In the midst of the whiplashing weather this week — going from the dead in 60 seconds deep freeze to springtime 60s and back again — I plowed through Mark Yarm’s Everybody Loves our Town: An Oral History of Grunge, which I stumbled upon back home at Myopic a few months ago. As indicated by the title, it tells the tale of the rise and fall of grunge, the rocketship that burst into the heavens in the early to mid-90s, turning legions of kids into flannel-sporting shoegazers, before blowing apart almost as quickly on reentry.
It follows the same format as Lizzy Goodman’s Meet me in the Bathroom: Rebirth and Rock and Roll in New York City 2001-2011, which chronicled an equally epochal (and ephemeral) moment in music, leveraging the memories of the era’s key participants — everyone from band members and producers to journalists and standers-by — to remind us how that moment (and its seminal albums) came to be. What’s unavoidable in comparison to that book, though, is how differently it makes you view the music (and its makers) by its conclusion. As I wrote before, Goodman’s tale was full of really good bands — the Strokes, Interpol, Yeah Yeah Yeahs, LCD Soundsystem, the Rapture, the Walkmen, the National, Grizzly Bear, Vampire Weekend, Kings of Leon, the Vines, and the Hives, among many others — being made by people who (for the most part) seem like folks you’d want to have a beer with. They seem funny, self-deprecating, and passionate about the music they were making, and each of their bands have at least two outstanding albums, if not more, among them.
Contrast this with those found in Yarm’s book and you’ve got basically four bands who weren’t mostly (or completely) terrible — Nirvana, Pearl Jam, Soundgarden, and Alice in Chains — and a scene full of delusional, pretentious dicks, a significant chunk of whom also happen to be raging drug addicts and/or alcoholics. Almost nowhere in their recounting is a love of the music they were making — which when you go back and listen makes sense because outside the big four most of these bands have at best one mediocre album to their name, and that’s being generous — but almost everywhere is this cloying sense of entitlement — an endless litany of people saying they were a better singer/drummer/guitarist than this person, that their band was better than this band, that they should have gotten this magazine cover or record deal or be the ones who were famous. It’s an exhausting, frustrating, read as a result — which apparently shouldn’t be a surprise, because as one of the journalists says early on, “Seattle isn’t a glamorous town at all. It was pretty pathetic. Very depressing. That’s where this music came out of…Grunge isn’t a music style, it’s complaining set to a drop-D tuning.”
And that’s what we get — nearly 550 pages of backbiting and bitching, talking about a scene (and sound) no one seems to particularly like much (but still want the credit for creating/guiding/driving). Where Goodman’s book makes you look back more fondly on the titans and want to investigate the smaller bands around them, Yarm’s makes you question even liking the big bands to an extent and want to completely avoid the smaller ones because of the cumulative effect of disgust you get from their deeds/disposition. If Goodman’s book was full of the equivalent of happy drunks, Yarm’s is full of their opposite, hateful, destructive disasters you want to steer clear of at all costs. Goodman’s tales of excess involved people who got fucked up and danced, jammed, or goofed around, the rooms seemingly filled with warmth and laughter. Yarm’s, on the other hand, are filled with people who got fucked up and fought (each other or strangers, verbally and/or physically), destroyed things (rooms and/or relationships, mostly just because they could) and/or OD’d, the rooms seemingly filled with bile and belligerence. Goodman’s drunks are the ones who hug you and tell you they love you, Yarm’s are the ones who punch you in the face, fuck your girlfriend, and take a dump on your coffeetable after they smash up your apartment.
Almost no one escapes unscathed — only Nirvana’s Krist Novaselic and the ever-unassailable Dave Grohl come off looking like upstanding human beings, as does Pearl Jam for their decision to stop doing interviews at the height of the frenzy to focus on their music instead of how to become more famous. The vast majority that remain invoke varying degrees of revulsion in the recounting for being self-important, self-indulgent, and/or otherwise shitty to their fellow man. It even affects some of the big four — the Alice guys’ drug and booze fueled debauchery (aside from the very sad tale of frontman Layne Staley) was disappointing, and the same goes for several of the guys in Soundgarden (aside from the sad fate of frontman Chris Cornell). The complaining and outright disdain for those around them (including their fans) is oppressive, like a flannel after a heavy rain. (One comical discovery to that point was the latter band being referred to as Frowngarden due to their perpetual demeanor.)
It’s all very unfortunate — due in no small part to the high number of deaths that occurred during this span, which number nearly in the double digits (most by overdose, with one homicide and one very famous suicide as well), but also because of how important some of this music was to people. I remember vividly when Nirvana started blowing up, becoming an omnipresent part of my teenage years, plastered on every magazine and TV screen you found. I was in middle school and remember hearing “Teen Spirit” for the first time in a Sam Goody, standing there captivated by how loud the drums were (and how angry/indecipherable the singer’s screams were) while watching the cover with the tiny penis spinning from the ceiling. I remember listening to the follow-on In Utero in the car with my dad, cringing when Cobain sang about cancer turning someone black in “Heart-shaped Box,” but identifying instantly with the album’s anger as my mom was nearing the end of her battle with that plague. I remember waiting eagerly in line at the mall for the second Pearl Jam album to come out and listening to the third one incessantly while working shifts at the local ice cream store, cramming whipped cream-filled piroulines into my face almost as quickly as the riffs raced by in its blistering lead single, “Spin the Black Circle.” (Pearl Jam may not be responsible for my days as a doughboy, but they were certainly witness…) And I remember even then the moments that gave me pause — inscrutable lyrics that were passed off as poetry, pretentiousness that was passed off as genius, mediocrity or the willfully weird that were passed off as legendary greats, as well as untold songs and scenes about drug abuse that were passed off as passe parts of the party instead of worrying cause for alarm.
Each of those glimmers from my adolescent memory are highlighted in withering incandescence here and the additional focus makes you realize all of the fame, hype, and pressure almost couldn’t have happened to a worse group of people — not just in terms of temperament (ie good things happening to shitty people), but more in how they’d be able to handle it once it arrived. And based on their own testimony, it was a recipe for disaster — self-destructive behavior spun out of control (far too often fatally), delusion and disagreeability led to fractious divorces and disputes, egos and insecurities spiraled into depression or self-obsession, with the end result being the music suffered and the people who most needed help often didn’t get it.
It’s a truly depressing mess made all the worse because the music plays such a small part of their recollections. Grohl is one of the few who talks about music being the one thing he knows he’s meant to do and one of his overarching joys. For almost everyone else it seems like just a job or an excuse to sportfuck and get blackout drunk or high. (Or a way to continue deluding yourself with misguided thoughts of your own greatness — you’re right, guy, Cat Butt didn’t get as big as Pearl Jam or Nirvana because you refused to sacrifice your “artistic integrity.” NOT because you’re in a band called Cat Butt and the music sucks. Christ…) How the music industry coopted and cannibalized the good parts of the moment is well known and unfortunate, but so are the lesser known elements that helped them along — the bands and individuals whose actions this book lays bare. This one’s a disappointing reminder on the perils of power and its ability to reveal people’s true natures.