Billy Corgan with Zwan, Chris Cornell and Audioslave, Dave Grohl with Foo Fighters, Tenacious D and Queens Of The Stone Age. Pearl Jam making their best album in years. Courtney Love on more magazine covers since the early 90s and she doesn't even have a record out. Nirvana everywhere. A new breed of bands heavily indebted to the class of '91... Grunge is back!
Grunge was the most important musical movement since punk and it had a unique impact on guitarists. Famously, the story runs, grunge brought about the death of the guitar solo: the anti-muso stance of Kurt Cobain combined with his cooler-than-cool image made the hair rockers and the 80s widdlers look like old-hat at best and ridiculous at worst. Guitar playing was stripped back to its most basic: a slamming riff, a handful of powerchords, an overload of distortion...But... That's not really true, is it? The truth is that the class of '91 featured some great guitarists and songwriters: Billy Corgan, Jerry Cantrell, Kim Thayil, Stone Gossard and Mike McCready, Kurt Cobain and many more. To pay respect, we asked the guitarist-and-songwriter-turned-journalist credited with discovering the scene, Everett True, to explain what grunge was and how it happened. So grab your Superfuzz, plug it into your Big Muff, throw on a check shirt... it's gonna get grungy!
Seattle 1988 is where it all started. People ask me what the attraction of Seattle was. It was the energy, the insane amount of energy rising up through the boards of that town's clubs, the musicians with their long greasy hair and unflagging sick humour, the thrill of loud music. Bodies tumbling on top of bodies, faces smiling and grinning and lapping up the pain, musicians such as Mudhoney's Mark Arm and the mighty Tad Doyle and any number of interchangeable grunge bands all merging into one sweat-soaked, glorious whole. The parties where I'd be barricaded into bathrooms by junkie models looking to get laid, and later race through streets in cars high on delirium and alcohol and the thrill of the chill night air. The skyscrapers, towering into the night like a symphony of neon and rich promise, ringed by an almost mythical circle of mountains sometimes not seen for years, such could be the density of cloud and rain. The cheap Mexican beer, endless supply of coffee and trips to the liquor store. The top floor of the Terminal Sales Building where Sub Pop had its offices, world domination stupidly promised in literature and on the phone, glorious views of the Puget Sound and the city through every window. The warehouse, wandering through a collector's delight of coloured vinyl, knowing you could take anything you want and you wanted everything you took.
What was there to be excited about? Oh, so much, so much...The numerous late night transatlantic phone calls, enthusing about this or that, not checking facts - never checking facts - only on the look out for more outrageous lies, more tales of glory. The live shows filled with noise and surprise and the hum of amplifiers feeding back, the bass always too loud, the whole crowd a hive of wanton activity. Overnight drives spent chatting to friendly dominatrixes, strip bars that doubled as discos with the mirror ball turning and Tad's band thudding, scuzzy joints that threw you straight on to the street when your drinking slowed down too much. Train rides that lasted for days and ended with me taking Sub Pop's bosses for all they owned at poker.
Soundgarden lit farts; Mudhoney talked ancient scriptures; The Walkabouts swung with gentile grace; Nirvana acted all young and mischievous. What was the attraction of Seattle? It was the lilt in Mark Arm's smile, that knowing smirk as he took another swing at the microphone stand. It was the insane numbers of friendly faces all looking to make sure your good time was your only time; dorky girls who dragged you to ridiculous places and made up songs when the sleep deprivation became too much; conversations that lasted for years.
February 1989 was my first time in America. I'd been flown over there to investigate the nascent Sub Pop label: the Sonic Youth-championed Mudhoney were starting to make inroads into the UK's student discos with their full-on guitar wallow Touch Me, I'm Sick, and Melody Maker wanted someone to investigate. I took one look at the Seattle skyline as it rose into view over the highway from the airport, like a corporate Emerald City, and fell in love. I remember thinking to myself: "Don't be absurd. You'll probably feel this way about every city in America you ever see." I saw many, and never did.
Seattle in '89 had little to distinguish it from the outside world: rain, good coffee, Boeing, a fish market and a beautiful skyline, at the centre of which was the Space Needle built for the 1962 World Fair. It was a remote big city with a small-town attitude, stuck away in the top Northwest corner of the States, sheltered by the Olympics and the Pacific Ocean on one side, the Puget Sound (an inland sea) on another, Canada on a third, and cut off from the rest of America by the Cascades, and two thousand miles of badlands, cornfields and the Rocky Mountains.
The factor that differentiated Seattle from a dozen other American cities was its insular self-belief. Seattle groups all listened to the same records: Iggy Pop, 60s garage band (and homeboys) The Sonics, and also Portland's Wipers, Led Zeppelin, Black Sabbath, Australia's Scientists and seminal slow-core psychedelic punk rock missing links Flipper. Few of these artists had much time for punk's brevity or holier-than-thou elitism. Late 80s Washington garage bands like The U-Men, Screaming Trees and Green River wanted more from their music than three-minute rants.
"Mostly, these musicians had been in jokey hardcore punk bands in the early 80s," explained former Sub Pop general manager Rich Jensen. "After a few years they reacted against the lazy pseudo-rebellious posing of their peers - too many Mohawks and too many leather jackets covered with shallow political slogans, no guitar solos allowed - and started riffing out, growing their hair and acting like pre-punk gods of rock."
Unlike metal, which by the late 80s had degenerated into a bad LA hair parody of itself coupled with dullard sexism, this music had an impassioned urgency. Seattle musicians had learned well the lessons of US punk pioneers like Black Flag, Minutemen and San Francisco's female-led The Avengers. Already, the Northwest had a sound of its own: "Hard music played to a slow tempo," as Kurt Cobain described it to me in '89. This was a sound that took equally from hard rock, punk rock and psychedelic rock, and was infused with a freshness that made it sound unique. A word was needed to describe what was happening: self-deprecating, steeped in garage lore and disposable. You didn't need to look far to find something that matched the dirty, abrasive guitar sound of Mudhoney: grunge.
Looking to discover who invented the word? It wasn't me, despite claims on the internet to the contrary [and by Pearl Jam on p54 - Ed]. Lester Bangs described The Groundhogs as "good run-of-the-racks heavy grunge" in the April '72 issue of Rolling Stone. Even as early on as Green River's Dry As A Bone, Sub Pop were promoting their label's sound as "gritty vocals, roaring Marshall amps, ultra-loose GRUNGE that destroyed the morals of a generation". (The 'Loser' tag that settled round the grunge generation's neck, and was immortalised by Beck's 1994 single Loser, came from an early Sub Pop T-shirt.)
In late '88, Sub Pop bosses Bruce Pavitt and Jonathan Poneman realised they were nearly out of funds. In what would later become a typical show of bravado, they decided to fly out an English journalist to cover the Seattle 'scene' in a last ditch attempt to stir up industry interest. The call came at a good time. I'd started writing for Melody Maker a few months earlier, and was fed up of 'the Godfather of Cutie' tag I'd gained by championing bands like The Pastels, Shop Assistants and Beat Happening at my previous paper, NME. I'd already been turned on to Green River. My friends and I hadn't totally understood all the Steve Harris triplets, but we could relate on a primal level to future Mudhoney singer Mark Arm's howl. Here were bands that achieved what I had thought hitherto impossible: they made metal sound cool. It's worth remembering that during the mid-80s, pop music was anti-guitar. You couldn't pick up the NME or Rolling Stone without reading someone like Toyah or Gary Numan telling you that the guitar was old and dead, a phallic symbol of repression. Early Sub Pop's guitar-driven rock was a human reaction to the drum machines. John and Bruce's stroke of marketing genius was to push rock 'n' roll as rebellion - an ancient credo - while allowing people to listen to big dumb rock and retain their hipster credibility. Up until grunge, there had always been a line drawn between popular and underground music, with Journey on one side and Dead Kennedys on the other. People got beat up for being punk rock, especially in the US.
Sub Pop confused that line once and for all. "There never was anything unique about the so-called 'Seattle Sound'," Peter Bagge, the cartoonist behind Hate's Buddy Bradley, the slacker precursor of Bart Simpson, explains. "It was your typical whiteboy noise: heavy metal with a punk attitude. Identical music was coming out of a lot of places, particularly Chicago, at the same time. It wasn't even a new sound. In fact, it sounded very retro 70s to me, only louder."
The scene soon degenerated. Grunge started to die the moment it became exposed to the outside world, as all scenes do. As soon as the hangers-on and major label A&R men in town started to out-number the creative people, the artists, musicians and fanzine editors.Kurt Cobain's suicide was the final straw for most. There had been other deaths - Stephanie Sergeant from L7-style female punk band 7 Year Bitch, Andrew Wood from Mother Love Bone, Mia Zapata of The Gits - but none with as much impact as Cobain's.
Suspicious of outsiders by nature, the city's musicians and late-come scenesters retreated into a taciturn near-silence. (Seattle, despite all its Microsoft millions, has always retained a parochial small-town attitude.) Soundgarden and Alice In Chains split a few years later. The first was partly caused by a deep-rooted hatred of the record industry, the latter by the band's continued dalliance with heroin. Even now, it is still almost taboo to speak of Nirvana, or indeed grunge, in public in the Northwest.
Having your lifestyle laid open to ridicule on the fashion catwalks of Paris and in films like Reality Bites and Singles will do that to a generation.
In all the words I've avoided reading about Nirvana since Kurt Cobain's death, I rarely see any mention of the grunge band's feminine side. Yet to me, this was the most interesting aspect of their rise to fame. Sure, Kurt had a great voice. Sure, Krist Novoselic had the most endearingly goofy way of throwing his bass up into the air and sometimes catching it again. Who cares?
Who cares if Nirvana could rock and wrote catchy refrains? Anyone can rock and write catchy refrains. Fuck. Give me five minutes and the fingerings to three chords, and I'll write you a song to set the world ablaze. There's nothing smart or clever about having the ability to plug your amplifier into the wall and flick the switch to ON. The chords in Smells Like Teen Spirit, that famous guitar riff that helped launch a thousand MTV executives' bank-balances, are basically Boston's More Than A Feeling updated. Chad Channing's drumming on Nirvana's 1989 debut album Bleach was directly influenced by the full-on approach of Melvins' superlative Dale Crover. Melvins were the band Kurt once roadied for. Great, but male.
The reinforcement of rock stereotypes wasn't Nirvana's forte, even if it did help shift the units. Nirvana had far more to offer the public than that. Nirvana played punk rock as preached by UK bands like The Raincoats and Slits and The Pastels, not the hardcore (wrongly mistaken for punk) of Henry Rollins and The Exploited. At their finest, at Kurt's finest, Nirvana's music directly recalled the hurt, overly sensitive soul of punk outcasts like Half-Japanese's Jad Fair and Austin idiot savant poet/singer Daniel Johnston. This wasn't rock in the classic sense, far from it. Nirvana's soulful force came from the female side of Kurt's nature - nourished and fed by people like Calvin Johnson and Bikini Kill and yes, even Courtney Love. Kurt might have loved the heavy metal riffs that helped free him from a life of small-town drudgery in Aberdeen but he also thought there was something wrong with the people creating those riffs. Hence the constant reference to sickness throughout Nirvana's career. The mentions of cancer, infirmity and hospitalisation in Kurt's lyrics served as wider metaphors for the corporate rock industry he despised.This is how it was for me, first arriving in Seattle; attracted by the sound of rock but repelled by its attendant baggage. I felt an instant attraction towards all the long-haired obnoxious laid back rockers like Mudhoney and Tad, despite my training. I might have had my feminist ideals, but when I first heard Love Buzz one chilly November evening in 1988 at the Melody Maker offices, I was attracted by the record's power - not because I saw it as part of some wider movement. I played it back to back 17 times with The U-Men's Solid Action and the split Sonic Youth/Mudhoney 12-inch as Maker staffers walked by the window, laughing at my dancing.
Sure, I liked to rock... and having hated rock 'n' roll for so long, all this unrepentantly full-on rock - this Seattle grunge, as Mark Arm jokingly referred to it when I first met him on the corner of 1st and Virginia - seemed fresh and unexpected to me.
Everett True is the author of Live Through This: American Underground Music In The 90s (Virgin) and editor of Careless Talk Costs Lives (www.carelesstalkcostslives.com)
If grunge hadn't happened
There might still be guitar solos in rock music. Can you imagine?!We might still be listening to the 'shoegazers'. Or 'baggy'. Everybody wouldn't be copying Eddie Vedder's vocal style and there'd be no Stone Temple Pilots, Nickelback, Puddle Of Mudd, Default, Saliva [insert name of almost any new US rock band].Courtney Love wouldn't be naked on the cover of Q.Dave Grohl wouldn't have brought us the Foos or drummed with the D or QOTSA.Kurt Cobain's journals would, thankfully, have remained private.Mullets would still be in fashion.Skid Row would've become the new U2.Smells Like Teen Spirit wouldn't have become the new Smoke On The Water.There would - let's face it - be a lot more boring, guitar solos in rock music.
-TotalGuitar.Co.Uk
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