Everybody Loves Our Town: An Oral History of Grunge [ハードカバー]

Being born in 1987, I wasn't really old enough to appreciate any of the music talked about in this book at the time when it first came out. That said, I kinda gravitated towards grunge after I started learning guitar. I loved the Melvins, and being a punk and garage fan, Mudhoney were an easy addition to my CD collection too. I bought some Nirvana albums and some Alice In Chains, etc. as I went along.

I think the main reason for me gravitating towards grunge was the simple fact that, even if that odd "title" for a supposed musical genre did encompass a large range of the rock landscape, from metal to punk to modern rock, it always included plenty of guitar.

I grabbed this book out of a desire to learn more of what went on with this movement, and because I usually find these oral history books a fun read, even if many stories are somewhat inflated and probably a little inaccurate.

Its a long book, but a very good one. Its a bit of a slow starter, but when Sub-Pop really gets its legs and a bunch of bands are being signed to the majors, the stories come fast and furious, and its always a great read. We hear a lot about all the big bands, plenty of the small ones, and a ton of concert stories, the band members view of the media explosion, how they felt when the hype died down, all that stuff. Like I said, a good good read.

Here are some things I learned reading this book (or at least found interesting, even if I already knew them):

-The Melvins' incredibly slow sludge music was influenced, not directly by Black Sabbath, but by "My War" by Black Flag, where the 2nd side of the record gets all slow.

-The girls of L7 were NOT all gay (Jennifer Finch and Dave Grohl were an item for a while!)... I don't really care one way or the other, honestly, but if you saw the cover of "Smell the Magic," it was almost as though they WANTED you to think they were the butchest chicks around.

-Kurt Cobain was kind of a tool bag. I mean, he seems like a decent guy most of the time, but after Nirvana hit it big, you start to hear a lot more stories of him being quite a d-bag to people.

-Courtney Love is one of the most horrid, deplorable people ever to have a career of any kind in the entertainment industry. I would have reached that conclusion just reading her own interviews in this book, but plenty of testimony from other people help reinforce that conclusion. The whole time I was reading about her, all I could think of is a joke from commedian Neil Hamburger: "Whats the difference between Courtney Love and the American Flag? ...It would be inappropriate to urinate on the American flag."

-Layne Staley from Alice In Chains was kind of the Johnny Thunders of the Seattle scene. He was a great talent who was a huge influence and made some excellent music, then he got addicted to heroin, and slowly dissolved into drug-related death. The descriptions of some of his sightings later on in the book match up almost note for note to what people said about seeing Johnny Thunders pop up through the 80s.

-I missed out on a TON of great albums... Half the fun of this book for me was finding out about these other great bands, most of whom you can buy used copies of their albums for dirt cheap here on amazon. As I type this, I have music from TAD, Mother Love Bone, and the Screaming Trees in my car. Its all been great so far. I'm happy this book has expanded my early 90s horizons.

If you're a music nerd with any passing interest in ANYTHING from the grunge era, this book is a fantastic, informative, well put together read. Check it out.

I nearly gave up on this book shortly after I started it. I was born in late 1980, so I was only ten years old when Nevermind hit the stores and brought grunge into mainstream America. During the years that grunge was vital and relevant, then, I was a little too young to connect with it. My friends' cool older siblings liked Soundgarden and Nirvana and Pearl Jam (although the fourth big grunge band is consistently listed as Alice in Chains, I have never had a personal relationship with anyone interested in that band), and I had a couple of Pearl Jam CDs on my shelf collecting dust (because my mom had heard somewhere that all the cool kids liked Pearl Jam, and she wasn't going to tolerate a kid who wouldn't even try to be cool), but I was never really an active grunge fan. I mean, I liked flannel because it was a style that was kind to fat kids, but I didn't personally connect to the music. Even today, I generally reference Kurt Cobain when I'm helping people who want clarification on how I spell my name, but I'm certainly not a devoted Nirvana fan. And the first 100-150 pages of this book are largely concerned with the regional roots of grunge. Many vapid observations about bands you've probably never heard of: "Man, I went to that U-Men show at that venue, and I was sooooo drunk..." "Yeah, there was a dead cat at that one show, and it was crazy..." "Yeah, I met this member of my new band in my high school, and we smoked pot at his mom's house, then I met this other member of my new band in my high school and we smoked pot at my mom's house..." It was a bunch of people telling inane stories about when they used to be cool in their hometown. And with no connection, I was prepared to give up on the book and write a polite review about how it's only geared toward those who are already intense grunge fans.

And then Courtney Love showed up.

Into a world of rational observations and shallow analysis, Yarm starts sharing quotes from Courtney Love, who thunders in like a hostile unicorn stomping around in an uncovered septic tank. She spills her trash-mouthed crazy sauce all over the pages of this book and turns it into something amazing.

I recognize that Love's portrayal is generally negative, with different figures complaining about her toxic influence, and her own quotes being almost unfailingly agitated and disrespectful. And in the context of the whole book, she has a small role, only a few quotes and a few more references to her by other participants in the project. Still, the book changes at a fundamental level when she appears. It gets wild and unpredictable, especially since that's about the point where the narrative picks up speed. Bands start taking off on a national level, and the sources interviewed start sharing not only their thoughts but also their responses to the ways they were portrayed at the time. The book develops a sense of purpose, an epic scale like a collection of Shakespearean tragedies, and a grand historical perspective, and Yarm's gifts as an historian really begin to shine.

Yarm is, by all the evidence in this book, a phenomenal historian. The range of perspectives is simply astounding - nearly every member of every significant band, plus the music executives, the venue owners, the roadies, the random fans... In a few haunting moments, Kurt Cobain even speaks, as Yarm shares contextually appropriate excerpts from Cobain's suicide note and his journals. Yarm also shows a great deal of precision and care as he takes disconnected interviews and weaves them together to make clear moments and clear timelines. Yarm's sense of humor is wicked and brilliant, as he often juxtaposes contradictory memories or allows his stars to laugh about what their friends have said about them.

After the first rough couple of hundred pages, I loved this book at a level I can't really explain. I was excited for band members who would enjoy things that they did well, and when tragedy would occasionally strike, usually in the form of an overdose and a gripping memorial service (beautifully captured with reverent memories of the participants, sharing pain that hasn't really gone away in twenty years), I almost always had to put the book down and walk around the house for a while before I could get centered enough to return to the story. Band members still mourn the emotional wounds inflicted by their record companies, and producers still regret the hard choices that they had to make. Some people still nurse grudges, but most have grown enough to try to forgive those who hurt them twenty years ago. This book was honest and it was wise and it was powerful, and I recommend it to anyone. The long introduction is really only for fans of grunge and its origins, but the rest of the book is for fans of humanity, and this book is a treasure.

In the early Nineties, a roar of flannel-encased rage came from the extreme northwestern corner of the United States, a musical movement with a lot of weird-sounding band names and even weirder-sounding songs. Then, in a poof, it was gone. Twenty years later, we as a nation are still trying to figure out how we feel about the dreaded word "grunge," but the movement that it labeled is more than just a distant memory.

In Mark Yarm's brilliant "Everybody Loves Our Town: An Oral History of Grunge," the major and minor players of that movement get to have their say, with no interference from the author in the way of chronology or commentary. Beginning with the little-known U-Men (who I was not aware of before I read this book), Yarm opens up the history of grunge as less Nirvana-centric than other books before this, profiling Soundgarden, Pearl Jam, the Melvins, and countless others. Using interviews from such luminaries as Eddie Vedder, Chris Cornell, and the always feisty Courtney Love, Yarm uses their words to convey the moment that the movement broke big, and the fallout that occurred once the major labels stood up and took notice. Sub Pop's legendary founders Bruce Pavitt and Jonathan Poneman both benefited from and were victims of the national obsession with everything Seattle, and of course Kurt Cobain was its most high-profile casualty. But theirs is not the only take on the grunge story.

Some of the most interesting interviews come from members of the Melvins (and their unorthodox connection to America's sweetheart, Shirley Temple Black), Candlebox (derided as "jumping the Seattle bandwagon via Los Angeles" even though their members were longtime residents of the area that grunge called home), and various hangers-on of the major and minor bands, all of whom were caught up first in the excitement of the post-"Smells Like Teen Spirit" boom and then in the feeding frenzy that ultimately corrupted the scene. Not every band from Seattle made it, of course, and the members of those bands were often on the outside looking and their comments show the flip side of what happened.

And there is the long list of those from the scene who are no longer around, from Mother Love Bone's Andrew Wood (whose death prompted Cornell and Vedder to headline the "grunge superstar group" Temple of the Dog), 7 Year Bitch's Stefanie Sargent, Gits lead singer Mia Zapata (whose rape and murder caused suspicion within the scene), and of course Kurt Cobain, whose death rightfully signaled, if not the end, the twilight of the grunge movement as a national obsession. But the saddest story to emerge is that of Layne Staley, the former Alice in Chains frontman whose death in 2002 was virtually ignored at the time. Staley's last days, recounted by friends and bandmates, paints a harrowing portrait of a man old before his time due to the drugs that once fueled the scene.

But in the end, the survivors of the madness are still around, whether thriving in the music world (like Pearl Jam) or happy to remember their moment in the sun. "Everyone Loves Our Town" doesn't pull punches about what went wrong (the moment when, as the Who once sang, the punk became the godfather), but it shows that the bands who were part of that scene, whether major or minor in the history of grunge, certainly had some good times to go with the bad ones. When the media spotlight faded, when labels like Sub Pop either went out of existence or downsized to more manageable, less-hyped configurations, and many of the brightest lights burned out and faded away, grunge was still vital as a beacon to what can happen when the music comes from a place that's not about money or fame. Whether you liked grunge or not, you will enjoy "Everyone Loves Our Town," because it's not about the death of a movement but the brief moment when it thrived.