Grunge: Seattle and the End of Innocence

There's one figure that explains everything: Bleach, Nirvana's debut, cost 606 dollars and 17 cents to record in 1989. Two and a half years later, their second album knocked Michael Jackson off the top of the Billboard chart. No music scene ever went from basement to summit that fast. And none paid so high a price for the trip.

A rainy city and a label with a sense of humour

In the late eighties, Seattle was a backwater of the music business: far from Los Angeles, far from New York, with long winters and damp garages. That remoteness, which looked like a sentence, was in fact the condition of the miracle: with no A&R men circling, the bands had years to sound strange without anyone telling them how they ought to sound.

There, Bruce Pavitt and Jonathan Poneman turned the Sub Pop fanzine into a record label that ran on more irony than budget. Their masterstroke was public relations: they paid a journalist from the British weekly Melody Maker to fly over and write about the scene. The piece presented Seattle as an exotic, remote city, and the English press did the rest. The scene was invented as much as it was discovered.

Sub Pop put out Green River — the missing link from which Mudhoney and Pearl Jam would emerge — and in 1988 released Mudhoney's "Touch Me I'm Sick", the single that defined the sound: guitars saturated with fuzz, dragging tempos, the crossed inheritance of Black Sabbath and punk. The British press, always hungry for a new scene, gave it the name nobody in Seattle wanted: grunge.

1991: the year it all blew up

The hinge date is 24 September 1991, when Geffen released Nevermind. The label expected to sell around 250,000 copies. By January 1992 the record was number one in the United States and "Smells Like Teen Spirit" was playing on every radio station on the planet.

It's worth saying why it worked, because it wasn't only the song. Butch Vig and Andy Wallace polished that sound until it was as clean and compact as any record on commercial radio: the noise arrived wrapped in the same production the enemy used. Cobain came to hate that mix and said so publicly. That's the knot of the whole story: the record that declared war on artifice won thanks to artifice.

It wasn't an isolated bolt. Pearl Jam's Ten had come out a month earlier and would end up selling even more in the United States. Soundgarden and Alice in Chains signed to majors. In 1992, even Hollywood arrived on time with Singles, Cameron Crowe's film set in the scene.

The hangover of fame

Here begins the uncomfortable part of the story. The industry descended on Seattle like a gold rush: scouts in every bar, lumberjack flannel on Marc Jacobs' catwalks, bands signed for resembling other bands.

The protagonists didn't take it well. Kurt Cobain spent his last years at open war with his own success, uneasy with an audience chanting songs whose sarcasm it didn't grasp. His death, on 5 April 1994, was read immediately as the end of an era. Layne Staley, of Alice in Chains, faded more slowly until 2002. The scene's casualty list is too long to be coincidence: it was a fragile community exposed all at once to an industrial pressure it never asked for.

What remained when the tide went out

It would be easy to stop at the tragedy, but the musical balance is enormous. Grunge gave mass rock back its distortion, its vulnerability and its suspicion of stardom.

Pearl Jam turned that suspicion into method. In 1994 they took on Ticketmaster over booking fees, testified before the United States Congress and ended up touring alternative venues, at enormous cost to the band and with no immediate change in the industry. They lost. Three decades later, the argument about prices and fees is exactly as alive as ever, which says a good deal about who was right.

And there's a debt backwards worth acknowledging: all of it came out of the infrastructure punk had built fifteen years earlier — small labels, its own press, touring in a van — and out of the same deliberate dirt the sixties garage bands were already practising, as we tell in What Is Garage Rock?.

The end of innocence, literally

Grunge was the last great scene to grow up without the internet: through gigs, cassettes and fanzines, in a specific city with specific clubs. It was also the first to be devoured in real time by the global media machine.

That's why we say innocence ended there. After Seattle, no local scene ever again had time to grow in the dark. Ten years later, when New York put guitar rock back at the centre, the full cycle — discovery, hype and exhaustion — lasted about four years; we tell that story in Garage Rock: The Eternal Return.

And that time in the dark, listening to these records, was exactly what made them possible.