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Everybody Loves Our Town: An Oral History of Grunge Hardcover – September 6, 2011
| Mark Yarm (Author) Find all the books, read about the author, and more. See search results for this author |
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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.
- Print length592 pages
- LanguageEnglish
- PublisherCrown Archetype
- Publication dateSeptember 6, 2011
- Dimensions6.49 x 1.91 x 9.67 inches
- ISBN-100307464431
- ISBN-13978-0307464439
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Editorial Reviews
Amazon.com Review
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
Review
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.”—BloombergBusinessweek
“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
About the Author
Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.
LARRY REID (U-Men manager; co-owner of Roscoe Louie/Graven Image galleries; Tracey Rowland's husband) This was Labor Day weekend of 1985. Here's how I remember it. The U-Men's roadie, Mike Tucker, thinks it was my idea; I think it was Charlie Ryan's idea. And it's not that I don't want to take credit for it, because it was brilliant. But I'm sure it was Charlie's idea because Charlie had a fetish for Zippo lighters.
MIKE TUCKER (U-Men roadie) The idea, I do believe, was born out of a conversation between Larry and me. I remember going with Larry and getting the lighter fluid, which someone poured into Mickey's brand malt-liquor bottles.
JIM TILLMAN (U-Men/Love Battery bassist) I'm fairly positive it was John's idea. Suffice it to say that we all thought it was brilliant.
CHARLIE RYAN (U-Men/Cat Butt/the Crows drummer) It was my idea. I collected lighters. I was the firebug. I was the pyro. My idea!
LARRY REID The U-Men were the first real punk band ever booked at the Bumbershoot Festival. I managed to sell them as a performance-art combo. God bless 'em, the producers trusted me, and they shouldn't have-and never did after this!
CHARLIE RYAN Larry says, "We're on Bumbershoot." And we're like, "Oh, my God. Okay. This is going to be the ultimate showcase for us." I start thinking about the fact that there's the moat, this body of water in front of the stage. I wondered, Could we light it on fire?
LARRY REID Nobody was quite sure it would work, so we filled up my bathtub, poured some lighter fluid on it, and...
CHARLIE RYAN We took a match and threw it in, and it went boom! Flames.
LARRY REID There was a curtain on the window above the bathtub and it fucking went up, man. If we would've thought about it, we probably would've tried it outside using a bucket of water. The alarm went off, all hell broke loose-they had to empty the building, but it didn't catch the apartment on fire. We were all high-fiving each other, and like, "Yes, this was a good thing. This is gonna work!"
So skip to the gig, a couple weeks later. Bumbershoot was held at an outdoor venue called the Mural Amphitheatre, which is on the grounds of this large city-owned property called the Seattle Center. There were hundreds of people in the audience because it was free.
KURT BLOCH (Fastbacks/Young Fresh Fellows guitarist) I was right there in the front. They're setting up and everybody's like, "Something crazy's gonna happen, something crazy's gonna happen."
KERRI HARROP (Sub Pop Records sales and retail employee) I can even remember what I was wearing, the show was that significant. First of all, Bumbershoot's this family-friendly event-it's out on the open lawn in the shadow of the Space Needle-and you have these complete weirdos out on this stage.
CHARLIE RYAN It's sunny and nice out, and we're all in black leather and top hats and dark shades and being as menacing as we could be. Our freak show only appeared at night, in dark places, but here we are, in broad daylight. My mom was there-the end of the show wasn't her proudest moment.
LARRY REID At the end of the set, the sun was just going down. Mike Tucker and myself walked out to the edge of the stage, and we're each pouring what appeared to be a gallon of vodka into the pond. And Bigley comes out-they're doing this song called "They," which at that point was the standard last song.
JIM TILLMAN The last song was "Green Trumpet," though I could be wrong. There were 2,000 or 3,000 people there. A couple of our friends, this guy Mike, who was sort of a roadie, and this other guy Tommy Bonehead-his real name was Tom Simpson, but he was called Bonehead because it didn't matter how hard you'd hit him, he'd always fight-are pouring lighter fluid on either side of the stage.
TOM PRICE (U-Men/Cat Butt/Gas Huffer guitarist) We were playing a song called "10 After 1." And John ducked behind an amp, because we didn't want the authorities to see what was going on.
JOHN BIGLEY (U-Men/the Crows singer) I had gotten a broom and cut off the bristles, so it was just a nub where the bristles joined the handle, and wrapped it in a T-shirt soaked in lighter fluid. I ran back behind the drums, lit the broom with my lighter, and waited until the song "They" kicked into gear.
CHARLIE RYAN And John comes out, doing this insane tribal voodoo dance with a lit broom, menacing the crowd. And then he chucks it into the water.
MIKE TUCKER When John dipped his torch into the moat, it didn't immediately ignite. It was like, "Oh, fuck, it didn't work." The second time he dipped it in, suddenly this wall of fire went up.
JOHN BIGLEY I throw the broom in and there was a giant fireball, 20 to 30 feet high, easy. It was gigantic and it made a sound, this whoosh of oxygen.
LARRY REID The pond fuckin' exploded, man! I mean, it made the bathroom look like child's play. It went up, oh, 10, 12, 15 feet.
JOE NEWTON (Gas Huffer drummer) My recollection was that it was over in the blink of an eye. It burned fast, it burned hugely high and bright, but it just lasted a second. I knew they were going to do it, and it was like, "That's it?" Other people totally remember it being this huge wall of fire.
DENNIS R. WHITE (Pravda Productions partner; Desperate Times zine cofounder) In a lot of cases, people remember things being much bigger than they were. In this case, they don't. It looked like the band was engulfed in flames.
JOHN BIGLEY And with the supercharged rock-and-roll music, that's when the vast majority of the folks started jumping around and dancing. It was a crazy primal deal.
JAMES BURDYSHAW (Cat Butt guitarist; 64 Spiders guitarist/singer) The U-Men were into bones and skulls and black clothes and witch-doctor sort of imagery. The whole voodoo tribal thing became real 'cause the sun went down right when the flames happened. You felt like there was something dangerous going on but you couldn't look away. The crowd was screaming, but it wasn't out of fear. It was like, Yes! Yes! It was elation.
It was like, Fuck the Man, we're the most dangerous voodoo band-and we're gonna do a human sacrifice next. It felt like that was gonna happen.
LARRY REID It was perfect, except we'd failed to take into consideration that the stage was built out over the pond. There was creosote and tar underneath the stage, so there was just black smoke billowing long after the flames had died down. And the soundman freaked out, thinking the stage was on fire, and he's running up, trying to get his sound equipment off the stage. The audience is now going apeshit crazy. Cops being cops, they started wading into the audience and beating people with their billy clubs!
CHARLES PETERSON (photographer) The thing I remember most is that we all just went fuckin' bonkers, and started slam-dancing into each other. And there were these Seattle Center security guards who thought we were getting into fights and were trying to separate us. This 60- year-old security guard was just freaking out, and some of us were like, "Dude, they're just dancing!" I recall somebody grabbed a security guard's hat and danced around. It was mayhem.
JOHN BIGLEY We finished the song, definitely. Someone, it might have been Larry, grabbed me and threw me towards the drums: "Get the fuck out! Load the shit!" It was very chaotic-people running and screaming and kids holding their eyes and arrests and that whole thing.
TRACEY ROWLAND (co-owner of Roscoe Louie/Graven Image galleries; Larry Reid's wife) Norman Langill, who was running Bumbershoot, was yelling and screaming and freaking out and jumping up and down. He was furious.
JIM TILLMAN I'd parked our tour bus-it was a 1960s Chevy city school bus that said tacoma hillbillies on the side, though I have absolutely no idea why-in this spot next to the stage.
JOHN BIGLEY "Load the shit, load the shit!" We got loaded up and drove off before the police had gotten their act together to approach us.
CHARLIE RYAN I'll never forget driving our bus out of the Seattle Center grounds-all of these nice, normal people looking up at us, these freaks in a school bus who had just set the moat on fire.
KERRI HARROP I was blown away by the audacity of it. I'm sure if there was a panoramic shot of the crowd, virtually everyone who ended up in a band or who was in a band at the time was at that show. I think that if you were in a band and you saw that, it made you step up your game.
MARK ARM (né Mark McLaughlin; Mudhoney singer/guitarist; Green River singer; Mr. Epp and the Calculations guitarist/singer; the Thrown Ups drummer) I don't know if it was necessarily the best U-Men show I ever saw, but that was the coolest event at a U-Men show. They really made something happen.
LARRY REID The U-Men were banned from Bumbershoot, and I wasn't the most popular guy around there for a while. The year after that, they started draining the pond. And now they've filled it in with cement.
The day after the show, I met the Everly Brothers at the hotel and brought them to the venue-I was working at Bumbershoot, operating as an informal chaperone for the bigger acts-and the first person I ran into was Norm Langill, the producer of the festival. He just came unglued. He said, "What are you trying to do to me?!"
Phil Everly was really kinda sweet and came to my defense. He told this great anecdote, which was possibly apocryphal, about a show they had played with Jerry Lee Lewis. Jerry Lee was squirting lighter fluid on the 88s and pounding out "Great Balls of Fire." And the next thing you know...accidents happen. Apparently Jerry Lee was dancing on the piano, which was an impromptu addition to his normal routine, and caught his pants on fire.
That story got me off the hook. That calmed everything down, because Norm held the Everly Brothers in real high regard. Phil told him, "Leave the kid alone. That's rock and roll."
. . .
TOM PRICE The U-Men started in late '81. My family had moved to Seattle in 1965. I sta...
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Product details
- Publisher : Crown Archetype; First Printing edition (September 6, 2011)
- Language : English
- Hardcover : 592 pages
- ISBN-10 : 0307464431
- ISBN-13 : 978-0307464439
- Item Weight : 2 pounds
- Dimensions : 6.49 x 1.91 x 9.67 inches
- Best Sellers Rank: #1,741,867 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
- #2,366 in Popular Music (Books)
- #5,115 in Music History & Criticism (Books)
- #5,922 in Rock Music (Books)
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Having grown up in Seattle, I've been a fan of the Seattle bands since the early 90s. Up until very recently I actually segregated my "Seattle" bands from all the others in my CD collection. I found out just how little I actually knew about them all by reading this book. First off, the drugs, wow. I knew there were a lot of drugs being used, but holy cow I didn't have any clue as to how bad it was. It's front and center here because it took such a horrific toll on the musicians and those around them, from Kurt Cobain and Layne Staley to Stephanie Sargent and Mike Starr. But the one that really seemed to kick the entire community in the gut was Andrew Wood. To hear about what these people meant to the people who knew them, in their own words, it just takes you way beyond the music, which is often secondary in this history.
Grunge seemed to have exploded onto the airwaves when Nirvana released Nevermind, but in the long arc of its rise and fall that was actually nearer the end than the beginning. Yarm tracked down virtually anyone and everyone who planted the seeds with the punk bands from throughout western Washington, like the U-Men and Melvins. While the book has plenty of Nirvana, Pearl Jam, Soundgarden, and Alice in Chains, there is no shortage of other bands, including the Screaming Trees, Candlebox, the Gits, 7 Year Bitch, Mudhoney, and Green River. And don't forget Cat Butt. (How could anyone, with a name like that?) He also gives a lot of space to the guys at Sub Pop records, who were instrumental in helping a lot of these bands find an audience.
The book is entirely told by the people who were there when it all happened, at least a couple hundred in all. Fortunately, Yarm included a handy alphabetical reference list in the back, which I was constantly flipping to to remember just who someone was and what their role in the music community was.
It's alternately sad (lots of death), funny, and gossipy, almost to the point of catty, particularly whenever Courtney Love is involved. She really came across to me as an utterly psychotic bitch. So much so that I feel bad for liking her music. There weren't many others who had much nice to say about her. No surprise there. What did surprise me was how much everyone else hated Candlebox, a band I've always liked. I never realized what outcasts they were on the local music scene.
I bought this book as a Christmas gift for my niece a couple years ago. At the time I thought, "I should read this before I send it to her." I didn't, but I finally got my own copy and am glad I did. Fantastic.
If you want to read only one book on what most defined the culture of the 90s, read this. It will become a go-to for information as well.
I'd also recommend Hype!, a documentary film shot just after Grunge peaked and looks at the genre with nostalgia and hindsight while everything is still fresh in everyone's minds.
Top reviews from other countries
However I dont think you have to necessarily be a fan of that sound to be entertained by the book. So well done... short stories and quotes by all who lived or passed thru Seattle at its peak... people in the industry and of course the epic bands. Reading it I cracked up laughing a lot and found out quite a bit I didn't know about my favourites. Very entertaining read indeed.
That is exactly what former music journalist Mark Yarm set out to do with with this project: to make sense of grunge by asking the bands, the roadies, the soundmen, the girlfriends and the hangers on: what happened? He did so by compiling an oral history, entirely told by `witness accounts' rather than by his own authorial voice. The result is a compelling read, which will captivate you right from the first chapter - on how The U-Men once set fire to the stage - right until the end, when the grunge supernova implodes, leaving a string of casualties along the way.
This collection of interviews, loosely grouped by band but expertly interwoven in chronological order, offers an almost seamless narrative which has the page-turning quality of the best fiction. Yarm pieced ELOT together from both existing and new material; by doing so, he succeeded in creating an incredibly comprehensive `bible' of grunge, with cross referencing questions and answers and whose protagonists often give their own version of events only described a few paragraphs before. The result is often very amusing, with discordant opinions on what really happened and all people in question offering their own contradicting version. Predictably, anecdotes involving Courtney Love seem to invariably be cause for disagreement.
There are a lot of books about `grunge' out there but ELOT stands out because it lets its protagonists do the talking, instead of attempting to draw the kind of pseudo-sociological conclusions so beloved by popular culture writers. If you never had the chance to experience the early 1990s Seattle scene in person, this book is going to be the next best thing.
Especially poignant was the death of Andrew Wood










