There have, of course, been many Nirvana biographies, from those cut and pasted from interviews with the press, to those claiming to be "official". There have been films and biopics, live films and reissued box sets. Every milestone anniversary is accompanied by those iconic pictures of Kurt Cobain, panda eyes boring into the camera lens. What these artefacts have failed to do is to fully contextualise Nirvana within the movement they were part of, that is, grunge. The other bands that found success immediately before and after Nirvana's landmark 'Nevermind' have often been ignored as the cult of death grew up around Kurt and a kind of redemption story formed around drummer Dave Grohl's new band, Foo Fighters. So what about those other bands? How did such a rich and diverse musical scene grow and thrive in the provinces of America's Pacific Northwest? How did Seattle suddenly become the centre of musical universe? These are the questions that Mark Yarm seeks to answer with his laudable tome 'Everybody Loves Our Town'.
The book is an oral history that seems to have the primary purpose of reminding people that there was a lot more to grunge than Nirvana. The author- or more accurately, editor- of the text begins with a note on the term "grunge". There have been many stories about how the term was coined over the years: the best guess, judging by chapter 17 of this opus, is that Mark Arm of Mudhoney found it in a 1970s music paper, used as an adjective when discussing guitar tone. He then used it when writing fake hate mail about his own high school band, Mr Epp and the Calculations ("Pure grunge! Pure noise! Pure shit!"), which later led to record label Sub Pop using it to describe Arm's second band Green River ("ultra loose GRUNGE that destroyed the morals of a generation"). Some time after that, music journalist Everett True was flown out from London to cover the emerging Seattle scene and used the word to describe the scene. Suddenly the word was everywhere, so much so that this word, with its richly evocative phonetics, was suddenly being applied to everything from bands to clothing. Which bands were grunge? Is the word only applicable to bands from Seattle, or also to more recent bands that have emulated the sound? Why did kids who called themselves "grungers" in the early 2000s not actually listen to grunge? It is a fascinating subject, and the interviews conducted by Yarm over a three year period tell a tale that is never anything but compelling.
Yarm's structure is largely chronological, which gives the book the page turning quality of a best selling novel, and also allows one to develop a widescreen sense of how the scene evolved. We start with the "proto-grunge" band The U-Men, who the major players in the scene that followed were avid fans of. Following their tale, we meet the members of Green River and Malfunkshun, who would later break off and combine into three of the quintessential grunge bands: Mudhoney, Mother Love Bone and Pearl Jam. Next we meet Soundgarden, the first grunge act to achieve major label success and in many ways the most stable of the bands in that scene, and then Screaming Trees and TAD, both of whom were largely responsible for the classic grunge "look" of flannel shirts and longjohns under jeans (Chris Cornell of Soundgarden explains this clothing preference as being partly to do with the area's inclement weather, partly to do with the cheapness of such gear and partly because of the fact that many band members from the scene had worked manual labour in local industries like logging). We hear all about the young Kurt Cobain (described by Melvins' Dale Crover as a "funny motherfucker") who by all accounts was not the tortured artist everybody would like to think of him as. We learn about the development of Sub Pop records, equally as fascinating as the tales about the bands that appeared on their infamous compilations. Later, we read about the almost ludicrous success of Soundgarden, Nirvana, Alice In Chains and Pearl Jam, and the consequences of that success, ranging from heroin addiction to fatherhood to dealing with the rapacious mainstream press. Even during these sections, the multiple voices that make up the narrative ensure that the book never indulges in mythology or a glamourisation of rock star excess.
What really stands out about this book is the intelligence, DIY culture and originality of the musicians of Washington state, and the passion and integrity with which they recount their experiences. There's no self-pity or navel gazing from these people, even though, as a reader, you know that tragedy is around the narrative corner at almost every turn. Some of the passages about death are just heartbreaking, and yet the focus lies on remembering those people for the friendship they gave and the music they made. The deaths of Andrew Wood of Mafunkshun and Mother Love Bone, Stefanie Sargent of Seven Year Bitch, Mia Zapata of The Gits and of course Kurt Cobain himself all cast a shadow over the scene and how it is remembered. Two of Yarm's interviewees, Mike Starr, formerly of Alice In Chains, and Ricky Kulwicki, of Fluid, tragically died just before the publication of 'Everybody Loves Our Town'. Of all of the reflections on tragedy though, I was most touched by Jerry Cantrell of Alice In Chains' description of his band's vocalist Layne Staley: "people realise what the guy contributed and the amazing talent that he was...nobody's ever gonna know personally what kinda fuckin' guy he was. We do, and he was so fuckin' cool and badass." I think that says it all.
There's no doubt that the massive strength of this book is that it is told by those who were involved. There's no narrative bias or editorial comment to distract the reader from the multitude of stories that are told. As a text, it has told for the first time the story of a movement that had so much more to it than Nirvana, as great a band as they were. When I finished this book high over the Atlantic Ocean on my way to America, I determined that the first thing I was going to do when I got back was get on Spotify and listen to all of the bands I had read about. It's been an interesting couple of weeks of listening. This weighty oral history comes highly recommended to anyone interested in bands, music, but most of all, friendship.
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