Bloomberg Businessweek
Go To Businessweek.com
During the past 20 years, the author has watch China move from being a developing country into an industrial superpower
Money Moves, 5/24: Chocomize Co-Founder Fabian Kaempfer talks with Bloomberg’s Deirdre Bolton about the business of customizing chocolate
The president's campaign has a new rule—no cell phones allowed
In honor of remote control inventor Eugene Polley, we recognize other influential but neglected inventors who have felt the sting of stolen glory
Forget Adderall. Traders now pop chia seeds to stay focused and energized
The Italian automaker and others are adding hybrid technology to elite cars
The storied bridge that links San Francisco and Marin County changed the face of California
Schools cultivate ties with startups before they're big successes
Dave McClure's traveling venture capital show scours the world for promising startups
Grunge, now a Rock and Roll Hall of Fame museum piece, put Seattle on the map for better, and decidedly worse Christian Heeb/Laif/Redux
Everybody Loves Our Town: An Oral History of Grunge
By Mark Yarm
Crown Archetype
592pp; $25.00
Kurt Cobain famously opened Nirvana’s final studio album, In Utero, with the lines “Teenage angst has paid off well / Now I’m bored and old.” In the Seattle of the early 1990s, nothing, not even worldwide commercial success and near-universal artistic acclaim, was above moaning about. Indeed teenage angst did pay off well. Grunge, the musical genre of which Nirvana was Exhibit A, was at once a grassroots repudiation of the hair-metal hegemony that preceded it and a commercial juggernaut that woke up the world to Seattle. It also completely upended the music business, elevating independent labels and precipitating a major-label gold rush to the Pacific Northwest.
Mark Yarm, a former editor at the defunct Blender magazine, has taken it upon himself to capture every blessed, accursed moment in grunge’s history. Before he gets down to the business of presenting his exhaustive, 250-interview-strong account of the music movement that put the city in the global spotlight, he semi-apologizes for using the word grunge, which rankled Seattle’s scenesters back then and evidently still does. “When I see the word grunge, especially on books,” he quotes an interviewee, “I kind of go… .” Then this person proceeds to make “a rather convincing vomiting sound.”
A dedicated miserabilism pervades Everybody Loves Our Town, a feeling among its participants that life sucked in the lean years because it was harsh and penurious and that life sucked in the boom years because it was flash and phony. One minute, the erstwhile members of the U-Men, a seminal proto-grunge band, are recalling how they had to shoplift from 7-Elevens to survive on tour in the ’80s; the next, Eddie Vedder is summoning the psychic scars he bore from appearing against his will on the cover of Time. “I never knew … that they could sell magazines and make money, and you didn’t have a copyright on your face,” he says.
Yet the fact is that something truly exciting and appealing happened musically in Seattle as the ’80s turned into the ’90s. And grunge is a fairly apt, onomatopoeically pleasing way to describe the movement’s defining characteristics: the musicians’ mildewy flannel shirts and defiantly unteased hair; the marriage of punk’s DIY ethos to Black Sabbath’s heavy, down-tuned guitar riffage; and the dark and caustic lyrics. As local journalist and DJ Jeff Gilbert says: “Grunge isn’t a musical style. It’s complaining set to a drop D tuning.”
Yarm seems to have unearthed every living witness to the birth of the Seattle scene. Nearly two-thirds of the book goes by before he reaches the epochal event that loosed a plague of A&R men upon the Emerald City: the release of Nirvana’s Nevermind, in September 1991, to whose 20th anniversary his book is timed. Everyone is here and on the record, from the alumni of the forebear groups U-Men and Skin Yard to the scene’s enduring celebrities (Vedder, Dave Grohl, Chris Cornell, Courtney Love) to the scrappy survivors in the second rung (e.g., Mark Arm of Mudhoney); from Bruce Pavitt and Jonathan Poneman, the promotionally savvy but financially inept overseers of Seattle’s beloved indie Sub Pop label, to the opportunistic jackals from the major labels; from MTV’s Kurt Loder and Riki Rachtman to the designer Marc Jacobs, whose notorious “grunge collection” for Perry Ellis (flannels, Doc Martens, and skull caps repurposed for the runway) got him fired from his job as the company’s creative director.
As impressive a display of reportorial industriousness as Everyone Loves Our Town is, though, it’s not for the casual rock-history reader—the kind who might pick up Steven Tyler’s memoir in an airport. Yarm’s book is Advanced Placement reading for the serious rock snob: the kind of person who not only wants to familiarize himself with the genealogical intricacies of how the bands Mother Love Bone, Pearl Jam, Temple of the Dog, and Mudhoney trace their origins back to the band Green River but is also keen to pore over the individual accounts of these bands’ musicians to compare and contrast their testimony.
