Albums That Changed My Life 8: Grunge and the Seattle Sound

I attended high school in Seattle from 1989 to 1993.  It was the perfect time, the perfect place, and the perfect age from which to observe the rise and fall of Grunge.

Not that I liked it right away.  I spent most of the late 80s listening to thrash metal.  I was obsessed with Megadeth early on, and by 1989 I was well into second, third or fourth-tier bands like Sacred Reich, Death, and Seattle's own Metal Church.

At that point in my life "easy listening" amounted to Hard Rock bands like Van Halen or AC/DC.  I wasn't a huge fan of what we then called "Van Hagar" (Van Halen + Sammy Hagar), but Alex and Eddie's talent was beyond question.  OU812?  Not awesome, but if you ignored the stupidity of Hagar's lyrics there were enough hooks to make it good.

About the same time, when I was 16 years old, I clued into the fact that a local band, Alice in Chains, was accompanying Van Hagar on the Monsters of Rock tour.  Soon after that I saw the video for "Man in the Box" on MTV, and I liked it well enough to buy the album.

Of course back then I thought of Alice in Chains as a metal band.  The term "Grunge" hadn't been coined yet, and to my ears Alice in Chains wasn't all that different from other, local metal bands I'd been hearing around Seattle.  At the time I probably thought they'd learn how to "polish" their sound, and more closely resemble local favorites Queensryche.  Local music history will show this attitude to be wrong, but it's what many of us thought at the time.

Not to put too fine a point on it, but the Puget Sound's* pre-Grunge music scene followed a rough trajectory from Bing Crosby (really!), to The Sonics (remembered for "The Witch"), to Jimi Hendrix, to Heart, to Queensryche, and then to the loose association of musicians who eventually formed bands like Alice in Chains, Nirvana, Mudhoney and Soundgarden.  Most people associate Seattle with Grunge (or vice versa), but there's also a whole hazy backstory of bands that paved the way.

With the result that when bands like Alice in Chains, Soundgarden and (especially) Nirvana finally made it big, there was a whole reservoir of talent built up behind them.  This only helped grow the scene later, once record producers got wise to what was happening.  Suddenly these local musicians - most of them having kicked around for years - had a shot at the big time.  Even now it's hard to explain the sense of excitement this turn of events generated in a place as overlooked as the city where I grew up.  Bands sprung into existence overnight, friends decided they were going to be rock stars, and some of us - years later - even succeeded in doing so.

But back in 1990, around the time I bought my copy of Facelift, most of that was still on the horizon.  In 1990 we were still a backwater known for making airplanes (hence Queensryche's "Jet City Woman"), and Alice in Chains was more a curiosity than anything else.

Until, as you might expect, the massive success of Nirvana's "Smells Like Teen Spirit" and their album Nevermind.  This was followed closely by Pearl Jam's Ten and then Soundgarden's Badmotorfinger.  Almost before anyone knew what was happening, we had FOUR Seattle bands in the charts, and the term Grunge - whatever that means - was born.

My first concert?  Alice in Chains, the Dirt Tour, Seattle Arena.  The Supersuckers (another local band) and Eugenius (from Ireland) were the opening acts.  I missed Nirvana at the height of their popularity, I missed Pearl Jam and Soundgarden, but yeah, I can claim that one badge of honor.  After I saw dozens of other local bands that have come and gone, and I have many good memories of attending concerts during that time.  As friends and I followed the scene Grunge mutated into Post Grunge, which may or may not have been the same as Alternative.  Who knew what it really was?  Who cared?  What mattered was that it all sounded good, or at least interestingly adventurous, and we were always eager to hear more.

Looking back at that time and those bands, it's funny to think of how my opinion has changed over time.  I was and I remain a lifelong fan of Alice in Chains up until Layne Staley's suicide.  However these days I can't stand Pearl Jam, who I worshiped around the time Ten was released.  Nirvana I liked from the beginning, but it took me a while to appreciate the simplicity of their music.  Soundgarden?  In the beginning I thought I hated them, but I was really equating them with earlier, more amateurish efforts.  When I finally sat down and listened to Badmortorfinger - probably around the time Superunkown came out - I was in awe of it.  Soundgarden is now, I have to say, is my favorite of the Grunge bands.

The early 90s.  Not a bad time to be alive.  Or at least that was the case for me.  And when it wasn't a good time at least I had great tunes to rock out to, and great concerts in my future.

Related Entries:

Albums That Changed My Life 7: "Rust in Peace" and Other Thrash Albums
Albums That Changed My Life 6: Iron Maiden's "Number of the Beast"
Albums That Changed My Life 5: Rush's First Album and "Power Windows"
Albums That Changed My Life 4: The Top Gun Soundtrack

*For those not from the area, the Puget Sound is a huge inlet west of Seattle.  Seattle and the other cities around the Puget Sound are often referred to as the Puget Sound region or the greater Puget Sound.

Wherein the Author of This Blog Uses Knute Berger's "Pugetopolis" to Talk About Both Himself and the Puget Sound

(Self-aggrandizement is fun.  Just ask Knute Berger.  In the spirit of both self-aggrandizement and Knute Berger I offer the following thoughts, all "inspired" [if that's the right word] by his book "Pugetopolis")

(And although much of this book could be boiled down to the statement "Nature, old buildings, and local traditions good; business interests, development, and economic decision-making bad," there are some "subtleties of argument" in the authors varied essays.  Some of these subtleties of argument are presented below.)

1. Knute Berger distrusts the future:

"I remember talking about the future with my mother.  We were in our summer cabin in the San Juan Islands some time in the 1960s.  One day, she predicted, they'll cut down all the trees and pave everything."

Yeah... that's not going to happen.  Just look at the size of most people's yards.  If anything, yards are bigger out in the suburbs, NOT smaller.  And I realize that "urban density" is a dirty word around here, but how else can you conquer the trend toward sprawl?  At some point someone's going to build one of these developments you hate so much, just so that others have somewhere to live.

Those vehemently against this type of development probably already own a house - with a big yard - inside the city.

2. Knute Berger is "edgy":

"People tell me how surprised they are at liberal Seattle's prudish crackdown on strip clubs and lap dancers, but it seems totally in character to me."

It is in character.  This area has a long history of laws and regulations intended for our moral improvement.  But I notice that Mr. Berger says very little about alcohol and drugs in this context.  Why?  Because he was writing for the Seattle Weekly in 2005, and he was afraid of offending someone.  

Instead of concentrating on strip clubs (a vanishing beast around here for sure), it would have been more enlightening to discuss the larger issue of how (often unspoken) religious concepts play into people's conceptions of the public good.  The author, writing as he is the journalistic equivalent of tomato soup, avoids this almost entirely.

3. Knute Berger cares about the Earth:

"My first thought when I see such a load is, "Is it still legal to cut those trees?"  To me, it's amazing that we are still tossing such rare commodities into buzz saws and turning them into mundane things like shingles and lumber."

...says the guy who probably lives in a wooden house, built long ago by people who made their living cutting lumber.  That wood has to come from somewhere, doesn't it?

And I don't know...  Perhaps that piece of "old growth timber" spotted by your owlish eyes wasn't really old growth at all.  Maybe it was also growing on private property.  Maybe it was knocked over in a windstorm, or by lightning, or it was diseased and removed by trained forest service personnel.  Not all of the trees can remain where they are, and some of them are removed for perfectly acceptable reasons.

4. Knute Berger is "old school":

"Modern mossbacks [his term for people that have acclimatized to the area] - still sneered at my many newcomers and outsiders  - are not people who have settled the country but people who have been settled by it.  We've been here long enough to put down roots and become part of the modern landscape.  'Mossback' is an epithet to embrace with pride."

Does this make ME a mossback?  Or did I cease being a mossback the moment I moved away from the area?  God, I hope so.  Such an "epithet" strikes me as silly, and perhaps even shameful.  Seattle is hipsterish enough without clowns pretending to be more "local" than other, "nonlocal" clowns they're trying to impress.

5. Knute Berger worries pointlessly:

"Just as the range was fenced off, we in the auto age are now facing a future that comes with more toll gates, private roads, and high-tech surveillance technology."

Really?  This is something you spend time worrying about?  Ten years later, I doubt that toll gates, private roads, or high-tech surveillance are any more pervasive than they were in the early 2000s.  The surveillance state is a real worry, but the only thing hindering your freedom of the road is other drivers.

6. Knute Berger becomes hard to relate to:

"Our summers became Shaw Island summers, we spent days exploring the coastline in a skiff, walking the woods, collecting old fishing floats on the beaches.  Our only social life consisted of hanging out with my mother's cousin and her husband.  Margaret 'Babs' Cameron was an artist who made sensuous wildlife sculptures in soapstone.  Her husband, Malcolm, was an illustrator and architect who built wooden steamboats for fun."

Cool, man.  But my parents never had a cabin on an island, and I never spent summers floating around on a skiff.  No one in my family ever sculpted anything out of soapstone, and I never enjoyed the kind of wealth your family seems to have enjoyed decades previous.  I don't have anything against those with recourse to island cabins, skiffs, and artsy relatives, but I also don't pretend it somehow makes me more "local" than those who had to work harder and indulge in cheaper pastimes.

7. Knute Berger isn't sure if he wants to portray himself as "local boy" or member of the aristocracy:

"It's a funny thing to watch the kids you went to high school with grow up and, in some cases, become important people."

Or, conversely, it's a funny thing to watch the kids you went to high school with grow up and, in some cases, become residents of various penal systems, employees earning minimum wage, or patients in the care of mental health institutions.  

I'm not trying to be depressing - we had our success stories too - but Knute Berger sure does spend a lot of time talking about all the rich and influential white men he knew in high school.

8. Knute Berger oversimplifies incredibly complicated subjects:

"Isn't it odd that in a time of economic shortfall, our major priority is roads?  We're slashing social and health services, cutting back on fundamental state services, making a good public education harder to come by, but the one bill that everyone in Olympia everyone can agree upon is a welfare bill for the road lobby?"

Knute seems to regard the roads around here as a luxury.  But are they?  Just imagine, for example, that you're a recent immigrant living in White Center, and you work at a nursing home in Shoreline.  Are you going to be able to afford public transportation back and forth between both places?  Would it be worth it if you could?  Most likely you're going to want a car, because that car means less time in a vehicle, and more times spent with your family.  For many people road improvements are a social service, and moreover a social service that many desperately need.

Knute's also assuming that the budgets for transportation, social and health services, and education are the same thing.  In many local and state governments these budgets are kept separate, and are subject to oversight by different individuals and organizations.  If these budgets really do fall under the same jurisdiction and oversight, this should have been stated in the article.

But to be fair, the last two sections of this book are pretty good. It's only that I find Knute Berger's positions on any number of topics ill-defined and seemingly contradictory.  I doubt, in other words, that this book will add significantly to anyone's understanding of the Puget Sound region.  I liked parts of it well enough, but if this region has a voice, Knute Berger isn't it.

Post Grunge

I grew up in Seattle.  I graduated from Ballard High School in 1993, right as grunge was on its way out of fashion.  It was a good time to live in the Emerald City, and I have many fond memories of that chapter in my life.

Not that I miss high school all that much.  But there were good times to be had in other places.  Aside from holding my breath through the average school day, there were lots of all-ages shows back then, and even for a high-school kid like myself there was always something to do after school.

Like a lot of kids my age, I came to grunge from metal.  I was listening to Rush in elementary school.  I was listening to Zeppelin in middle school.  I was listening to Iron Maiden and Metallica by the time I was 16.  Most of the grunge bands were fairly close to metal, they were local, and they managed to alienate our parents.  These were all marks in their favor.

It was 1991 when I first saw Nirvana's "Smells Like Teen Spirit" on MTV.  All of my classmates saw the same video.  From Nirvana it was only a step to Soundgarden, Alice in Chains, and Pearl Jam, and from such humble beginnings the music of Seattle somehow conquered the world.  Suddenly grunge was everywhere, and when people were talking about grunge they were also talking about Seattle - about places I haunted every day.

Of the four bands mentioned above, Alice in Chains was probably the band I took to most readily.  At that time they were touring with Van Halen, and Van Halen (the Roth incarnation, anyway) was one of my favorite bands.  I can remember listening to "Facelift" over, and over, and over, and over again.  I couldn't get enough of Layne Staley's voice and Jerry Cantrell's guitar.

Back then, when the Seattle Scene was in full flower, Nirvana would have been my second favorite.  I thought "Nevermind" was OK, but it wasn't until "In Utero" that I really got into that band.  Pearl Jam was lost on me.  I also failed to understand Soundgarden, though they emerged as my favorite in later years.

There were a host of other bands, of course, many of which few remember.  Gruntruck was another favorite, as was a (very) local band by the name of Engine Kid.  A lot of my friends were into Mudhoney and the Supersuckers, but I found those bands tolerable at best.  There was also Queensryche, which in some ways preceded Nirvana, but no one seems to think much about Queensryche anymore.

It was a good time to be into music.  I can remember seeing Alice in Chains at the Seattle Arena - one of my first concerts ever.  I can remember seeing Gruntruck.  I can remember seeing Tad.  I saw countless other bands, but Alice in Chains was the only band within grunge's "big four" that I had the chance to see.  Whatever kind of music you were into back then, there was always a show to be found.

Yet no sooner had the Seattle Scene found an audience than many of these bands began to self-destruct.  Alice in Chains stalled after "Dirt," though they did release other albums.  Kurt Cobain's suicide pretty much signified the beginning of the end, only three years after "Nevermind" broke records.  Pearl Jam continued on for some time, but their changes in musical direction estranged many fans.  Soundgarden disbanded after the "Down on the Upside" tour, though they reunited in 2009.

Not that any of this bothered me much at the time.  College beckoned, and my listening tastes changed.  Nirvana gave way to Radiohead, and Alice in Chains gave way to Shudder to Think.  I went through a Miles Davis phase.  I went through a progressive rock phase.  I went through a glam phase, with David Bowie on the turntable almost every day.  Occasionally I would pull out my copies of "Badmotorfinger" or "Facelift," and remember what had been.  Grunge quickly disappeared, but it was hard to care at the time.

But I still feel thankful for that time, and that music.  It was a good time to be a teenager, and it was a good time to live in Seattle.  I can remember seeing Kim Thayil in the audience at that Alice in Chains concert, and my brother serving Layne Staley burgers at the Dick's on Queen Anne.  Many of those guys were MTV superstars, but they acted as if no one had bothered to tell them.  By the end of the 90s many of them were just regular guys again, MTV having left them far, far behind.

It's a funny thing when that kind of attention comes to your hometown.  The world is turned upside down, and things that seemed boring before somehow seem important.  Then, all at once, the moment passes, and the place you grew up in is just as it was - no better, and no worse.  So it was with grunge.  It was everything, and nothing, and we always knew that it was going to end too soon.