I'd like to write in appreciation of that genre of music known as "grunge rock." Lately I feel like it's gotten a bad rap for it's earnest posturing and sometimes silly facial hair, but I believed in it back then, and I'll stick by it now, even if it's not particularly cool to do so.
I'm trying to remember when I first heard the term "grunge." I believe it was back in 1992, when I was in college, and my music collection was pretty firmly rooted in classic rock. Many of us who were teenaged in the '80s looked to older bands like Led Zeppelin, Black Sabbath, Lynyrd Skynyrd, Aerosmith, and the Allman Brothers to give us what we felt was an authentic rock n' roll experience. By this I guess I mean long-haired reefer smokin' music.
If you think about the 1980s, there wasn't much of that on offer from the currently popular bands. Punk had morphed into this bizarre synthesizer driven fluff like Flock of Seagulls and the Human League, and heavy metal was dominated by silly hair bands like Poison and Ratt. Guns N' Roses offered a little reprieve from this — I remember watching them stumble up drunk at the Grammy Awards and spitting curse words into the microphone. That, to me, back then, was very cool. It just didn't seem as calculated as everything else.
So, as Guns N' Roses imploded and we all grew a little older and wiser, my generation was on the lookout for just about anything which didn't strike us as commoditized. I suppose this is what most generations are on the lookout for, and this is why popular music tends to be such a reaction to whatever came before it. And this is also why it tends to look kind of ridiculous and irrelevant fifteen years later when the context is changed.
I know it sounds completely trite to say this, but I will never forget the first time I heard Nirvana. Kurt Cobain sounded like such a screaming breath of fresh air. Although I thought that album cover was needlessly obvious, with the fishhook through the dollar bill and all, I loved whatever that new sound was. Apparently this music had been floating around the Northwest for some time, but it took us neo-hippies in the Northeast a while to catch on. As soon as we did, we began hunting down bands like Mother Love Bone, Green River, Soundgarden, the Smashing Pumpkins, the Screaming Trees, etc. And this might sound trite too: I finally felt like my generation, people my roughly my age, were actually making some real noise, and that was quite a thrill. I didn't really even like the term "grunge rock." It sounded sort of gross and mossy, but I guess it did capture a little of what the music was about. It wasn't about being pretty and packaged, and I suppose it's true that we were feeling a little bit of angst in those days. There had been some kind of strange, quick war in the middle east and apparently the economy sucked. Many would try to claim that grunge was some kind of punk offspring, but if you ask me, its roots were in heavy metal like Black Sabbath and classic hippie rock like Zeppelin and Neil Young. Cross a hippie with a metalhead and you pretty much get grunge.
In the summer of 1992 I drove across the U.S. in a van with some friends. Lacking much direction, we headed for the Northwest, birthplace of old Jimi Hendrix and that big Seattle sound. We got tattoos, trying roughly to emulate those cool Gus Van Sant pictures on the liner notes of Blood Sugar Sex Magik, and we grew our hair long and got jobs on a Puget Sound island bucking hay for a farmer named Al. I'll recall that summer as the time when I finally stopped listening to '70s rock and got down with the sounds currently around me. At one point I recall walking along the foggy streets of Seattle and thinking to myself, "So this is where it all began. I wonder if Eddie Vedder's around . . ."
On our way home, we met some girls who were going to the big Lollapalooza Festival and we tagged along. That festival became known as an "alternative" rock festival, but in '92 it was all about grunge, whatever that word meant. Pearl Jam, Soundgarden, Alice in Chains, even the Chili Peppers seemed to embody the term and rock it hard at that festival. The girl I'd met, an overall-clad vixen with a ring through her nose, disappeared later in the evening with the singer from a Seattle band called Green Apple Quickstep. I bought one of their albums later on, and though I hoped to dislike it, I actually thought it was pretty good.
Oh, grunge faded away fairly quickly, I guess. Something else came along and made it all look silly. Or perhaps it was the vague emptiness of those second-generation grunge rockers like Stone Temple Pilots, Candlebox and Creed. But I still like the spirit of the early '90s bands, and I can still find a lot of joy in albums by Mother Love Bone, Temple of the Dog, Alice In Chains, The Screaming Trees, Blind Melon, and so on. Just as in 1996 no one would have believed an '80s revival possible, we should be prepared for the resurgence of the earnest 1990s. Rock music trends always come back around, and it's beginning to feel like 1987 all over again.
©2006 Arthur Bradford and hooksexup.com