Everybody Loves Our Town: A History of Grunge (Mark Yarm)

Unless you were living under rock for the entirety of the early 1990s, you'll know all about Nirvana, the band that emerged from the provincial backwater of Aberdeen, Washington to bestride the musical world, led by charismatic enigma Kurt Cobain, equally in love with The Beatles and underground 80s punk, a genius songwriter who, it would seem, never wanted to be famous and ultimately succumbed to his personal demons, becoming one of the most famed and lamented rock 'n' roll suicides of all time. Since that tragic event, Nirvana's legacy has been one of t-shirt designs and slightly distasteful hero worship from the generation that followed Nirvana's orgiginal fanbase. Everything surrounding that time seems to have become distorted, warped, in the same way as with The Doors and Jim Morrison, or The Beatles and Lennon, or even with Amy Winehouse...

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.

Morvern Callar (Alan Warner)

Literary history is filled with infamous, confrontationally beautiful opening lines. Who could forget "It was a bright cold day in April, and the clocks were striking thirteen" from 'Nineteen Eighty Four', "As Gregor Samsa awoke one morning from uneasy dreams he found himself transformed in his bed into a gigantic insect" from 'Metamorphosis', "People are afraid to merge on freeways in Los Angeles" from 'Less Than Zero' or "Mother died today. Or maybe yesterday, I don't know" from 'The Outsider'. Well, to that hallowed company you can add the first line of Alan Warner's 1995 debut 'Morvern Callar': "He'd cut his throat with the knife." With that stark statement, we are introduced to a new existentialist narrator, the laconic, amoral Morvern, a twenty-one-year-old shelf stacker for whom the suicide of her older, upper middle class boyfriend is an opportunity to be grasped rather than an occasion for mourning.

Indeed, it seems that her dead boyfriend, who is never named, intended Morvern to be set free from the fences her class and location have put up around her, given that he leaves her everything he has. He asks only that she sends off his novel, so that he can gain some posthumous fame. In a moment of blind inspiration, Morvern deletes his name and substitutes her own, gaining herself a nice little advance cheque in addition to all the money in the deceased's account. She also disposes of his body in a rather unique fashion, never telling anybody of his demise. They have, she says, "broken up". In the early part of the novel, Warner paints an especially bleak portrait of life in a port town in the extreme north of Scotland, from the supermarket where Morvern used to have to wade through blood and bone in the butchery department to the archaic pubs and working men's clubs Morvern tours with her friend Lanny. Existence here seems to exude a kind of sinister desperation reflected by the inclement weather. This is small town life at its most insular, and Warner paints it in a vivid and convincing manner throughout. The fact that Morvern is utterly indifferent to everything- sex with strangers, her boyfriend's horrifically grisly suicide, the love of her foster father, her friendship with Lanny- adds to this feel, making every page of stark prose entirely fascinating. She is truly a worthy successor to the likes of Meursault in the line up of great existentialist characters. The fact that her attitude does not change when her windfall leads her to two extended, extravagant tours of the Med show that she is completely dead to joy, but equally, not depressed in any way...she just exists.

I was utterly absorbed in Morvern throughout as she has so many obsessions that speak of control. She endlessly lists songs she listens to in a new cassette walkman, going so far as to give the reader full tracklistings of various compilation tapes. She continually refers to her cigarette lighter with the alarmingly specific choral refrain "I used the goldish lighter on a Silk Cut" (a technique also used in 'Fight Club' where the narrator has several of these stock phrases, for example "I know this because Tyler knows this"). One of her Christmas gifts from Lanny is a pedicure kit, which she uses to continually re-paint her toe nails throughout the novel, and several times a day during her Mediterranean excursions. As she spends more time on holiday she develops an addiction to tanning (a control motif familiar from Ian McKewan's 'The Cement Garden'). Her decisions are so hard-edged and pragmatic, instinctive and amoral, never clearly explained to the reader.

I've read various opinions on this book around and abouts, and I must say, I think a lot of people have missed the point when they say that 'Morvern Callar' is some kind of bildungsroman, with Morvern "learning about her womanly soul" and "going on a journey of self-discovery". For me, the whole point of the book is that she has no desire to learn about herself or the world around her. She does not care about anything at the beginning of the book, nor at the end. The absurdity of human existence is laid bare throughout, and our attachment to possessions and places is questioned with a forensic, critical eye. This is brilliant book, with Warner equally assured in both Scottish and Spanish settings. He does something many authors strive to do but few truly achieve: he creates an original, charismatic and memorable voice for a literary character.

Ecstasy (Irvine Welsh)

Another month, another Irvine Welsh to review. I picked this up in a charity shop back in November, despite the fact that I had so many other unread books on the shelf. I'm such a hopeless book buying addict. Anyway, fresh from reading 'Filth', I popped this in my bag to read on a coach journey to and from London, the return leg of which turned out to be so epically traffic delayed that I had pretty much finished it by the time I got home.

'Ecstasy' (subtitled 'Three Tales of Chemical Romance') is a collection of three novellas which are loosely linked by the themes of love and drug taking. The first, 'Lorraine Goes To Livingston', concerns Rebecca Navarro, an author of best selling romantic fiction who suffers a stroke and, during her convalescence, discovers the dastardly deeds of her pornography loving husband and cooks up a revenge scheme with her young scots nurse. A bizarre sub-plot focuses on a necrophiliac television personality of their acquaintance who gives generously to a local hospital in return for, ahem, "access" to the recently deceased. The novella is narrated in the omniscient third person and structures the action quite ingeniously, with the actions of each of the characters finally intertwining at the end in a manner strangely reminiscent of Jane Austen. The narrative is punctuated by extracts of Rebecca's unpublished work in progress, a formulaic Regency romance which transforms into a poronographic romp to spite her husband's ambitions for yet another money spinning novel he can live off of. In all honesty, although it is enjoyable enough, even amusing at points, 'Lorraine Goes To Livingston' is quite lightweight and not particularly impressive as a whole. It feels like Welsh is often experimenting with form for the sake of it, and the character of Freddy Royle, the necrophiliac presenter, is deeply irritating, with the West Country dialect not translating as well to the page as Welsh's more familiar Scottish characters' dialects do. The endless references to nineties club culture feel forced and the plot of the story is too outlandish for it to truly work as social commentary.

The second novella, 'Fortune's Always Hiding', begins promisingly, but ultimately feels like a missed opportunity. Samantha Worthington is one of many victims of a drug called Tenazadrine (a very thinly veiled Thalidomide) and has been inducted into a brutal revenge scheme against its makers by a former lover, the German anarchist Andreas. However, this brutality has left her emotionally cold, unable to enjoy her life or her vengeance. It is a chance meeting with football hooligan Dave Thornton that transforms her life, not only because she is able to use him against the last living man responsible for Tenazadrine, its British marketing director Bruce Sturgess but also because she begins to feel again. The novella again suffers from a gimmicky structure, with present day first person narration from Dave and third person flashbacks from the perspectives of Samantha and Bruce. Furthermore, the supposedly heroic character of Dave is deeply unpleasant, with Welsh seeming to glorify hooliganism and misogyny in the most naive way possible. This is supposed to be a redemptive tale, the thug and the victim joining forces against corporate evil, but Bruce is too much of a pantomime villain for this to work, a mere parody of capitalist greed. This is sledgehammer sociology and it doesn't work. Aside from the incendiary prologue, the only moment that made me want to cheer was a brief glimpse of Mark Renton from 'Trainspotting' in one of Samantha's flashbacks about London's punk scene.

In some ways, 'The Undefeated' feels like the best thought out of these novellas, but it's still deeply disappointing; you can see what Welsh was trying to achieve, but he missed the mark as far as I'm concerned. Heather is in her late twenties and unhappily married to Hugh, twenty-seven going on forty-seven. Her narrative of bored middle class desperation runs alongside that of Lloyd, a veteran club-goer who worries that he doesn't get enough out of life outside of the E induced euphoria of the weekend. Lloyd is a much more familiar Welsh character type, and it's a relief to return to the familiar "Ah wis jist sayin, ken?" dialogue and the semi-stream of consciousness narrative. This type of writing, Welsh does well.  The plot, however, is weak, essentially revolving around multiple nights out and drug psychology in the case of Lloyd, and domestic drudgery in the case of Heather. You do certainly root for both characters in a way that you don't in either of the other two novellas, but the way in which their nascent relationship is painted at the end ruins the build up Welsh has given it. The heavy handed elucidation of the club scene, and ecstasy use in particular, doesn't help matters.

'Ecstasy' is a massive disappointment, three novellas which have their moments but ultimately feel disposable. I can only assume that back in 1996, with the film adaptation of 'Trainspotting' taking over the world, Welsh let the hype get to him and published something unworthy of his considerable talents. Poet laureate of the chemical generation he may be, but there's nothing poetic about this book, and nothing that future generations could use to piece together what nineties Britain was truly like.