Customer Reviews

Everybody Loves Our Town: An Oral History of Grunge

5 star:		(22)
4 star:		(16)
3 star:		(7)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(2)

 

 

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!)... I don't really care one way or the other, honestly, but if you saw the cover of "Smell the Magic," it was almost as though they WANTED you to think they were the butchest chicks around.

-Kurt Cobain was kind of a tool bag. I mean, he seems like a decent guy most of the time, but after Nirvana hit it big, you start to hear a lot more stories of him being quite a d-bag to people.

-Courtney Love is one of the most horrid, deplorable people ever to have a career of any kind in the entertainment industry. I would have reached that conclusion just reading her own interviews in this book, but plenty of testimony from other people help reinforce that conclusion. The whole time I was reading about her, all I could think of is a joke from commedian Neil Hamburger: "Whats the difference between Courtney Love and the American Flag? ...It would be inappropriate to urinate on the American flag."

-Layne Staley from Alice In Chains was kind of the Johnny Thunders of the Seattle scene. He was a great talent who was a huge influence and made some excellent music, then he got addicted to heroin, and slowly dissolved into drug-related death. The descriptions of some of his sightings later on in the book match up almost note for note to what people said about seeing Johnny Thunders pop up through the 80s.

-I missed out on a TON of great albums... Half the fun of this book for me was finding out about these other great bands, most of whom you can buy used copies of their albums for dirt cheap here on amazon. As I type this, I have music from TAD, Mother Love Bone, and the Screaming Trees in my car. Its all been great so far. I'm happy this book has expanded my early 90s horizons.

If you're a music nerd with any passing interest in ANYTHING from the grunge era, this book is a fantastic, informative, well put together read. Check it out.

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. And with no connection, I was prepared to give up on the book and write a polite review about how it's only geared toward those who are already intense grunge fans.

And then Courtney Love showed up.

Into a world of rational observations and shallow analysis, Yarm starts sharing quotes from Courtney Love, who thunders in like a hostile unicorn stomping around in an uncovered septic tank. She spills her trash-mouthed crazy sauce all over the pages of this book and turns it into something amazing.

I recognize that Love's portrayal is generally negative, with different figures complaining about her toxic influence, and her own quotes being almost unfailingly agitated and disrespectful. And in the context of the whole book, she has a small role, only a few quotes and a few more references to her by other participants in the project. Still, the book changes at a fundamental level when she appears. It gets wild and unpredictable, especially since that's about the point where the narrative picks up speed. Bands start taking off on a national level, and the sources interviewed start sharing not only their thoughts but also their responses to the ways they were portrayed at the time. The book develops a sense of purpose, an epic scale like a collection of Shakespearean tragedies, and a grand historical perspective, and Yarm's gifts as an historian really begin to shine.

Yarm is, by all the evidence in this book, a phenomenal historian. The range of perspectives is simply astounding - nearly every member of every significant band, plus the music executives, the venue owners, the roadies, the random fans... In a few haunting moments, Kurt Cobain even speaks, as Yarm shares contextually appropriate excerpts from Cobain's suicide note and his journals. Yarm also shows a great deal of precision and care as he takes disconnected interviews and weaves them together to make clear moments and clear timelines. Yarm's sense of humor is wicked and brilliant, as he often juxtaposes contradictory memories or allows his stars to laugh about what their friends have said about them.

After the first rough couple of hundred pages, I loved this book at a level I can't really explain. I was excited for band members who would enjoy things that they did well, and when tragedy would occasionally strike, usually in the form of an overdose and a gripping memorial service (beautifully captured with reverent memories of the participants, sharing pain that hasn't really gone away in twenty years), I almost always had to put the book down and walk around the house for a while before I could get centered enough to return to the story. Band members still mourn the emotional wounds inflicted by their record companies, and producers still regret the hard choices that they had to make. Some people still nurse grudges, but most have grown enough to try to forgive those who hurt them twenty years ago. This book was honest and it was wise and it was powerful, and I recommend it to anyone. The long introduction is really only for fans of grunge and its origins, but the rest of the book is for fans of humanity, and this book is a treasure.

As a native Seattleite, I know first-hand how seriously we take our culture. Coffee, computers, and music - these may be our three biggest exports and this book cleverly discusses the last of those three. One of Seattle's most notable music accomplishments? Grunge.

With this book, Mark Yarm offers a fascinating and innovative account of grunge music in Seattle. The history of grunge is told entirely in interviews, featuring everyone from actual band members to engineers, record company owners, roadies, and music industry employees.

Launching its story with - who else? - Nirvana, this book takes the reader through a sometimes shocking, sometimes hilarious world of grunge music - and the people who hate that term. Amazing stories are told - which I'll let you discover on your own - and barriers are crossed. It's worth every minute of reading time.

As a note, this book is being released right around the 20th anniversary of Nirvana's Nevermind album, which is a noteworthy and quintessential addition to any music fan's collection. Do yourself a favor and grab a copy of the CD and play it as a soundtrack to a fascinating book.

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.

Some of the most interesting interviews come from members of the Melvins (and their unorthodox connection to America's sweetheart, Shirley Temple Black), Candlebox (derided as "jumping the Seattle bandwagon via Los Angeles" even though their members were longtime residents of the area that grunge called home), and various hangers-on of the major and minor bands, all of whom were caught up first in the excitement of the post-"Smells Like Teen Spirit" boom and then in the feeding frenzy that ultimately corrupted the scene. Not every band from Seattle made it, of course, and the members of those bands were often on the outside looking and their comments show the flip side of what happened.

And there is the long list of those from the scene who are no longer around, from Mother Love Bone's Andrew Wood (whose death prompted Cornell and Vedder to headline the "grunge superstar group" Temple of the Dog), 7 Year Bitch's Stefanie Sargent, Gits lead singer Mia Zapata (whose rape and murder caused suspicion within the scene), and of course Kurt Cobain, whose death rightfully signaled, if not the end, the twilight of the grunge movement as a national obsession. But the saddest story to emerge is that of Layne Staley, the former Alice in Chains frontman whose death in 2002 was virtually ignored at the time. Staley's last days, recounted by friends and bandmates, paints a harrowing portrait of a man old before his time due to the drugs that once fueled the scene.

But in the end, the survivors of the madness are still around, whether thriving in the music world (like Pearl Jam) or happy to remember their moment in the sun. "Everyone Loves Our Town" doesn't pull punches about what went wrong (the moment when, as the Who once sang, the punk became the godfather), but it shows that the bands who were part of that scene, whether major or minor in the history of grunge, certainly had some good times to go with the bad ones. When the media spotlight faded, when labels like Sub Pop either went out of existence or downsized to more manageable, less-hyped configurations, and many of the brightest lights burned out and faded away, grunge was still vital as a beacon to what can happen when the music comes from a place that's not about money or fame. Whether you liked grunge or not, you will enjoy "Everyone Loves Our Town," because it's not about the death of a movement but the brief moment when it thrived.

I loved this book!

I didn't expect the depth and detail to be what it was. I was thoroughly involved with each section. Although I've never been to Seattle or even to Washington State, like the rest of the nation, I feel a connection to the city simply by virtue of being a music fan. It was part of my life in the early to mid-ninties, along with the advent of computers and the coffee revolution. Seatlle experienced a renaissance during that time and it affected the whole country and - dare I say - the world.

I have a collection of coffee table books about Woodstock, The Beatles, Stones, Who and various genres and important periods in rock history, and this awesome book has found its place among them.

I'm reading a proof copy, so sadly I don't have the photographs that will be included w/this when it's published on September 6, 2011. No doubt, I'm going to have to seek out the published copy because this story's so good, I want the full monty.

If you're not a fan of oral history, then you're not going to appreciate this book. In fact, I don't think it's fair to read this and review it if you weren't into the scene or the music when it was ongoing. Some people miss the boat entirely, and therefore drag down the reviews of truly excellent rock and roll history. The cast of characters are legion, and the musicians and people involved tell their stories in an upfront and entertaining way. Oral history is not a chronological recounting of what happened. It's people who were involved in the scene telling the stories as they lived it. Recollections are from the inside out, not the outside in. And telling the story according to the alphabetical order of names as one reviewer suggests? Surely, you must be joking!

What this book has going for it is a real inside feel. For instance, I loved Alice and Chains but hardly realized all the back stage drama w/ the band, even though I knew their lead singer, Layne Staley died an extremely untimely death (heroin OD). In fact, just recently their bassist Mike Starr (who got thrown out of the band and never got over it) also overdosed. Aside from the heavy alcohol/drug usage - it's only rock and roll, after all - there are interesting parts about rivalries between bands, the ego games headliners play on their opening acts and the resulting retaliations, etc. Band member testimonials included here: Nirvana, Screaming Trees, Soundgarden, Pearl Jam, Candlebox, Hole, Babes in Toyland and L7. Another interesting fact I learned: many people from different bands strongly dislike Courtney Love! I guess that wasn't a surprise. Ever verbose, Courtney throws in more than her two cents here, and, like her or not, she adds the punch of her strong personality to the mix.

If you loved Please Kill Me: The Uncensored History of Punk (by Legs McNeil and Gillian McKane) and enjoy exposes of any and all music scenes (like I do), you must get your hands on this. For the record, I'm savoring each of every page.

To the author/editor: Mark Yarm: BRAVO!

Note: I reviewed this book using a pre-publication galley, so the spelling errors were not corrected nor were there any photos, so I can't judge the final book's presentation.

"Everybody Loves Our Town" is an oral history of the evolution of the Seattle music scene, from the early 80's thru the end of the so-called "grunge era" (herein, the death of Layne Staley is basically where this book ends up). An oral history book, for those not in the know, consists of interviews from key participants in small snippets, that tie together and play off each other, to relate the overall story. It usually makes for entertaining reading as people's perceptions of events and others sometimes differ, so you get a Rashomon-like take on the whole story, but more or less get the big picture. In this case, there are dozens of interviewees from the scene, including many that will be instantly recognizable even to the casual fan : Eddie Vedder, Dave Grohl, Courtney Love, other members of Pearl Jam, Soungarden, Alice in Chains, etc., as well as music journalists, Sub Pop employees, and others around the scene. I debated using the word grunge here in this review, as the vast majority of the scene's players, etc. all bristle at the word (that aversion is covered here in the book as well as the Pearl Jam documentary), but that's what the popular press latched onto as a catch-all.

I found the book a bit slow-going in the first 150 or so pages, if only because I was less familiar with the earlier Seattle bands (the U-Men, Love Battery and Cat Butt, to name a few). The story picks up pacewise a bit once we get to Malfunkshun, Green River, early Soundgarden, and Mother Love Bone, for obvious reasons. The most interesting chapters concern Nirvana, and the release of "Nevermind", given that it brought so much attention. While it seemed like an insular music community (with most bands friendly with one another and supportive, though many in the scene seem to agree that Courtney Love's arrival on the scene was a net negative), once "Nevermind" really popped into mass-popularity, the participants all pretty much agree that the co-opting of grunge (and what the media perceived it to be, cf. the amusing "Grunge-speak" piece in the NYT and incorporation of flannel into shockingly high-priced fashion lines), and with it the attention of major labels and inflow of bands to Seattle trying to capitalize on the attention, rapidly spelled the beginning of the end of the Seattle scene. That, and the drug and other tragedies and casualties that began to pile up (Stefanie Sargent, Mia Zapata, Kristen Pfaff, and ongoing drug problems that would plague others like Layne Staley and Mike Starr). There was also much more in the book of interest to me, given that I got a lot of background perspective I had not heard before - chapters on Screaming Trees, Candlebox (who were unfairly slagged as having moved to Seattle and latched onto the scene), the Sub Pop label's role in both the rise and weathering the decline of the scene, Mudhoney, and the like. I also very much appreciated the Temple of the Dog material, as I'm of the opinion that the album is the gem of the scene, being the nexus of Soundgarden and Pearl Jam captured at a critical moment before everything exploded, but representing the influence of what came before.

Overall, this book makes a very good companion piece to the recent Pearl Jam projects (deluxe reissues of early albums and the PJ 20 documentary and book) and the 20th anniversary of "Nevermind". Twenty years is enough time to gain a perspective and assess what the Seattle scene's lasting impact is on the culture - the best bands from the scene, like Nirvana, Pearl Jam and Alice in Chains, created bodies of work that are absolutely certain to remain stellar examples of the Seattle sound of the 90's.

It is hard for me to be objective about this book, because in a strange way it was like reading my own history. Even though I wasn't a member of any band worth mentioning, I was one of those screaming faces in the crowd during the grunge era in Seattle. There was a time when pretty much every night of the week you could find me at the OK Hotel, the Crocodile Café, RockCandy, the Frontier Room and the NiteLite, the Vogue, the Weathered Wall, Linda's and Moe, or any of the other numerous little haunts of Seattle punk rock. A few of the people in this book I knew personally, most just by reputation or from the stage.

The Seattle scene was always about the people, and that is what I loved about "Everybody Loves Our Town: An Oral History of Grunge." At first I thought this was just a re-release of Grunge Is Dead: The Oral History of Seattle Rock Music, but the two are different books in the same style. Both use accumulated interviews to create a story of the Rise and Fall of Grunge (or what the world perceived as the Rise and Fall of Grunge) in the Seattle scene. "Everybody Loves Our Town" had access to some different folks, like Soundgarden's Chris Cornell and the notorious Courtney Love, who were conspicuously missing from "Grunge is Dead."

Mark Yarm did an amazing job getting interviews, starting at the beginning with the U-Men and the Melvins, and how those two bands influenced all the more famous acts to come. He takes you through all the transformations, all the little peaks and valleys, all the different incarnations of bands and scenes until Green River appeared and things started to congeal into a specific regional sound. I loved hearing the background stories at Sub Pop. It's strange how much gumption those two maestros, Bruce Pavitt and Jonathan Poneman, had when they were really operating on nothing. I remember getting Sub Pop singles releases showing the Sup Pop World Headquarters and how they were always talking about the explosion of the Seattle scene onto the world. It was a funny joke at the time, but we all believed it was possible. We just believed it was going to happen with Mudhoney.

Yarm went into some areas that surprised me, but were interesting to read. I had no idea Nancy Wilson of Heart had such a connection to the scene. And, like many people from Seattle, I always had distain for bands like Pearl Jam, Alice in Chains, and most-especially Candlebox, who the media trumped as "Seattle Grunge Bands" even though they were anything but. But hearing some of their background stories, and listing to how bummed Candlebox felt to be embraced by the world but rejected by their hometown of Seattle, made me respect the people if not their music.

Parts of this book doesn't really have anything to do with "grunge," at least not as how it was seen in Seattle. As much as I enjoyed reading about the Piecora's crew and 7-Year Bitch, as that was the group I was most personally connected with through my brother and his band Los Hornets, no one would have ever considered them a "grunge" band. But whatever. It was all another piece of the picture, and the labels never meant anything anyways.

One thing I can say is that everything in this book is, if not 100% true (we are dealing with the memories of people on drugs, 20 years past), it is at least honest. It brought a lot back to me reading this, and remembering those times. The music, the drugs, the people--all of which were interconnected. The good times and bad. Oh yes, and Courtney Love, who really is as terrible as she is made out to be.

I have to preface this review by saying that I've never been deeply into the "grunge" scene. I was aware of many of the groups at the time, especially better-known ones like the Melvins and Soundgarden, but most of them didn't excite me. I've always been into music history and scenes that fly a bit under the radar, though, so I was interested to read this history of a spontaneous scene that suddenly became world-famous when Nirvana hit the big time.

This book is a riot! Even though I wouldn't know most of the "characters" from Adam, the overall effect is of hanging around in a bar after closing time and listening to the old-timers BSing and telling ridiculous stories of the old days. Some of the interviewees contradict each other -- and Yarm does a very good job of juxtaposing these contradictions to call attention to them -- but, while I have no idea who's telling the truth and who's not, it's really fun to read the different versions of the same story.

When I started this book, I was unfamiliar with most of the "characters." I knew maybe a couple dozen out of the hundreds interviewed and mentioned. But the book is very well sequenced and so compulsively readable and full of crazy stories and catty gossip that it could have been fiction and it would have been equally enjoyable. It doesn't require a deep knowledge of, or interest in, the grunge scene. To enjoy it, you just need to appreciate the madness of bored, testosterone-charged small-town kids... and the artistic and personal pitfalls of commercializing that energy. It's the same story that can be told about the Haight-Ashbury and Sunset Strip scenes that sprung up in California in the 60s -- or, really, of any other "local" scene that ever hit the big time, with all the attendant money and fame and temptations.

I recommend this book for anyone who wants an organic and even-handed look at a scene that started out as rootless kids fooling around and ended up commercially co-opted six ways to Sunday, leaving behind a lot of damaged lives, a lot of enduring music ... and a lot of great stories.

If you know from which song the title of book is derived (or if you even knew it was a song lyric at all), and you didn't need to read the epigraph inside to learn the answer, then you are probably a sure candidate for this book. "Everybody Loves Our Town" ("ELOT") is a very comprehensive book that captures mood, attitude and atmosphere of a musical era that was as important as it was ridiculous. Because they were all firsthand accounts, this was one of those rare times when I felt I could blindly trust a non-fiction book. But the author, Mark Yarm, earned my trust as a reader. One of his interviewees would make a statement, and then rather than accept that statement as fact and move on, Yarm would immediately follow it with a contradictory statement from another interviewee. Often times there were points in the book that read like this:

GUY 1: So-and-so said this, and then he did this...
GUY 2: That is absolutely not true. This is what happened...

In this way, ELOT does not allow myth to become fact. It forces us to decide for ourselves. Like for instance, did Kurt really "scale the wall" of his rehab center? Did Barrett Martin actually get crushed by a fridge?

Some more commendable notes about ELOT:

1.) Its broad scope of interviewees. Not just sticking with mainstream guys like Eddie Vedder and Dave Grohl, but actually digging right down to some obscure photograher, or the assistant to an assistant manager, or the second bass player to some band most of us haven't even heard of. People like that. It was important to get the points of view of people from all levels of status.

2.) This book makes interesting bands that you might not even be interested in.

3.) The most important point: Mark Yarm is able to tell a story and advance ELOT's narrative without a conventional prose style...without even using his own words. For an author who cannot paraphrase or fictionalize, whose only source of material MUST come from primary sources, this is quite a feat. If he wanted to take a certain anecdote in a certain direction, then he had to sift through what was probably hundreds of hours of interviews to find the exact sound clip to use next. Damn, I can't even imagine how many years this book took to write.