A Time Magazine Best Book of 2011, Featuring Nirvana, Pearl Jam, Soundgarden, Alice In Chains, Mudhoney and more!
Twenty years after the release of Nirvana’s landmark album Nevermind comes Everybody Loves Our Town: An Oral History of Grunge, the definitive word on the grunge era, straight from the mouths of those at the center of it all.
In 1986, fledgling Seattle label C/Z Records released Deep Six, a compilation featuring a half-dozen local bands: Soundgarden, Green River, Melvins, Malfunkshun, the U-Men and Skin Yard. Though it sold miserably, the record made music history by documenting a burgeoning regional sound, the raw fusion of heavy metal and punk rock that we now know as grunge. But it wasn’t until five years later, with the seemingly overnight success of Nirvana’s “Smells Like Teen Spirit,” that grunge became a household word and Seattle ground zero for the nineties alternative-rock explosion.
Everybody Loves Our Town captures the grunge era in the words of the musicians, producers, managers, record executives, video directors, photographers, journalists, publicists, club owners, roadies, scenesters and hangers-on who lived through it. The book tells the whole story: from the founding of the Deep Six bands to the worldwide success of grunge’s big four (Nirvana, Pearl Jam, Soundgarden and Alice in Chains); from the rise of Seattle’s cash-poor, hype-rich indie label Sub Pop to the major-label feeding frenzy that overtook the Pacific Northwest; from the simple joys of making noise at basement parties and tiny rock clubs to the tragic, lonely deaths of superstars Kurt Cobain and Layne Staley.
Drawn from more than 250 new interviews—with members of Nirvana, Pearl Jam, Soundgarden, Alice in Chains, Screaming Trees, Hole, Melvins, Mudhoney, Green River, Mother Love Bone, Temple of the Dog, Mad Season, L7, Babes in Toyland, 7 Year Bitch, TAD, the U-Men, Candlebox and many more—and featuring previously untold stories and never-before-published photographs, Everybody Loves Our Town is at once a moving, funny, lurid, and hugely insightful portrait of an extraordinary musical era.
Everybody Loves Our Town: An Oral History of Grunge
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An Interview with Author Mark Yarm
Q.) Why do you think grunge took off in Seattle as opposed to somewhere else at that time?
A lot of it had to do with geographical isolation. Many people don’t seem to realize that in the ’80s--before the Starbucks/Microsoft/Amazon boom era--Seattle wasn’t the cosmopolitan place it is today. People in the rest of the country pretty much considered it the hinterlands; a couple interviewees told me that back in the day, people who weren’t familiar with Seattle would ask them, in all sincerity, “Seattle? Aren’t there cowboys and Indians out there?” Often times, touring bands would simply skip Seattle because it was too far out of their way. So, in effect, musicians in that region had to make their own fun. And in the process, they honed their own sound.
Q.) What are the biggest misconceptions people have about grunge?
Probably the biggest one is that all these musicians were overly earnest gloom mongers sticking needles in their arms. Of course, a few were overly earnest and some were sticking needles in their arms, but for the most part--and I think this comes across in the book--these musicians were just super-funny and huge jokesters.
Q.) Where does the book’s title come from?
Speaking of humor in grunge… “Everybody loves our town” is a lyric from “Overblown,” an extremely arch song Mudhoney wrote for the Cameron Crowe movie Singles. It pretty much deflates the hype surrounding the scene at the time and takes a semi-veiled jab at at least one grunge superstar.
Q.) What’s your favorite grunge song?
It almost seems too obvious an answer, but Mudhoney’s “Touch Me I’m Sick” is pretty much perfect--and perfectly encapsulates the scuzzy “grunge” guitar sound and scabrous humor of the scene. Nirvana’s “Negative Creep” comes to mind too.
Q.) Is there a grunge band that should have made it big that did not?
Had their super-charismatic lead singer Andrew Wood not died of a drug overdose in 1990, Mother Love Bone--the band from which Pearl Jam sprung--would likely have made it big. Also, TAD--a band fronted by Tad Doyle, who was marketed as a 300-pound ex-butcher from Boise--appeared primed for success in the early ’90s. But TAD was beset by bad luck at nearly every turn. Their downward spiral began when their album 8-Way Santa had to be yanked from shelves because the band used this hilarious, very saucy photo of a couple on the cover without their permission. (Google it.) Legend has it that the woman in the picture had since found God, and the couple took legal action.
Everybody Loves Our Town: An Oral History of Grunge author Mark Yarm put together this list of 15 grunge tracks (ranging from the obscure to the chart-topping) discussed in the book.
1. Mudhoney “Touch Me I’m Sick”
2. U-Men “They”
3. Green River “Ain’t Nothing to Do”
4. Soundgarden “Nothing to Say”
5. Nirvana “Love Buzz”
6. TAD “Jack”
7. 7 Year Bitch “Lorna”
8. Mother Love Bone “Crown of Thorns”
9. Temple of the Dog “Hunger Strike”
10. Pearl Jam “Even Flow”
11. Alice in Chains “Fear the Voices”
12. Screaming Trees “Nearly Lost You”
13. Melvins “Sky Pup”
14. Candlebox “You”
15. Mudhoney “Overblown”
A Look Inside Everybody Loves Our Town
 Pearl Jam |  Nirvana |  Soundgarden |
--This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.
Review
“Yarm’s affectionate, gossipy, detailed look at the highs and lows of the contemporary Seattle music scene is one of the most essential rock
books of recent years.”
—Kirkus Review, *Starred Review*
“Hardcore fans of grunge will treasure this.”
—Publishers Weekly
“Yarm, a former editor of Blender, interviewed more than 250 musicians, scenesters, and record business types
to deliver a personal, comprehensive history of grunge music…Highly recommended.”
—Library Journal
"Mark Yarm has assembled the gospels of Grunge music. Here is a warts-and-elbows refresher course for those of us who still find our memories of the era a little hazy."
─Chuck Palahniuk, author of Fight Club
"A very noble record of the grunge scene—and an excellent addition to the growing library of oral history music books."
—Legs McNeil, coauthor of Please Kill Me: The Uncensored Oral History of Punk and the forthcoming Resident Punk
"Great oral histories are rare. Hewing a narrative from all those chaotic and often conflicting memories with testimony alone and no guide-prose or stage direction is difficult. Making that somehow intimate and epic is nearly impossible. When a writer pulls it off, as Mark has with Everybody Loves Our Town, it's really a gift: the subject or scene finally gets its definitive record and the reader gains what feels like a room full of brand new friends. One of the best rock reads in a very long time."
─Marc Spitz (co-author We Got The Neutron Bomb: The Untold Story of LA Punk, music blogger VanityFair.com).
"In Everybody Loves Our Town, Mark Yarm collects and dispenses remarkable insights about a genre no one even wants to claim as their own. As a child of grunge – who spent a humiliating chunk of the 1990s in an Alice in Chains t-shirt – I loved this book; it clarified so many things about a sound and a time I thought I already knew."
─Amanda Petrusich, author of It Still Moves: Lost Songs, Lost Highways, and the Search for the Next American Music
"A deeply funny story, as well as a deeply sad story--the glorious Nineties moment when a bunch of punk rock bands from Seattle accidentally blew up into the world’s biggest noise. Mark Yarm gives the definitive chronicle of how it all happened, and how it ended too soon. But the book also makes you appreciate how weird it is that this moment happened at all."
─Rob Sheffield, author of Love Is A Mix Tape and Talking To Girls About Duran Duran
"A definitive, irreplaceable chronicle of one of rock-n-roll's greatest eras. It should sit tall on any rock lover's bookshelf."
─Neal Pollack, author of Never Mind The Pollacks
“In an attempt to trace the real roots of grunge, journalist Mark Yarm compiled an exhaustive oral history from the people who lived it. In his book Everybody Loves Our Town, there are interviews with everyone from the early adopters to those that were late to the party, but nevertheless helped extend [grunge's] shadow of influence by turning it into a look for the world to emulate.”
—The Fader
“This massively readable tome gathers recollections from every grunge band you’ve ever heard of (Pearl Jam, Nirvana, Soundgarden, Melvins) and some you haven’t (we hardly knew ye, Skin Yard)…The genre’s first truly comprehensive insider history…It’s gossipy…and fascinating, with so much backstabbing and death it’s like Shakespeare, if Shakespeare had written about heroin addicts with bad hair.”
—Revolver (4 out of 4 stars)
“An impressive display of reportorial industriousness… It’s the feel-bad rock book of the fall.”—Bloomberg Businessweek
“Oral history is an art in itself. It’s why Everybody Loves Our Town will endure as a classic of monumental scale.”—Paste Magazine.
“For hardcore fans or people just curious about what the fuss was all about, Mark Yarm’s excellent new book –Everybody Loves Our Town: An Oral History of Grunge” is well worth the read. Yarm has done an admirable job of assembling an engaging, funny and ultimately sad narrative by letting the people who helped create the Jet City sound talk about what happened in their own words.—Seattle Post-Intelligencer
“Yarm’s account captures the essential tension that made the era so compelling.”—Greg Kot, Chicago Tribune
"We finished all five hundred and forty-two pages of this book in two days, abandoning all responsibility (this, friends, is why we do not have children; had there been any children about us, we would have locked these unfortunate creatures in the bathroom, so as to not be
distracted) and staying up until two in the morning, reading whole chunks of it out loud to poor long-suffering Support Team."--TheRejectionist.com
Mark Yarm's superb book, Everybody Loves Our Town: A History of Grunge details the dramatic rise of the grunge movement and all of its players, including Cobain, Love and Vedder, told through the voices of the people that lived through it.--Hollywood Reporter
“I came away from this book with a big smile on my face. Lots of it is like a gray day in western Washington; you’ve been kicked out of yet another band, and your girlfriend is spending far too much time with the drummer from the Melvins or the Screaming Trees. In the end, though, “Everybody Loves Our Town" made me want to be young, stupid and lucky again. Mainly, it made me want to be young.”--The Washington Post
“Everybody Loves Our Town should inspire new conversations about the unique culture and people that made grunge so unusual and unforgettable to so many fans. The book is timely, as 2011 marks the 20-year anniversary of Nirvana’s “Nevermind” and Pearl Jam’s multi-platinum debut album, “Ten.” Everybody Loves Our Town is as good an excuse as any to put on an Alice in Chains CD and curl up with a good book about some great old friends with whom we haven’t spent much time in a while.”--The Washington Independent Review of Books
“Everybody Loves Our Town is authoritatively researched and compiled, often very funny and always just a little bit sad.”—Buffalo News
"Like a very extended and entertaining all-night bulls--- session among everyone who mattered during the late-'80s/early-'90s music scene."--Seattle Weekly
"The scope is encyclopaedic and the closeness to the subject unparalleled."--Record Collector
"A wild ride that is in turns uplifting and tragic." --Your Flesh
Named one of the top music books of 2011 by UK Telegraph
"Riveting, gossipy, and impossible to put down until the last quote has been read." --New York magazine's Vulture blog
“This exhaustive oral history features unknowns, cult figures, supporting players and stars; each gets the time he or she deserves as Yarm pieces together the arc of a scene that built itself from scratch, blossomed beyond most people's dreams, and then crashed. Yes, there are plenty of Kurt Cobain stories. But there's much more, too — indelible characters, weird scenes, creative chaos, laughs and tragedy and lots of cheap beer.”—NPR.org
"Gen-X music geeks: Here’s your holy grail." --Tulsa World
"The best book on music I've read this year." --Omaha World-Herald
“This volume could have been a huge, snarky compendium of gossip and score settling from the inhabitants of a claustrophobically insular local music scene. And it is, but in the best possible way—and it’s also much, much more…. Yarm has culled the story of grunge from the people who created it, and their testimony is remarkable for its eloquence and its passion and its fairness and its anger.” —Lev Grossman, Time (named one of the magazine's Top 10 nonfiction books of 2011)
“A Herculean work of interviewing and editing which gives everyone a voice, from the biggest stars to the lowliest foot soldiers… . Though the Seattle scene’s stew of folly, feuding, rampant drug addiction and a startling number of fatalities might have made for a voyeuristic tale, Yarm leaves the reader full of empathy for young men and women swept up in a cultural moment they couldn’t control.” —The Guardian (named a best music book of the year)
“Exhilarating … Mark Yarm’s brilliant and exhaustive oral history of grunge is full of … vivid observations. Some 250 interviews with those intimately associated with the most unlikely musical sensation of all time piece together a story that is hilarious and tragic and utterly gripping.” —Sunday Times of London
A Gawker.com Best Thing We Read All Year selection
“[A] lively, funny, melancholy and exhaustive oral history … For all its eventual compromise and dissolution, Seattle was briefly an exhilarating pop cultural moment to rank with the greats. Yarm’s labour of love has well and truly done it justice.” —Time Out London
“If you loved the ’90s and you hav...
books of recent years.”
—Kirkus Review, *Starred Review*
“Hardcore fans of grunge will treasure this.”
—Publishers Weekly
“Yarm, a former editor of Blender, interviewed more than 250 musicians, scenesters, and record business types
to deliver a personal, comprehensive history of grunge music…Highly recommended.”
—Library Journal
"Mark Yarm has assembled the gospels of Grunge music. Here is a warts-and-elbows refresher course for those of us who still find our memories of the era a little hazy."
─Chuck Palahniuk, author of Fight Club
"A very noble record of the grunge scene—and an excellent addition to the growing library of oral history music books."
—Legs McNeil, coauthor of Please Kill Me: The Uncensored Oral History of Punk and the forthcoming Resident Punk
"Great oral histories are rare. Hewing a narrative from all those chaotic and often conflicting memories with testimony alone and no guide-prose or stage direction is difficult. Making that somehow intimate and epic is nearly impossible. When a writer pulls it off, as Mark has with Everybody Loves Our Town, it's really a gift: the subject or scene finally gets its definitive record and the reader gains what feels like a room full of brand new friends. One of the best rock reads in a very long time."
─Marc Spitz (co-author We Got The Neutron Bomb: The Untold Story of LA Punk, music blogger VanityFair.com).
"In Everybody Loves Our Town, Mark Yarm collects and dispenses remarkable insights about a genre no one even wants to claim as their own. As a child of grunge – who spent a humiliating chunk of the 1990s in an Alice in Chains t-shirt – I loved this book; it clarified so many things about a sound and a time I thought I already knew."
─Amanda Petrusich, author of It Still Moves: Lost Songs, Lost Highways, and the Search for the Next American Music
"A deeply funny story, as well as a deeply sad story--the glorious Nineties moment when a bunch of punk rock bands from Seattle accidentally blew up into the world’s biggest noise. Mark Yarm gives the definitive chronicle of how it all happened, and how it ended too soon. But the book also makes you appreciate how weird it is that this moment happened at all."
─Rob Sheffield, author of Love Is A Mix Tape and Talking To Girls About Duran Duran
"A definitive, irreplaceable chronicle of one of rock-n-roll's greatest eras. It should sit tall on any rock lover's bookshelf."
─Neal Pollack, author of Never Mind The Pollacks
“In an attempt to trace the real roots of grunge, journalist Mark Yarm compiled an exhaustive oral history from the people who lived it. In his book Everybody Loves Our Town, there are interviews with everyone from the early adopters to those that were late to the party, but nevertheless helped extend [grunge's] shadow of influence by turning it into a look for the world to emulate.”
—The Fader
“This massively readable tome gathers recollections from every grunge band you’ve ever heard of (Pearl Jam, Nirvana, Soundgarden, Melvins) and some you haven’t (we hardly knew ye, Skin Yard)…The genre’s first truly comprehensive insider history…It’s gossipy…and fascinating, with so much backstabbing and death it’s like Shakespeare, if Shakespeare had written about heroin addicts with bad hair.”
—Revolver (4 out of 4 stars)
“An impressive display of reportorial industriousness… It’s the feel-bad rock book of the fall.”—Bloomberg Businessweek
“Oral history is an art in itself. It’s why Everybody Loves Our Town will endure as a classic of monumental scale.”—Paste Magazine.
“For hardcore fans or people just curious about what the fuss was all about, Mark Yarm’s excellent new book –Everybody Loves Our Town: An Oral History of Grunge” is well worth the read. Yarm has done an admirable job of assembling an engaging, funny and ultimately sad narrative by letting the people who helped create the Jet City sound talk about what happened in their own words.—Seattle Post-Intelligencer
“Yarm’s account captures the essential tension that made the era so compelling.”—Greg Kot, Chicago Tribune
"We finished all five hundred and forty-two pages of this book in two days, abandoning all responsibility (this, friends, is why we do not have children; had there been any children about us, we would have locked these unfortunate creatures in the bathroom, so as to not be
distracted) and staying up until two in the morning, reading whole chunks of it out loud to poor long-suffering Support Team."--TheRejectionist.com
Mark Yarm's superb book, Everybody Loves Our Town: A History of Grunge details the dramatic rise of the grunge movement and all of its players, including Cobain, Love and Vedder, told through the voices of the people that lived through it.--Hollywood Reporter
“I came away from this book with a big smile on my face. Lots of it is like a gray day in western Washington; you’ve been kicked out of yet another band, and your girlfriend is spending far too much time with the drummer from the Melvins or the Screaming Trees. In the end, though, “Everybody Loves Our Town" made me want to be young, stupid and lucky again. Mainly, it made me want to be young.”--The Washington Post
“Everybody Loves Our Town should inspire new conversations about the unique culture and people that made grunge so unusual and unforgettable to so many fans. The book is timely, as 2011 marks the 20-year anniversary of Nirvana’s “Nevermind” and Pearl Jam’s multi-platinum debut album, “Ten.” Everybody Loves Our Town is as good an excuse as any to put on an Alice in Chains CD and curl up with a good book about some great old friends with whom we haven’t spent much time in a while.”--The Washington Independent Review of Books
“Everybody Loves Our Town is authoritatively researched and compiled, often very funny and always just a little bit sad.”—Buffalo News
"Like a very extended and entertaining all-night bulls--- session among everyone who mattered during the late-'80s/early-'90s music scene."--Seattle Weekly
"The scope is encyclopaedic and the closeness to the subject unparalleled."--Record Collector
"A wild ride that is in turns uplifting and tragic." --Your Flesh
Named one of the top music books of 2011 by UK Telegraph
"Riveting, gossipy, and impossible to put down until the last quote has been read." --New York magazine's Vulture blog
“This exhaustive oral history features unknowns, cult figures, supporting players and stars; each gets the time he or she deserves as Yarm pieces together the arc of a scene that built itself from scratch, blossomed beyond most people's dreams, and then crashed. Yes, there are plenty of Kurt Cobain stories. But there's much more, too — indelible characters, weird scenes, creative chaos, laughs and tragedy and lots of cheap beer.”—NPR.org
"Gen-X music geeks: Here’s your holy grail." --Tulsa World
"The best book on music I've read this year." --Omaha World-Herald
“This volume could have been a huge, snarky compendium of gossip and score settling from the inhabitants of a claustrophobically insular local music scene. And it is, but in the best possible way—and it’s also much, much more…. Yarm has culled the story of grunge from the people who created it, and their testimony is remarkable for its eloquence and its passion and its fairness and its anger.” —Lev Grossman, Time (named one of the magazine's Top 10 nonfiction books of 2011)
“A Herculean work of interviewing and editing which gives everyone a voice, from the biggest stars to the lowliest foot soldiers… . Though the Seattle scene’s stew of folly, feuding, rampant drug addiction and a startling number of fatalities might have made for a voyeuristic tale, Yarm leaves the reader full of empathy for young men and women swept up in a cultural moment they couldn’t control.” —The Guardian (named a best music book of the year)
“Exhilarating … Mark Yarm’s brilliant and exhaustive oral history of grunge is full of … vivid observations. Some 250 interviews with those intimately associated with the most unlikely musical sensation of all time piece together a story that is hilarious and tragic and utterly gripping.” —Sunday Times of London
A Gawker.com Best Thing We Read All Year selection
“[A] lively, funny, melancholy and exhaustive oral history … For all its eventual compromise and dissolution, Seattle was briefly an exhilarating pop cultural moment to rank with the greats. Yarm’s labour of love has well and truly done it justice.” —Time Out London
“If you loved the ’90s and you hav...
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Customer Reviews
“ This book is worth reading for anyone interested in this music, from people like me who know very little to experts, because the "oral history" style is so unique. ”
Most Helpful Customer Reviews
19 of 19 people found the following review helpful
Format:Hardcover|Amazon Vine™ Review
(What's this?)
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!)...... Read more ›
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!)...... Read more ›
23 of 26 people found the following review helpful
Format:Hardcover|Amazon Vine™ Review
(What's this?)
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.... Read more ›
10 of 10 people found the following review helpful
Format:Hardcover
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.... Read more ›
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.... Read more ›
Most Recent Customer Reviews
5.0 out of 5 stars
Mind-blowingly great book on Seattle music scene
Loved it. LOVED it. If I could give more than 5 stars I would. This book just blew me away. Easily the best book on music I've ever read, and probably the best book I've read on... Read more
Published 28 days ago by James Bailey
5.0 out of 5 stars
neat
great neat good super awesome good excellent .it was wonderful surprise delightful summer of fun.like as fun as a pearl jam show
Published 2 months ago by PearlJam
5.0 out of 5 stars
A fascinating story beautifully told
If you are even a little bit interested in grunge music, you'll love this book. In addition to the Kurt Cobains, Eddie Vedders, and Chris Cornells, you'll meet hundreds of... Read more
Published 5 months ago by Anon
5.0 out of 5 stars
Everybody Loves our Town
And loves your book as well! What a wonderful resource/reference book it will always be of this extraordinary period in music.
Published 5 months ago by E. T. Burr
5.0 out of 5 stars
Brings back memories.....
I fell for the hype in the early nineties and I'm glad I did as most of these bands I still listen to and love.The scene was really quite exciting and very sad at the same time... Read more
Published 7 months ago by D. L. Streeter
5.0 out of 5 stars
The human side of musical artistry...
This book captures the essence of what it was like, and still is, to be a musician in any city in the United States. Read more
Published 7 months ago by MikeMongo
4.0 out of 5 stars
Great and fun read,though it makes me feel old
At the time "Grunge" was starting to take off I was in the Midwest collecting and treasuring my record collection, including Mudhoney's Subpop releases. Read more
Published 13 months ago by T. Hardin
5.0 out of 5 stars
Brilliant
I read this entire book in a day, absolutely could not put it down. Perhaps the most engaging book I've ever read about music - it tops Hammer of the Gods, previously my number... Read more
Published 14 months ago by Francis
4.0 out of 5 stars
Is Grunge classic rock already?
I was in my mid teens/early twenties during this era of music, and I loved it. To me it was great time to be into rock and roll. Read more
Published 14 months ago by 302 Boss
4.0 out of 5 stars
Honest, raw, sad -- like the music scene it chronicles
A great oral history of grunge and seattle music in the last 20 years. Captures the joy and excitement of the music as well as the tremendous sadness and tragedy around the deaths... Read more
Published 14 months ago by R. C. Kopf
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