The word itself is of endless fascination to me. Trying to find out who coined the term in regard to Seattle bands is an exercise in futility. All signs point toward Mark Arm and/or someone at Sub Pop, though I doubt anyone (other than that vainglorious windbag Everett True) would try to take credit for it now. There’s absolutely no doubt that Sub Pop popularized the term, tossing it around with reckless abandon to help sell their vision of Seattle’s unkempt rock to the masses.
However, during what was clearly grunge’s heyday, bands (some even on Sub Pop) and many local rock critics avoided the word like the plague, preferring to call it noise rock, trash rock, art rock, punk rock. Anything but grunge.
Which is clearly what it was. The first time I heard Green River’s Come on Down, and C/Z’s Deep Six compilation I immediately understood what the term grunge was about. Picking up Green River’s even more focused Sub Pop debut Dry as a Bone cemented the connection. What I also intuitively understood was that the term had an implied tongue-in-cheek quality to it, just like much of the music itself. It was a perfect fit.
Even though the word was anathema to local scenesters (who seemed to equally despise the term "Seattle Sound") before there was such a ludicrous thing as grunge "fashion" or the "lexicon of grunge," it became utterly taboo after the rest of the world co-opted it and ultimately turned it into the punchline of a Jay Leno monologue. Locally it became known as the "G-word." Only clueless nitwits from the Midwest and other poorly educated and ill-informed ninnies even spoke the word grunge after about 1994. And then it was usually in reference to clearly non-grunge bands like Candlebox, Our Lady Peace and, fer chrissakes, Stone Temple Pilots.
But as odious as that all is, can you think of a better term to describe Mudhoney’s Superfuzz Bigmuff, Blood Circus’ Primal Rock Therapy or Soundgarden’s Screaming Life. Punk? Garage? Alternative? Please. There is just one word that fits the bill. Don’t make me say it again.
Listen, we’ve gotta have a word for the music that made Seattle part of rock history, don’t we? New York City had punk/new wave, Los Angeles had glam metal and, like it or not, Seattle is known for grunge. Whether or not all the Seattle bands that hit the big time in the early 1990s—Nirvana, Alice in Chains, Soundgarden and Pearl Jam—were actual grunge bands is irrelevant: they all had well-documented roots in it and/or were actual progenitors of the sound at some point. More importantly, nearly all had previously recorded demos or albums with the man responsible for magnetizing the "Seattle Sound," engineer/producer Jack Endino.
Endino’s work on all the seminal Sub Pop releases, as well as all the work he did for other labels in the late ’80s and early ’90s is probably most responsible for crafting a unified sound. Nearly every band that recorded for Sub Pop during that time—from the Fluid to Afghan Whigs to the Derelicts to Rein Sanction—was given the Endino treatment, the signature grunge sound that was heavy and abrasive, yet crisp and unmuddled. He basically captured the sound of (mostly) young men with cheap equipment playing loud rock and howling their lungs out. Which is actually not as easy as it sounds, especially when you consider the equipment he had to work with in the early days of Reciprocal Recording.
Now I’d be the first to admit that the endless wave of watered-down, post-grunge bands that to this day seem to have persisted longer than grunge ever did makes it difficult to remember what was so vital about Seattle rock circa 1989, when anything seemed possible. It’s hard not to hear Layne Staley’s nasally howl in a half-dozen horrible (and hugely popular) current bands and not feel a little sadness and disdain. But all of that doesn’t completely negate or erase the legacy that we are stuck with.
And, hell, the way these things seem to cycle around—now that we’re a good 10 years separated from grunge’s official blacklisting—it oughta be well on its way toward "retro" and thereby cool once again. Cool in that "I’m being ironic" way that has recently allowed people who pretended for years that they didn’t actually like Poison to embrace them as cool because it’s kitschy to do so.
I love grunge. I always have and I always will. Mostly because it was a musical aesthetic more than an actual sound, and for a few years bands as disparate as Nirvana, Big Chief, the Afghan Whigs, Mudhoney, Swallow, Skin Yard and many others were all, more or less, on the same page and making fun, loud and completely unruly rock music. These bands may have been coming from slightly different backgrounds and musical approaches, but the end result had a cohesiveness that the we, and eventually the rest of the goddamn free world, totally devoured.
I think you know what it was called.
THE GRUNGE REVIVAL BEGINS HERE!:
5 Records that Need to Be Reissued on CD
1. SWALLOW Swallow (Sub Pop)
2. SGM Aggression (Medusa)
3. U-MEN Step on a Bug (Black Label)
4. THRILLHAMMER Giftless (Rough trade)
5. DADDY HATE BOX Sugar Plow (New Rage)*
*Full disclosure: this was originally released on a label I ran with Sub Pop art director Jeff Kleinsmith, but it really does deserve to be digitized. Anybody?