Everybody Loves Our Town

The town is my hometown - Seattle. The reason - it was the birthplace of grunge. There's a new book about the history of grunge reviewed on the Guardian.

From said review...

In your standard rock narrative, there is a middle phase of joyous success before the hubris, unravelling, and so on, but grunge entered the harsh realm almost overnight. Within months of Nevermind's release, backbiting was rife, drug habits were burgeoning and flights from LA to Seattle were stuffed with A&R men scooping up bands such as the inauspiciously named Flop. It seemed like every group suddenly wanted to sound and look like Nirvana, except Nirvana themselves. Even as Cameron Crowe's 1992 movie Singles celebrated the Seattle scene, Mudhoney's typically sardonic contribution to the soundtrack, "Overblown", sought to bury it: "Everybody loves our town/ That's why I'm thinkin' lately/ Time for leavin' is now." Most music scenes are at their best in the darkness of relative obscurity but Seattle's burned up unusually fast on exposure to light: an unstable compound. One thinks of the description of Nirvana's messy "Smells Like Teen Spirit" video shoot: "The thing was never integrated enough to disintegrate."

Careful though Yarm is to chronicle those bands, like Cat Butt and the Gits, who were never destined for Time cover stories, the book's dramatic centre was always going to be Cobain and his wife, Courtney Love, a character who could start a war in an empty room. By this stage in the narrative, the playful misinformation celebrated by Everett True has curdled into savage disputes over Cobain's brief, tormented spell as America's biggest rock star. "How do you know when Courtney Love is lying?" asks Buzz Osborne of the Melvins. "Her lips are moving."



Studio 360 discusses "Nevermind" here: