anybody.” (Tracy Simmons – Blood Circus bassist)
“The thing that cracked me up about Malfunkshun- and the thing I loved about them- was that they would come to the end of the song and Andrew of Kevin would jump in the air to signal, Okay, the song ends here. Boom! But nobody would stop playing- the band would just keep going and going and going. Every show they did was one big, long song with a monster guitar solo all over it.” (Tom Price)
Grunge became commercially successful in the early 1990s, due to releases such as Nirvana’s Nevermind, Pearl Jam’s Ten, Soundgarden’s Superunknown, and Alice in Chains’ Dirt. The success of these bands boosted the popularity of alternative rock and made grunge the most popular form of rock music at the time. Although most grunge bands had disbanded or faded from view by the late 1990s, they influenced modern rock music, as their lyrics brought socially conscious issues into pop culture and added introspection and an exploration of what it means to be ‘true to oneself.’ Grunge was also an influence on subsequent genres such as post-grunge (a derivative of grunge) and nu metal.
“It wasn’t an anomaly to have women in Seattle bands…There just didn’t happen to be women in the bands that got huge in the ‘90s” (Mark Arm)
“There’s always been this element of danger for women in the Northwest, and I think part of what influences grunge is that element and a sort of depressed somberness.” (Alice Wheeler)
Grunge fuses elements of punk rock and heavy metal, such as the distorted electric guitar used in both genres, although some bands performed with more emphasis on one or the other. Like these genres, grunge typically uses electric guitar, bass guitar, a drummer and a singer. Lyrics are typically angst-filled and introspective, often addressing themes such as social alienation, apathy, concerns about confinement, and a desire for freedom. Having a relevant message in creativity is an important lesson we teach the students in our music school in Odessa, Texas.
“Seattle was a cowboy town back then. When we got there, people still wore cowboy hats and cowboy boots.” (Hiro Yamamoto – Soundgarden/Truly bassist)
“I think the mix of punk and metal was single-handedly because of Gorilla Gardens. It was an old theater that had two stages, a metal side and a punk or alternative side. So in the lobby, these people listening to very metal stuff had to be mixed in with people being very punk rock. And they had to use the same bathrooms.” (Tom Niemeyer)
“…Gorilla Gardens…There were some famous clashes with police that happened there that were of note…The parents started sayin’ ‘We don’t want our kids at these things.’ I think that led to the Teen Dance Ordinance. It made all-ages shows impossible to get- you had to have like a million-dollar insurance bond to allow kids to see live music, period.” (Tom Niemeyer)
“Back then people in the Seattle underground weren’t putting out records, and for the most part, when you did, you’d put out a single or maybe a four-song EP…Nobody cared about Seattle or the music coming from Seattle.” (Daniel House)
“Sub Pop turned the tables a little bit: We’re geeks, we’re record collectors, we’re losers, we’re pathetic. People like Mark Arm and Kurt Cobain and Tad, these guys embodied this in such a great way. They were not your typical good-looking punk-rock starts. They were kinda skinny, nose-picking nerds. Except for Tad, who was a fat, burger-burping geek. They were also lovable, and you sort of wanted to be part of that gang.” (Thurston Moore (singer/guitarist for New York’s Sonic Youth)
“That’s Seattle- it’s very passive-aggressive.” (Jim Tillman)
“I was hired by ASCAP to be a membership rep, and the first trip I did was go up to Seattle. We came across something called the Music Bank, which had 50 or 60 rehearsal rooms, all full. It was kind of odd because I was thinking, where did this come from? It was surreal to me, to see this much activity, this many rooms, a multitude of different genres. I was coming from L.A., thinking that’s the only music scene at the time.” (Nick Terzo – Columbia Records executive)
“I hate Mr. Epp & the Calculations! Pure grunge! Pure noise! Pure sh**! Everyone I know loves them, I don’t know why. They don’t even wear chains and Mohawks! They all look different, yuk! And they have no sense of humor. In fact, they have no sense. They’re all pretentious, older that the Grateful Dead, and love Everson Lake & Palmer (my mother’s fave). I love Phillip Glass! While my friends listen to Mr. Epp & the Calculations, I listen to Mr. Glass. His music is repetitious, redundant, and repetitive. Pure art! It’s sooooooo intellectual, like me. I love to listen to Philip Glass over and over and over and over again etc. ad infinitum.” (Mark Arm)
“By ’89, things had reached critical mass, ‘cause that’s when Lamefest happened- all of a sudden, Mudhoney and TAD and Nirvana played the Moore Theatre, and it was sold out. Over a thousand people were there. It was clear to me that the Seattle bands that my friends and acquaintances were in were getting really, really big. (James Burdyshaw)
“The one show of this tour that really sticks in my mind was the Lamefest at the Moore Theatre.” (Chad Channing)
“The U.K. Lamefest really broke the scene internationally- our bands got on the cover of the NME- just like the first Lamefest broke the scene in Seattle.” (Bruce Pavitt)
“When we were in New York, L7 were walking up ahead of us, and all of a sudden the girls were being harassed by a group of Puerto Rican teenagers, all carrying backpacks. So Danny and I step up to be the gentlemen and the protectors, and the kids whip hatchets out of their backpacks! One of the kids swings at Danny and breaks the bottom of his beer off. We were tripping on psychedelics, and at that point all the Cat Butt guys just started dying laughing. And then the girls started laughing. And then the guys with the hatchets started laughing. They put away their hatchets and walked away, laughing their heads off.” (David Duet)
“Seattle wasn’t like a lot of musical communities I’ve seen where everybody is doing what’s hot. We were all rocking, and it was hot, but nobody was trying to cop someone else’s thing. It was a respectful competition.” (Jerry Cantrell)
“Everything that Nirvana did that people consider good was clouded by some horrible thing. Everything.” (Buzz Osborne)
“The ‘Smells Like Teen Spirit’ video came in at the same time the new Guns N’ Roses video came in.” (Amy Finnerty – MTV director)
“In the fall of 1991, that video was getting a lot of airplay on MTV…Within a year of that, there were a lot of different-looking videos: Pearl Jam, Stone Temple Pilots, Soundgarden. It seemed like all the videos now had this angry, dark vibe to them.”
“We got a ton of sh** for being on Madonna’s label. Everybody thinks that you sleep with her. She had just released her Sex book. It’s like ‘Did you f*** her?” We didn’t’ meet Madonna until a year and a half after we signed. No one had sex with her.” (Kevin Martin – band member of Candlebox)
“We first met Madonna at a dinner in New York in March of ’94. We went to Sfuzzi, an Italian place by her apartment on Central Park West. She was 30 minutes late. All she talked about was sex. Afterwards, she invited us back to her apartment. We all went. Her place was f***ing incredible: Degas, Chagalls, Monets, Picassos- you name it, it was all there, hanging on the wall. She had a Steinway in the main living room. It was immaculate.” (Kevin Martin)
“There was a little bit of flirtation there, yeah. I mean, it was all in good fun; it wasn’t serious. She’s very personable that way.” (Scott Mercado)
“When all the bands in the Seattle music scene went on to major labels and bigger success, there was this kind of ‘Let’s pretend that we don’t wanna be doing this and someone’s sort of forcing us to dot it’ attitude. I think everybody day it, including members of my own band.” (Chris Cornell)
“We opened for Metallica in ’94. The end-of-tour party was the most decadent thing I had ever experienced in my life. It was like, mounds of cocaine, strippers, high-class hookers- you got a golden ticket so you can go f***them if you want. That was not my thing. I’ve never been with a prostitute. And I quit doing drugs when I was 18, so for me I was a wasted ticket- I ended up giving it to one of our guitar techs or something. I remember going into this back room and seeing this mound of cocaine, a basketball rim around and six to eight inches high.” (Kevin Martin)
A number of factors contributed to grunge’s decline in prominence. During the mid-to-late 1990s, many grunge bands broke up or became less visible. Nirvana’s Kurt Cobain, labeled by Time as “the John Lennon of the swinging Northwest”, appeared unusually tortured by success and struggled with an addiction to heroin before he committed suicide at the age of 27 in 1994. We strive to teach students in our music school in Odessa, Texas how to maintain a healthy perspective in life and creativity.
“Mark Arm had gotten clean at some point before I started recording My Brother the Cow. He said, ‘This is the first record I’m going to do clean and sober, so I’m a little worried.’” (Jack Endino)
“When the scene died down, the musicians and other people in the business who didn’t make it had to back up and reevaluate. I always say they had to either put on the orange apron the green apron, or the blue apron: Home Depot, Starbucks, or Kinko’s.” (Lance Mercer)
“I wanted to try to nudge us in a direction that was post-grunge. TAD had already been going in a more melodic direction, but it just didn’t have the cohesion yet.” (Mike Mongrain)
Seattle music journalist Charles R. Cross defines grunge as distortion-filled, down-tuned and riff-based rock that uses loud electric guitar feedback and heavy, ‘ponderous’ bass lines to support its song melodies. Robert Loss calls grunge a melding of ‘violence and speed, muscularity and melody’, where there is space for all people, including women musicians. We believe in every person’s ability and giftedness in pursuing artistic expression in our music school in Odessa, Texas.
Grunge fuses elements of punk rock (specifically American hardcore punk and heavy metal (especially traditional, earlier heavy metal groups such as Black Sabbath), although some bands performed with more emphasis on one or the other. Grunge is a “hybrid” that blends elements of heavy metal and punk rock. Alex DiBlasi states that indie rock was a third key source, with the most important influence coming from Sonic Youth’s ‘free-form’ noise. Grunge shares with punk a raw, lo fi sound and similar lyrical concerns, and it also used punk’s haphazard and untrained approach to playing and performing. However, grunge was deeper and darker-sounding than punk rock and it decreased the adrenaline-fueled tempos of punk to a slow, ‘sludgy’ speed and used more dissonant harmonies.
“It was mentally, physically, and spiritually a f***ed-up point in my life. I was waking up and drinking a glass of vodka just to get a dial tone. My marriage wasn’t working at all, and rather than face that, I turned to constant inebriation and then drugs.” (Chris Cornell)
“Everybody was tired of dealin’ with drug issues and personality problems…just sh** like that, where you get crazy paranoid. A lot of ego, too. And low self-esteem. Ego and low self-esteem at the same time.” (Van Conner)
“I got worn out touring. I have the whole sensitivity, bipolar thing that I live with. My wife and I, we had another child. I just couldn’t keep up with everything. That was a slippery slope for me at the time. I fell down. It’s an anxiety disorder. You’re having irrational anxieties- like you life’s being threatened. You can’t get onstage in front of 30,000 people and play your best for two or three hours that way.” (Jack Irons)
“I was mixing that Roskilde show. It was a stormy, really windy, rainy night. A lot of people, great big crowd. Outdoor shows with wind, they don’t ever go very well. It sounds like the P.A.’s being put through a flanger, wind is blowing everything all over the place. The crowd was crunching up, as they always did for the band. Apparently, the ground was uneven, it was very muddy, and people started to go down because of the side-to-side movement of the audience. The front crunch will crush you, but it doesn’t drop you. Going side to side you lose you footing and can get pulled under, and apparently that day happened to a bunch of kids. A security guard had seen a hole where a kid had been and was smart enough to react. He said something to our stage manager, who ran to our production manager, Dick Adams, and said, ‘I thing we have a problem out there.’ Dick ran straight onto the stage and told Ed in the middle of ‘Daughter.’ Ed stopped the band and he asked this huge crowd to take a step back, and they did. And that’s when they saw a bunch of bodies on the ground. I remember Ed drop to his knees. At that point, Dick corralled the band and got them offstage.” (Brett Eliason)
“A spokesman for the authorities tells Billboard that they regard the tragedy as an accident and not a criminal case. The fans, aged between 17 and 26, died as a result of a crowd crush during Pearl Jam’s headline set. Another 30 people were hospitalized.” (Billboard)
The grunge singing style was similar to the ‘outburst’ of loud, heavily distorted electric guitar in tone and delivery. Kurt Cobain used a ‘gruff, slurred articulation and gritty timbre’ and Eddie Vedder of Pearl Jam made use of a ‘wide, powerful vibrato’ to show his depth of expression. In general, grunge singers used a ‘deeper vocal style’ which matched the lower-sounding, down-tuned guitars and the darker-themed lyrical messages used in the style. Grunge singers used gravelly, raspy vocals…growls, moans, screams and mumbles and ‘plaintive groans.’ This range of singing styles was used to communicate the varied emotions of the lyrics. We encourage students in our music school in Odessa, Texas to find new and unique ways to communicate their ideas.
Grunge lyrics are typically dark, nihilistic, angst-filled, and anguished, often addressing themes such as social alienation, apathy, concerns about confinement, and a desire for freedom. An article by MIT states that grunge “lyrics [were] obsessed with disenfranchisement” and described a mood of “resigned despair”. Catherine Strong states that grunge songs were usually about “negative experiences or feelings”, with the main themes being alienation and depression, but with an “ironic sneer.” Grunge artists expressed ‘strong feelings’ in their lyrics about ‘societal ills’, including a “desire to ‘crucify the insincere'”, an approach which fans appreciated for its authenticity. Grunge lyrics have been criticized as “…violent and often obscene.” In 1996, conservative columnist Rich Lowry wrote an essay criticizing grunge, entitled “Heroin, Our Hero”; he called it a music that is mostly “…shorn of ideals and the impulse for political action”.
These were the kids of the previous generation’s Rock music crowd. They saw the excesses, the arrogance, the intensely decadent pursuit of drugs and sex of the artists their parents idolized. The Grunge generation lived in the wake of their parents’ sins. This spawned an attitude of hopelessness, as well as a rebellion to their ego-centered, ‘big show’ super-rock-star mentality. In search of truthfulness and honesty in their art, they invariable fell into the same pit of drug overdose and a generally destructive lifestyle (which seems to always attach itself to the strongest popular musical movements of any genre). But at least it wasn’t quite as excessive as the previous generation.
We hope to inspire in the students of our music school in Odessa, Texas a healthy approach to music-making and artistic creativity, which is both authentic and emotionally positive.