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Gather 'round my children
and I shall tell you the story of grunge. Ok
so it was about the early eighties in Seattle, and it was always kind of a musical town,
and uh, but about 1980
bands stopped touring up there because they figured it was too much trouble to go
like all the way up from San Francisco to Seattle just to play a show,
so the bands were kind of left to their own
devices to like form a music scene, so bands started forming in like the early 80s
like Malfunkshun and the U-Men, and
it slowly started to get a little bit of the grunge sound but it was still kind of the 80s
and um
and then about 1981, Mark
Arm was talking to The Rocket which is a local
magazine up there and he was describing his band Mr. Epp and the Calculations
as Pure Grunge! Pure Noise! Pure
***!, so that was the first time the word grunge
really came about in the scene, though he
actually says now that that wasn't the first time grunge was used to describe music and he got it from other people, but
safe to say if he hadn't have said that right then, who knows what it would be called today.
So that was 1981, so yeah "grunge" was around
ten years before Nevermind came out and um
So like the musicians in
Seattle, they didn't really feel like choosing
between all the heavy styles of rock music, so they all kind of just
mixed it together, and that also led to the sound. They didn't want to
be on the side of metal or punk so they figured, why not just take all the really cool heavy
parts of all of these things and
mash it together 'cause it's fun, so it was more about just
having fun, getting drunk, partying, just
playing loud music 'cause it's really cool to do so.
So the whole ethics thing, genuine, liberal type stuff,
alternative type stuff came in more like Nirvana and Pearl Jam in the 90s
because the 80s scene was all about being really heavy and just going crazy.
and um so where was I, the
early 80s, and then kind of the
um the mid 80s it started to really get the
sound and, they, all the bands, like,
they were, it was a very close-knit scene, a lot of them were friends, they
all played in each other's bands, you can have this huge web of
inter-connected band members 'cause there's like way less than 6 degrees of
separation between these band members because they all kind of shared bands,
and once a band would break up, the members of those bands would go and
form bands with the members of the other bands that just broke up, and
the members of the audience of the bands that were playing were musicians from the
same types of bands that would play the same bills and so on and so forth so
it created this really cool, unique,
close-knit scene. That's kind of how the
sound came about and how the unity of it came
about, and they didn't, it was Seattle so they
didn't think they were going to be famous so it's not L.A., no one's going to pay attention
so because the whole competition/pressure was off, they were actually able to pay attention to the
music
and create a good quality music, because that's always what happens because people are kind of wrong when they say competition
is an incentive because really, having a
big like friendly scene is more of an incentive
and actually caring about your passion instead of worrying about
competition and fame and money, so when those things are out you can actually create
a good thing
so that's kind of why it was good because they really wanted to just play
music. They were the types of
people that loved music, played in their
rooms, played in their garages, also the weather kind of led to them
staying in doors a lot and when you're bored, you don't know what to do,
you can't go
outside, might as well pick up a guitar and play some music and write some cool riffs and
lyrics and stuff, so there was that. Um
what else
Oh yeah and the bands that did tour up there were bands like
Big Black and uh
*** Surfers, and they always said that they thought that the Seattle Scene was the coolest because
all the people would just go crazy and have really fun and
at the shows and everyone was moshing, getting
drunk, and it's a lot better than the stiff L.A. and New York scenes where everyone's critiquing everyone all
the time
so that kind of showed some of the cool spirit
of it. Um, so the musicians were left to their own devices to form music, and they were
inspired by each other as well. They liked
each other's bands, they used that to influence each other,
and they mixed all of their influences together,
together, and around
the mid 80s the bands started to form
like Soundgarden and Green River, and that was kind of the first big
sound of the sound of grunge, and in 1986, a
compilation album called Deep Six came out, which had 6
really great and heavy bands on it, and that was
Soundgarden, U-men, Green River, Skin
Yard, Melvins, and Malfunkshun, so it was kind of the
first stamp that said there was something going on in Seattle,
so that was a very important thing. And then around
late 80s, '88, another compilation album came out called Sub Pop
200, and this was when Sub Pop was starting to form,
I think they kind of formed around like '85, '86, and they kind of led to the whole sound
too 'cause they put all the same types of bands on their label, and
they had the same record producer, Jack Endino, so they all had the kind
of same sound to them, and they had Charles Peterson which had a really
great photography strategy which was black and white and then a
low shudder speed so everything was like swirly and
it looked really cool, and he kind of took pictures of all the bands, so they had a look to it,
and then they had these guys who were like the head
of it, and they used the label grunge.
After Mark Arm said it in 1981, they kind of
tossed it around in the scene a little bit all throughout that decade,
they weren't really doing much with it, and then in 1988
around there, the Sub Pop Guys used it to market their
label. and um
so they had this whole thing going and then in 1989, Everett True
was this UK journalist and he wrote about the Seattle scene
so it got big in UK and Europe before it ever did in America, so
that was like late 80s,
early 90s, it was popular in the UK. Everyone was going crazy about the Seattle
Sound and Grunge, and he did like this whole spread with all the cool bands, Nirvana, Blood Circus,
Green River, and all of that. You can look that up and find it. I've seen
pictures of it. It's pretty cool. I haven't read through the whole thing yet.
ok so late 80s,
and then in 1990, it kind of slowed
down a little bit. Andy Wood died. He was the guy from Mother Love Bone
and Malfunkshun. He was like this total frontman
type of guy, so when he died, everyone kind of just,
it was like how, Nirvana, when Kurt died, everyone kind of just slowed
down and weren't really sure, so people thought it was kind of dying then, and then
in 1991 Nevermind came out and it was really just the
beginning and uh, and then it got really famous.
Bands started getting influenced by it
like all over the world, so then it
really just started beginning, and then the whole 90s was shaped
by grunge, and then it kind of slowed down in the late 90s
due to Kurt Cobain dying in 1994, Soundgarden breaking up in 1997, and then the rise of
glamorous pop bands in the late 90s.
Um, yeah I kind of wanted this to be more about the 80s because most people don't
really know.
Let me look through my notes and see if I missed anything.
I love this music too, if you can hear it. My webcam sucks.
Ok, I think I got it all. Bye.