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Ten myths about grunge, Nirvana and Kurt Cobain
Byrnzie
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http://www.guardian.co.uk/music/2011/au ... urt-cobain
Ten myths about grunge, Nirvana and Kurt Cobain
Kurt Cobain loved Abba, wasn't from Seattle and didn't invent grunge. Everett True, the man who pushed the singer's wheelchair on stage for his last UK show, sets the record straight
Everett True
guardian.co.uk, Wednesday 24 August 2011
I was first flown out to Seattle at the start of 1989. I'd been asked by Melody Maker to write a cover story on Sub Pop Records and its flagship band Mudhoney. It was my first time in the US. It seemed like the Emerald City to me, but instead of Munchkins there were scores of long-haired, hard-rocking, heavy-drinking folk influenced by early Black Sabbath and 60s garage rock. I drank cheap Mexican beer with affable flannel-shirted musicians in Pike Place Market, and fell in love with the place.
A few days after I arrived, there was a label showcase at Seattle University – Girl Trouble, Skin Yard, Nirvana and the Fluid. Nirvana had just released their debut single Love Buzz. I was a performer – hadn't I released the first (much-derided) single on Alan McGee's Creation label? – and so I demanded to play as well. So it was that I found myself on stage, alone, as 800 hardcore kids bellowed back the words to Arthur Conley's Sweet Soul Music at me.
Upon returning home, my story on Sub Pop helped launch the label and its roster on the road to (temporary) world domination; and every time I bumped into one of their bands after that, they'd be like: "Hey, why not jump on stage with us tonight and do that crazy thing you did in Seattle?"
So it was that, years later, I found myself performing Nirvana's encores for them on their final tour of the US, and pushing Kurt Cobain on stage in a wheelchair at Reading festival 1992 for their last UK show, 19 years ago; the gig will be screened at the festival this weekend. It's also rumoured I introduced Cobain to his wife Courtney Love, but that's a whole other story.
There's been a lot of talk about grunge since Cobain's death in 1994. How it put Seattle on the map. How it revitalised rock music. How it was just a media-created fad. As Nirvana's breakthrough album Nevermind approaches its 20th anniversary next month, it's time to explode some myths.
1. Grunge began in Seattle
It didn't. Sub Pop used the word in 1988 to promote a Green River album – "gritty vocals, roaring Marshall amps, ultra-loose GRUNGE that destroyed the morals of a generation" – but the word had been around as a description for decades. It shows up in 1957, on the back sleeve to a Johnny Burnette rockabilly album. Lester Bangs was using it in April 1972.
When Mudhoney singer Mark Arm referred to "the streets of Seattle being paved with grunge" in my cover story, he was using the term disparagingly. Grunge: the opposite of gold. Worthless.
There's more of an argument to be had for grunge beginning in Australia with the Scientists and their scrawny punk ilk. Grunge wasn't suburban metal, despite what Alice in Chains and Pearl Jam would have us believe. It was stripped-back primeval rock music, no artifice, just SWEAT and BEER and heads banging in bass speakers.
2. Grunge was overwhelmingly male
Women were totally represented. L7, Lunachicks, Dickless, STP, 7 Year Bitch. Courtney Love. Babes in Toyland – the all-female Minneapolis band whose first two albums are among the greatest of the era. Grunge was also inextricably linked with Riot Grrrl.
3. Nirvana came from Seattle
Kurt Cobain and Krist Novoselic, the two founder members of Nirvana, grew up in the depressed logging town of Aberdeen, WA. Dave Grohl is from Washington DC. As soon as they could, Krist and Kurt moved: not to Seattle but to the nearby towns of Olympia and Tacoma, because the rent was cheaper. Right up to the point when Nevermind hit No 1 on the Billboard chart in December 1991, Kurt was living in Olympia. He then moved to LA before ending up in Seattle.
4. Kurt Cobain was murdered
Suicide's very nature leaves it wide open to conspiracy theories. No one else is present – not usually. Kurt killed himself. He was screwed up, and full of rage and despair: at his record company, who he thought were placing undue pressure on him; with his bandmates, who he didn't want to play with; with himself, for being such a moody bastard. He was screwed up and full of rage and despair, when all he wanted to be was fucked up.
5. Cobain didn't want to be famous
He just had no idea what fame would entail. He was proud of his music. He wanted it to be heard by as many people as possible, but he was also conflicted. Kurt had received his schooling from people like K Records' founder Calvin Johnson, and his former girlfriend Tobi Vail, who fervently believed in doing it for yourself, away from the corporate machine. He wanted to sell. He just didn't want to sell out.
6. Cobain wrote most of Hole's second album, Live Through This
Kurt sang backing vocals on two songs. He wrote one B-side for Hole (Old Age), uncredited. And that was it. It would be just as accurate – and misleading – to say that Courtney Love wrote most of Nirvana's third album, In Utero: you can certainly see her influence in Kurt's lyrics. Before the pair met, it was often guesswork as to his intentions. Afterwards, his lyrics were far more direct.
7. Nevermind was actually crap
Some folk reckon Butch Vig's gleaming production was a betrayal of Nirvana's roots. Listen up: Cobain loved the Bay City Rollers as much as he loved the punk rock of Half Japanese and Beat Happening. He loved the chest-beating swagger of Black Flag, the cute girl pop of Shonen Knife, the hair-flailing noise of his Sub Pop contemporaries, and Abba.
I suspect most people who claim Nevermind to be not a million miles adrift from Mötley Crüe have never heard Mötley Crüe. Likewise those who have noted the similarity of Smells Like Teen Spirit to Boston's More Than a Feeling.
You're missing the point. Great bands transcend their influences.
8. Grunge was all dark, gloomy, woe-is-me music
Sure, Soundgarden were moody. Sure, Kurt Cobain could be a pissy bastard. Sure, it rained in Seattle a lot. The man-behemoth Tad Doyle (of Nirvana's touring buddies Tad), however, was as genial as he was scary-looking. Mark Arm, meanwhile, is perhaps the funniest man in the Pacific northwest. During the 1992 Reading festival, it poured down. Mud formed. During the Sunday, bands got pelted with reams of the stuff. Artists reacted in different ways. Donita from L7 hurled a used tampon into the crowd. Mudhoney downed their instruments and started pelting the audience back.
"You guys can't throw," taunted Mark Arm. "You're used to playing soccer and kicking balls with your feet." Just then a sizeable lump of Berkshire hit him smack in the face. "That'll learn me," he remarked afterwards. "Never taunt an armed audience."
9. Cobain was grunge's only casualty
Andrew Wood from Mother Love Bone. Mia Zapata from the Gits. Kristen Pfaff from Hole. Layne Staley from Alice in Chains. Poet Steven "Jesse" Bernstein. RIP.
10. Grunge had a great legacy
Smashing Pumpkins. Puddle of Mudd. Silverchair. Bush. Muse. Ash. Courtney Love. Better Than Ezra. Pearl Jam. Stone Temple Pilots. Live. Staind. Creed. Candlebox. Some legacy!
Ten myths about grunge, Nirvana and Kurt Cobain
Kurt Cobain loved Abba, wasn't from Seattle and didn't invent grunge. Everett True, the man who pushed the singer's wheelchair on stage for his last UK show, sets the record straight
Everett True
guardian.co.uk, Wednesday 24 August 2011
I was first flown out to Seattle at the start of 1989. I'd been asked by Melody Maker to write a cover story on Sub Pop Records and its flagship band Mudhoney. It was my first time in the US. It seemed like the Emerald City to me, but instead of Munchkins there were scores of long-haired, hard-rocking, heavy-drinking folk influenced by early Black Sabbath and 60s garage rock. I drank cheap Mexican beer with affable flannel-shirted musicians in Pike Place Market, and fell in love with the place.
A few days after I arrived, there was a label showcase at Seattle University – Girl Trouble, Skin Yard, Nirvana and the Fluid. Nirvana had just released their debut single Love Buzz. I was a performer – hadn't I released the first (much-derided) single on Alan McGee's Creation label? – and so I demanded to play as well. So it was that I found myself on stage, alone, as 800 hardcore kids bellowed back the words to Arthur Conley's Sweet Soul Music at me.
Upon returning home, my story on Sub Pop helped launch the label and its roster on the road to (temporary) world domination; and every time I bumped into one of their bands after that, they'd be like: "Hey, why not jump on stage with us tonight and do that crazy thing you did in Seattle?"
So it was that, years later, I found myself performing Nirvana's encores for them on their final tour of the US, and pushing Kurt Cobain on stage in a wheelchair at Reading festival 1992 for their last UK show, 19 years ago; the gig will be screened at the festival this weekend. It's also rumoured I introduced Cobain to his wife Courtney Love, but that's a whole other story.
There's been a lot of talk about grunge since Cobain's death in 1994. How it put Seattle on the map. How it revitalised rock music. How it was just a media-created fad. As Nirvana's breakthrough album Nevermind approaches its 20th anniversary next month, it's time to explode some myths.
1. Grunge began in Seattle
It didn't. Sub Pop used the word in 1988 to promote a Green River album – "gritty vocals, roaring Marshall amps, ultra-loose GRUNGE that destroyed the morals of a generation" – but the word had been around as a description for decades. It shows up in 1957, on the back sleeve to a Johnny Burnette rockabilly album. Lester Bangs was using it in April 1972.
When Mudhoney singer Mark Arm referred to "the streets of Seattle being paved with grunge" in my cover story, he was using the term disparagingly. Grunge: the opposite of gold. Worthless.
There's more of an argument to be had for grunge beginning in Australia with the Scientists and their scrawny punk ilk. Grunge wasn't suburban metal, despite what Alice in Chains and Pearl Jam would have us believe. It was stripped-back primeval rock music, no artifice, just SWEAT and BEER and heads banging in bass speakers.
2. Grunge was overwhelmingly male
Women were totally represented. L7, Lunachicks, Dickless, STP, 7 Year Bitch. Courtney Love. Babes in Toyland – the all-female Minneapolis band whose first two albums are among the greatest of the era. Grunge was also inextricably linked with Riot Grrrl.
3. Nirvana came from Seattle
Kurt Cobain and Krist Novoselic, the two founder members of Nirvana, grew up in the depressed logging town of Aberdeen, WA. Dave Grohl is from Washington DC. As soon as they could, Krist and Kurt moved: not to Seattle but to the nearby towns of Olympia and Tacoma, because the rent was cheaper. Right up to the point when Nevermind hit No 1 on the Billboard chart in December 1991, Kurt was living in Olympia. He then moved to LA before ending up in Seattle.
4. Kurt Cobain was murdered
Suicide's very nature leaves it wide open to conspiracy theories. No one else is present – not usually. Kurt killed himself. He was screwed up, and full of rage and despair: at his record company, who he thought were placing undue pressure on him; with his bandmates, who he didn't want to play with; with himself, for being such a moody bastard. He was screwed up and full of rage and despair, when all he wanted to be was fucked up.
5. Cobain didn't want to be famous
He just had no idea what fame would entail. He was proud of his music. He wanted it to be heard by as many people as possible, but he was also conflicted. Kurt had received his schooling from people like K Records' founder Calvin Johnson, and his former girlfriend Tobi Vail, who fervently believed in doing it for yourself, away from the corporate machine. He wanted to sell. He just didn't want to sell out.
6. Cobain wrote most of Hole's second album, Live Through This
Kurt sang backing vocals on two songs. He wrote one B-side for Hole (Old Age), uncredited. And that was it. It would be just as accurate – and misleading – to say that Courtney Love wrote most of Nirvana's third album, In Utero: you can certainly see her influence in Kurt's lyrics. Before the pair met, it was often guesswork as to his intentions. Afterwards, his lyrics were far more direct.
7. Nevermind was actually crap
Some folk reckon Butch Vig's gleaming production was a betrayal of Nirvana's roots. Listen up: Cobain loved the Bay City Rollers as much as he loved the punk rock of Half Japanese and Beat Happening. He loved the chest-beating swagger of Black Flag, the cute girl pop of Shonen Knife, the hair-flailing noise of his Sub Pop contemporaries, and Abba.
I suspect most people who claim Nevermind to be not a million miles adrift from Mötley Crüe have never heard Mötley Crüe. Likewise those who have noted the similarity of Smells Like Teen Spirit to Boston's More Than a Feeling.
You're missing the point. Great bands transcend their influences.
8. Grunge was all dark, gloomy, woe-is-me music
Sure, Soundgarden were moody. Sure, Kurt Cobain could be a pissy bastard. Sure, it rained in Seattle a lot. The man-behemoth Tad Doyle (of Nirvana's touring buddies Tad), however, was as genial as he was scary-looking. Mark Arm, meanwhile, is perhaps the funniest man in the Pacific northwest. During the 1992 Reading festival, it poured down. Mud formed. During the Sunday, bands got pelted with reams of the stuff. Artists reacted in different ways. Donita from L7 hurled a used tampon into the crowd. Mudhoney downed their instruments and started pelting the audience back.
"You guys can't throw," taunted Mark Arm. "You're used to playing soccer and kicking balls with your feet." Just then a sizeable lump of Berkshire hit him smack in the face. "That'll learn me," he remarked afterwards. "Never taunt an armed audience."
9. Cobain was grunge's only casualty
Andrew Wood from Mother Love Bone. Mia Zapata from the Gits. Kristen Pfaff from Hole. Layne Staley from Alice in Chains. Poet Steven "Jesse" Bernstein. RIP.
10. Grunge had a great legacy
Smashing Pumpkins. Puddle of Mudd. Silverchair. Bush. Muse. Ash. Courtney Love. Better Than Ezra. Pearl Jam. Stone Temple Pilots. Live. Staind. Creed. Candlebox. Some legacy!
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Comments
About the legacy though....It doesn't have to be knock off bands that are the legacy. It helped halt the shitty direction rock music was in.
In that respect almost all music after can thank grunge for that.
As mostly a reader of the Train...there tends not to be much discussion of music in here, although it might be interesting to see people's take on it.
For me, it reads as if the author for the most part is just wanting to say 'Hey look at me! I was around from the beginning, so I know more than you know.'
Bleh
That's Everett True all right. I used to read Melody Maker from about 1988-1994 when he wrote for it and he always was a bit full of himself.
It took a while, but I think we agree 100%!!!!
This guy would hate my taste in music apparently.
haha, me too.. but lucky for me we only get about a month where we can wear flannels in Florida.
Those murder conspiracy theories always make me laugh, if Courtney Love was a good enough actress to make the public believe she was sad during the memorial event and to like to lie to police who would have surely questioned her about what happened, then she would have a shelf full of Oscars. Unfortunatly she is not that good an actress.
I'd say those three are pretty solid bands and from a wide spectrum. Lumping Better Than Ezra in is quite odd though. Sure they came out after grunge, but was there never supposed to be rock bands after grunge? They made a brilliant album in How Does Your Garden Grow? and I just don't get seeing them listed.
Silverchair's first two albums make them acceptable to be on this list, but come on. Neon Ballroom, Diorama and Young Modern are fantastic albums. Diorama might be one of my favorite albums of the 2000's. They're not the 15 year old marketing tools they were in 1995
Pearl Jam. Well. We're here aren't we.
I'm just not sold on the author of this article. He compares Soundgarden to Nirvana in the article, but then mentions Pearl Jam at the end for the "legacy". I guess I just don't buy the whole "grunge" idea anyway. 1991 isn't the year when "grunge broke" or "punk broke". These were rock bands on major labels. It's just one of the rare times that the labels actually got it right and put out a quality product that resulted in a movement.
http://www.reverbnation.com/brianzilm
That's the first impression I got from this article.
he actually was there from the beginning, that's why this guy knows so much. he's probably less full of himself and more just frustrated at all the falsities that go around, so he has to trumpet the fact that he was there since day 1 so people will believe the facts, not the myths.
Fargo 2003
Winnipeg 2005
Winnipeg 2011
St. Paul 2014
I thought everyone knew he was from a small town, that he liked pop music and that Grunge was just a label that already existed. I heard it used to describe the CULT's "electric" album about 5 years before that.
Grunge did have a great legacy but none of those bands they mentioned. Pearl Jam was never grunge, they were just from the same city and got added to the marketing machine.
I was a huge Nirvana fan... still wonder how his career would have gone... but I never thought any of that.
and... um... doesn't everyone like ABBA?
FACT: im wearing one right now.
when ever i read everett true i sometimes think hes full of himself. i know all the stories, i know nirvana didnt invent grunge(shudder), i know courtney didnt kill kurt, i know nirvana werent from seattle, i know grunge isnt all dark gloomy woe-is-me music cause ive heard soundgarens big dumb sex countless times and i dotn consider soundgarden grunge anyway and i wouldnt consider mia zapata murder the same as the other deaths, suicide and 'unintentional' suicide. and yes i knnow there were actually girls playing the same music who didnt get the recognition.. probably cause they didnt fit the (to come) fem mold of witches like alanis morrisette, fiona apple and sheryl crowe. they were perhaps a little too confrontational for the boys in suits whose only desire was an ever expanding bottom line.
take a good look
this could be the day
hold my hand
lie beside me
i just need to say
I don't think he's talking about the uber-fans that spend our time on grunge band message boards.
Fargo 2003
Winnipeg 2005
Winnipeg 2011
St. Paul 2014
I don't know when Nirvana got big. But in 91 I was 6 and when he died in 94 I was 9. I knew Nirvana's radio hits. I didn't follow the band at any point in time.
I was on facey spacey and seen an article about recent photos released. I hadn't ever thought about or researched his death. Hadn't even considered murder. I remember recently pics were released. I today decided to look at them. As you know nothing much to look at.
I am deeply saddened and depressed now. There is so much hate in this hell we call earth and to see a pic of his leg/foot knowing it's a dead leg. To see his arm with his watch and part of his torso and know it's a picture of a dead body. Wow. Just really makes you stop and think. About just everything.
I don't know. Just felt like sharing.
I haven't experienced a loss in that way. I hope I don't have to.
I understand why Ed says peace love take care of yourself and your neighbor. Sad that some see that behavior as weak.
Sorry I'm rambling. Even if I could dig deep and remember what life was like when I was 9 and what was being talked about I wouldn't have understood.
Those that can be trusted can change their mind.
I'm not one to click on death photos - it's enough that our local news shows plowed-down bodies in the street covered by a bloody sheet (cannot even imagine what the family must feel, seeing that).
For all of the hate and shittiness that surrounds us, so too are kind souls.
Those that can be trusted can change their mind.