Theoretically Speaking S3 | E15: What Makes Grunge, Grunge ?

Bill Bois’ Music Theory For Non-Musicians™

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…if there was ever an art where breaking the rules is one of the rules, it’s music.

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What Makes Grunge, Grunge? 

Seattle.

Even if you hadn’t already read the title, I could just say the city’s name.

And you’d think, “grunge.”

Seattle has a long music history, though. From the garage rock of The Sonics, to the innovative virtuosity of Jimi Hendrix, to the sophisticated hard rock of Heart, Seattle’s contributions to rock music are well known and respected.

There’s more to it than that, of course. Seattle had a strong jazz scene in the first half of the 20th Century and also embraced politically left-leaning folk music. Even vaudeville had a place there. 

With that, the outlets for artists dried up, especially after Boeing started up, and a lot of aerospace engineers moved in.

It became a town for slide rules, not slide guitars.

Boeing = Boring.

But things happened underground.

Even before The Beatles and the British Invasion, amateur musicians began rehearsing in garages up and down the west coast.

Garage rock was simple, energetic, and fun.

Though some professionals played garage rock, it has the reputation of being friends just getting together and calling themselves a band. The instrumentation was whatever instruments each group of friends played.

Garage rock is often seen as an ancestor of punk. It’s so simple, anyone can play it. No training is required, all you really need is a guitar, an amp, and a fuzzbox. Just like punk.

Through the 70s and into the 80s, Seattle gradually became the perfect petri dish for a new sort of sound.

Not only did small venues open, but so did independent record stores and labels, and college radio stations and fanzines. It was a tiny scene, everyone knew each other and supported each other. The punk spirit of DIY was in full force.

What Seattle didn’t have was a good location for touring bands. If a group from east of the Mississippi was booking a tour, they might make it to San Diego, Los Angeles, and San Francisco. It’s a long way from there to Portland, and from there they could go to Seattle and, passports permitting, Vancouver .

Many tours skipped the Pacific northwest entirely. Likewise, Seattle bands rarely played out of the area.

That left musicians in Seattle isolated and their sound evolved in its own way. 

One band that made it up to Seattle was the Los Angeles group Black Flag. Known for their fast, aggressive, hardcore punk sound, they arrived just after changing their sound. Their second album, 1984’s My War, annoyed fans of their first record by slowing the tempo down significantly. 

As Black Sabbath and other early heavy metal bands had already proved, slower speeds sound heavier. Black Flag’s new sound influenced Seattle bands like The Melvins, Soundgarden, and Green River.

The Melvins were the first metal-adjacent band to use drop D tuning, where the low E string is tuned down to a D. This makes the guitar sound even darker and heavier. The Melvins taught it to Soundgarden.

Not only were musicians in and out of multiple bands over time, they were in the audience, too.  More often than not, the audience was only musicians from other bands. If you want people to come to your show next week, you go to see them play this week. It helps keep the clubs open, too. 

Somehow, you all still make it to your day jobs the next morning.

In the mid-80s, rock radio and MTV were playing a lot of glam metal, or hair metal as it was derisively called. Given Seattle’s insular nature, glam metal wasn’t popular in its underground scene. Rock god hairspray machismo is obviously fake when everyone will see you working at Peet’s the next day.

Malfunkshun and Mother Love Bone, both fronted by singer Andrew Wood, as well as Alice In Chains, started out as glam metal, but toned it down as the slower, heavier, sound was coming into vogue. Soundgarden’s 1989 song Big Dumb Sex satirizes glam metal’s superficial penchant for treating women as sex objects.

Parenthetically, the album that song came from, Louder Than Love, inspired Metallica to write Enter Sandman. While they remained a metal band, they slowed way down, and had their biggest hits.

In 1986, local label CZ Records put out a compilation album of Seattle bands. Called Deep Six, it included Green River, The Melvins, Malfunkshun, Skin Yard, Soundgarden, and The U-Men. It didn’t sell well, but it’s some of the first recordings we have of early grunge. I’ll include a song from it in Suggested Listening below, but here’s a link to a playlist of the entire album.

The biggest Seattle label was SubPop.

And word got out, making it all the way to the major labels. PolyGram signed Mother Love Bone and released an EP called Shine on a new subsidiary label they created just for the band. Hopes were high.

Unfortunately, and perhaps predictably, singer Andrew Wood died of a heroin overdose a few days before their full length album, Apple, came out. His death was one of many within the Seattle scene.

Gossard asked his high school friend Mike McCready to play guitar, and Cornell asked Eddie Vedder to come in for some backing vocals. Matt Cameron from Soundgarden played drums.

From that project, Gossard, Ament, McCready, and Vedder started a band they called Mookie Blaylock, after a favorite basketball player. They eventually decided that was a terrible name and changed it to the more psychedelic Pearl Jam. They did, however, name their first album Ten, which was the number on Blaylock’s uniform.

Ten wasn’t a success. At first.

Word of mouth grew though, and radio stations started playing their first single Alive. The album took a year to get to the top ten on the Billboard album chart, eventually peaking at #2. It has since gone 13 times platinum. They’re still together and selling out stadiums.

One hundred miles southwest of Seattle, where the Wishkah River meets the Chahalis, two friends who liked The Melvins started a band. Several bands, actually. Their first was a Creedence Clearwater Revival tribute band. They started doing originals and went through a few drummers.

But Kurt Cobain and Krist Novoselic eventually settled on a name:

Nirvana.

The label teamed them up with producer Butch Vig, so the resulting album, Nevermind, is a mixture of punk angst and slick major label production. 

You already know what happened next. You may even know where you were the first time you heard Smells Like Teen Spirit on the radio.

It was a paradigm shift. Suddenly, hair metal was old-fashioned. This was the new sound.

Nevermind knocked Michael Jackson out of the number one spot on the Billboard 200. It’s sold 30 million copies globally.

With the success of Nevermind and Ten, major labels scoured Seattle for other bands to sign. Soundgarden, Alice In Chains, Screaming Trees, and many more got deals. Even bands that weren’t grunge in the slightest, like Presidents Of The United States Of America, got signed simply because they were from Seattle. 

Grunge-adjacent bands from other places got signed, too.

Smashing Pumpkins were from Chicago, Hole was from Los Angeles, Sonic Youth were from New York, Stone Temple Pilots were from San Diego, and Babes In Toyland were from Minneapolis. Australia’s Silverchair and Bush from the United Kingdom had huge hits.

It had been a close community where everyone supported each other. But with A&R reps in every nightclub on any night of the week, it became more of a competition, more of a job.

The attention changed things in the Seattle scene.

Kurt Cobain killed himself in 1994. The same year, Kristen Pfaff, the bassist for Hole, died of a heroin overdose. Layne Staley of Alice In Chains died in 2002 from a mix of heroin and cocaine. Alice In Chains bassist Mike Starr overdosed on prescription meds in 2011. Scott Weiland of Stone Temple Pilots OD’d in 2015. Chris Cornell hung himself in 2017.

These are all tragedies.

The one we forget about, however, is probably the most shocking. 

The body of Mia Zapata, lead singer for The Gits, was found on a street corner at 3:30am on July 7, 1993. She had been beaten, raped, and strangled. The medical examiner recognized her because he was a fan. He said the beating was so brutal that she would have died even without being strangled.

Saliva from where she had been bitten was saved in cold storage and, after the invention of DNA technology, led to the arrest and conviction of her killer ten years later. He had a long record of violence against women.

In the intervening years, Seattle bands pooled their resources and raised $70,000 for a private investigator.

Zapata’s friends created a non-profit called Home Alive with the purpose of teaching women self-defense, meaning both martial arts and de-escalation techniques. They provide these courses with a pay structure that means even low income women can learn how to protect themselves.

The role of women in grunge isn’t limited to musicianship or running labels.

And the men in the scene are more supportive of women than almost anywhere else in the industry.

In no grunge music video will you see women as objects. 

In a 1992 interview with Spin Magazine, Kurt Cobain said, “I would like to get rid of the homophobes, sexists, and racists in our audience. I know they’re out there. And it really bothers me.”

Nirvana, Pearl Jam, and others had feminist lyrics. Both Cobain and Vedder would often write from a woman’s point of view. When Nirvana performed at their induction to the Rock And Roll Hall Of Fame, the late Cobain’s role was filled by several people: Joan Jett, Lorde, Annie Clark of St. Vincent, and Kim Gordon of Sonic Youth. All women. No men. Just how Cobain would have wanted it.

Part of Nirvana’s feminism may have come from their move from Aberdeen to Olympia, home of the Riot Grrrl movement.

We’ve forgotten the feminist side of grunge, but it’s a vital part of what grunge was.

That makes it all the sadder that we’ve also forgotten the first band to record something that can be called grunge, a year before Green River. We’ve forgotten what was perhaps the very first grunge band.

They were called Bam Bam. It was started by a husband and wife team, singer Tina Bell and guitarist Tommy Martin, in 1983. Listening to them now, they sound familiar, but at the time they were unique.

The guitar is over-processed in an 80s kind of way, but their songs hold up as well as any early grunge act. Why then don’t we know anything about them? Why weren’t they included on the Deep Six compilation? And why are they never mentioned in histories of grunge?

It could very well be the same reason Bell learned to use a mic stand in self-defense. She was black. 

At a club called The Metropolis, two skinheads stood in front and yelled a racist word. You know the word. An eyewitness said she waved the mic stand around a couple times and thwacked one racist on the head. Then she thwacked the other one. They both went down hard.

She became known more for that incident than for her music. And I’m not helping by mentioning it here.

But it’s part of the story that her race kept some people from hearing her art. We missed out on her absolute powerhouse of a voice and her planet-sized charisma.

We missed out in part because labels couldn’t figure out how to market a rock band with a black female singer. And in part due to our own shortcomings.

She left Bam Bam in 1990. The band continued as a trio. Bell and Martin divorced in 1996 and she became reclusive, dying in 2012. She was found in her empty apartment, a week or more after she died. The cause of death was cirrhosis of the liver. She drank herself to death. She died of depression.

The prior year, her son, T.J. Martin, won the Best Documentary Feature Oscar for directing Undefeated.

Grunge is a combination of punk, metal, and classic rock that talks about dark subjects, depression chief among them.

Yet, there’s something positive about it. Rather than hide behind feelgood lyrics, these singers write about the truth of being human. And listeners realize they’re not alone in feeling that way. It’s helpful.

People say it’s good to get things off your chest. Grunge certainly let songwriters do that, but we’ve lost so many of them that we have to wonder how well it worked.

Music is supposed to heal both the musician and the audience. It helped a lot of us. 

But not everyone.

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Suggested Listening – Full YouTube Playlist

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