Six Hundred Dollars
On the back of Nirvana’s Bleach is a single line: “Recorded at Reciprocal Recording by Jack Endino for $606.17.” Reciprocal was a cramped studio in Seattle’s Ballard neighbourhood, co-founded in 1986 by Endino and engineer Chris Hanzsek. At peak, the room was booked 17 hours a day. Endino, self-taught and also the guitarist in Skin Yard, recorded nearly every early Sub Pop release there: Soundgarden’s Screaming Life EP in 1987, Mudhoney’s Superfuzz Bigmuff, TAD’s debut. The studio closed in 1991. The sound it helped birth had outgrown the building, the label, and the city.
The Word Itself
In 1981, Mark Arm wrote a letter to a Seattle zine nominating his own band, Mr. Epp and the Calculations, as the city’s most overrated act. His phrasing: “Pure grunge! Pure noise! Pure shit!” The word sat dormant for six years. Then Bruce Pavitt wrote catalogue copy for Green River’s 1987 EP Dry as a Bone, calling it “ultra-loose grunge that destroyed the morals of a generation.” Marketing genius disguised as a joke. Within three years, the British press had adopted the term wholesale.
Deep Six and the First Wave
Before Sub Pop existed, there was Deep Six. Released in 1986 on C/Z Records, this compilation gathered six Seattle bands: Green River, Soundgarden, Melvins, Malfunkshun, Skin Yard, and the U-Men. Chris Hanzsek engineered it. The bands shared little beyond geography and volume, but the record drew a circle around them.
Green River, formed in 1984, were the connective tissue. When they split in 1988, guitarist Stone Gossard and bassist Jeff Ament formed Mother Love Bone with vocalist Andrew Wood. Mark Arm and Matt Lukin formed Mudhoney. Mother Love Bone signed to PolyGram, but Andrew Wood died of a heroin overdose on 19 March 1990, at 24. Soundgarden’s Chris Cornell (Wood’s former roommate) recruited Gossard and Ament for Temple of the Dog, a tribute project recorded at London Bridge Studio in late 1990. A San Diego surfer named Eddie Vedder sang on one track. Within a year, Vedder, Gossard, and Ament were Pearl Jam.
The Melvins predated everyone. Formed in 1983 in Montesano, Washington, Buzz Osborne and Dale Crover slowed punk to a doom-metal crawl. A teenage Kurt Cobain hung around their rehearsals. The Melvins never signed to Sub Pop, never went platinum, and never stopped. They proved you could make punk heavy without playing fast.
Sub Pop and the Hype Machine
Bruce Pavitt started a fanzine called Subterranean Pop in the early 1980s, covering American independent labels. He met Jonathan Poneman, a local promoter and KEXP DJ, who invested $20,000 for a 50% share. They incorporated Sub Pop Records on 1 April 1988. Their first major release was Mudhoney’s Touch Me I’m Sick single, which married a Stooges-grade riff to feedback and sarcasm. It sold out immediately.
Pavitt and Poneman understood that American music press would ignore a small Seattle indie. So they targeted the UK. In March 1989, they flew Melody Maker journalist Everett True to Seattle. True’s dispatches created a mythology: rain-soaked city, flannel-wearing misfits, music too raw for Los Angeles. The image was partially manufactured, but the bands were real.
Soundgarden became the first Seattle grunge act on a major label, signing to A&M in 1989. Louder Than Love was the first grunge record to chart on the Billboard 200. Alice in Chains’ Facelift followed in 1990 on Columbia, pushed into MTV rotation by Man in the Box. The dam was cracking before Nirvana kicked it open.
The Explosion
Nirvana recorded Nevermind at Sound City Studios in Van Nuys, California, in May and June 1991 with producer Butch Vig. The budget was $65,000. DGC Records shipped 46,251 copies, hoping to sell 250,000 total. During Christmas week 1991, the album moved 374,000 copies in seven days. By January 1992, Smells Like Teen Spirit had knocked Michael Jackson’s Dangerous from number one. Nevermind eventually sold over 30 million copies worldwide.
Pearl Jam’s Ten, released two months earlier in August 1991, took longer to build but eventually outsold Nevermind. Rick Parashar tracked it at London Bridge Studio, the same room where Temple of the Dog had recorded. Soundgarden’s Badmotorfinger arrived in October. Cameron Crowe’s film Singles came out in September 1992, its soundtrack selling two million copies. For roughly eighteen months, every major label A&R scout was booking flights to Sea-Tac.
The Sound
Grunge pulled from punk and metal in roughly equal measure, then added a Pacific Northwest bleakness. Drop D tuning was near-universal, giving power chords a low-end heaviness that standard tuning could not reach. Dynamics mattered enormously: quiet, muttered verses erupting into distorted, screaming choruses. Cobain learned that trick partly from the Pixies. Chris Cornell’s four-octave range let Soundgarden shift from whispered psychedelia to full-throated roar within a single bar.
Gear was cheap and loud. Cobain cycled through pawn-shop Fender Mustangs and Jaguars, running them into Boss DS-1 distortion pedals. Jerry Cantrell of Alice in Chains favoured a G&L Rampage into a Bogner head, producing the thick, detuned tone that defined Dirt. Kim Thayil of Soundgarden used a Guild S-100 through a Mesa/Boogie, adding wah for the dissonant textures of Superunknown.
Vocals separated grunge from its ancestors. Layne Staley and Jerry Cantrell harmonized in layered, close intervals that sounded like nothing else in rock: eerie, droning, almost liturgical. Eddie Vedder’s deep baritone brought an arena-rock intensity. Mark Lanegan of Screaming Trees sang like a man narrating his own funeral. None of them were performing energy. They were performing exhaustion.
The Aesthetic
The anti-fashion was not a pose. Seattle in the 1980s was, as Pavitt put it, “very working class.” Flannel shirts, ripped jeans, thrift-store T-shirts: people wore them because the city was cold and they were broke. Cobain lived out of his car for a stretch after moving from Aberdeen. He wore women’s dresses on stage as casual defiance. When Marc Jacobs sent flannel down the Perry Ellis runway in 1992, it was a working-class uniform repackaged as high fashion.
The Collapse
Kurt Cobain died on 5 April 1994 in his Seattle home. He was 27. Nirvana disbanded immediately. Pearl Jam cancelled their 1994 summer tour over a dispute with Ticketmaster about rising ticket prices. Layne Staley withdrew from public life, consumed by addiction, and was found dead in his Seattle apartment on 19 April 2002.
Screaming Trees broke up in 2000. Soundgarden dissolved in 1997. The scene’s social fabric frayed under success, drugs, and loss. Post-grunge bands like Bush and Silverchair carried the distorted guitars into the late 1990s, smoothing the edges for radio. The raw nerve that made grunge distinct did not survive its own mainstream absorption.
Essential Listening
- Nirvana – Nevermind (1991)
- Pearl Jam – Ten (1991)
- Alice in Chains – Dirt (1992)
- Soundgarden – Superunknown (1994)
- Mudhoney – Superfuzz Bigmuff (1988)
- Nirvana – In Utero (1993)
- Soundgarden – Badmotorfinger (1991)
- Alice in Chains – Jar of Flies (1994)
- Screaming Trees – Sweet Oblivion (1992)
- Melvins – Houdini (1993)
- Temple of the Dog – Temple of the Dog (1991)
- Pearl Jam – Vs. (1993)