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making tracks

Steve Ashby breaks his rusty cage and runs...

The Varmints are wondering: Is there an archaeology of 'grunge' and what might it look like? What and where are the iconic sites and monuments, and what types of artefact would represent grunge in museum exhibits? What, finally, might an archaeologist make of grunge's type-site: Seattle? Here occasional Varmints listener and colleague of John Varmint at the University of York, Dr Steve Ashby puts his Viking combs aside to reflect on a recent visit.

In the late 1980s and early 90s, it seemed that interesting music only came from one place: Seattle. Nirvana, Pearl Jam, Soundgarden, Mudhoney: bands with little musical similarity, but who shared a certain similarity of approach borne of a common heritage in punk and metal. It was these 'grunge' bands that kicked off the 'alternative rock' explosion (which very quickly became anything but alternative). As a result, Seattle was packaged and marketed. In fact, it is difficult to think of another musical moment in which a sense of place was so strongly implicated (see Bell 1998).

Seattle's 90s music scene is best characterised as a series of paradoxes: paradoxes relating to personal and group identity, to perceptions of place, and to the relationship between music, image and material. The scene's key protagonists refuted deterministic arguments about the 'home' of their music, while at the same time revelling in a communality of spirit that clearly had its root in the local. They downplayed the importance of image (shunning fame in the most visible ways), and habitually placed the 'reality' of the music in direct opposition to the material products that sprung up around them. Given such complex attitudes to identity, place, and material, it is rewarding to investigate how these phenomena fed back on one another, and to consider their relationship today: can Seattle's recent position at the musical centre of the world be in any way discerned in today's city? How is this heritage remembered? What are its archaeological signatures?

Place, materiality, memory

Perhaps the most characteristic artefact of the 'grunge' movement was the flyer: concert posters expeditiously produced and pinned up on walls and telegraph poles. These flyers are now highly sought after, and have developed a mythology of their own; it is frequently said that their posting was banned in order to protect the hands of telecommunications engineers, or to hide Seattle's seedy side. This was itself a paradox, as the economic growth that rode on the back of the city's musical output inevitably led to the gentrification of many areas of Seattle, including the 'alternative' nexus of Belltown.

The Crocodile Café , famous for intimate performances by many of Seattle's most influential bands; recently reopened as 'The Crocodile'.

The Moore Theatre, which played host to early genre-defining performances by bands such as Pearl Jam and Alice in Chains. Click for larger image

The Hendrix statue, in the Capitol Hill suburb of the city.

• All images are courtesy of Steve Ashby.

Nonetheless, this part of town is still home to thrift stores, bars, and music venues, and several 'monuments' to moments past remain (figs 1 & 2 ). However, there is little sign that these venues hold any place in music history: no blue plaque saying 'Eddie sat here'. Has the refusal to accept the importance of artefacts led to a reluctance to remember? It is notable that the city displays no easily identifiable tribute to Kurt Cobain, though a bench in Viretta Park has become something of an informal shrine. Indeed, this sort of understatement appears to be something of a tradition: even Jimi Hendrix is commemorated only by a diminutive statue (fig 3). Instead, the period is referenced in transient and ephemeral associations with places: memories (real or imagined) of Nirvana at the Croc, of Pearl Jam at the Moore, or of Kurt Cobain's memorial vigil beneath the Space Needle.

With this in mind, it is instructive to recall Paul Graves-Brown's (2009) critique of the assumption that music can be monumentalised through association with static places; it is too fluid, too dynamic for that. While Seattle has of course been transformed by the economic boom of the last 20 years, the 'alternative' set still populate bars that could only be described as 'grungey', the Crocodile Café has recently re-opened, and though the names of the bands are unfamiliar, the telegraph poles of Belltown remain hidden beneath layers of concert flyers. Perhaps this is where we will find the archaeology of the 'Seattle Sound': not in monuments and places, but in the ephemeral, disposable material created simply as a means to communicate information about what really mattered - the music. This, appropriately enough, creates a further paradox, as it is by virtue of this very belief that such material became central to the creation of the identities of these bands, and of those who followed them.

Links

• Chris Around the World: This travel blog recalls memories of a trip to Seattle, 'in search of Kurt Cobain', and includes images of the memorial bench in Viretta Park.
• Some of the above is taken from (or inspired by) Doug Pray's (1996) film Hype!

References

• Bell, TL (1998). "Why Seattle? An examination of an alternative rock culture hearth." Journal of Cultural Geography 18(1): 35–47.
• Graves-Brown, P (2009). "Nowhere man: urban life and the virtualization of popular music." Popular Music History 4(2): 220–241.

Soundtracks

Temple of the Dog

• Hunger Strike: The Temple of the Dog project was a one-off collaborative effort that represents a key moment in the development of Seattle's scene. When Mother Love Bone's singer, Andrew Wood died prematurely, his band-mates and room-mates clubbed together to record something in tribute. This ended up being a collaboration between members of Soundgarden and what would soon become Pearl Jam. Hunger Strike was the single from this album, and is notable as it features a vocal duet between Soundgarden's Chris Cornell and Eddie Vedder of Pearl Jam.

Alice in Chains

• Bleed the Freak: No idea what this is about, but it's beautifully horrible.

• Rain When I Die: Two things make Alice in Chains absolutely distinctive: Layne Stayley's incessant growl, and Jerry Cantrell's inability to leave his wah-wah pedal alone. This song combines both phenomena to great effect.

Pearl Jam

• Alive: Perhaps the song that best encaspsulates the Pearl Jam contribution to the development of the 'Seattle sound', and which led to hundreds of copy-cat bands being formed by teenagers in places like Wolverhampton and Gateshead. Angsty, but proper classic rock with a BIG old-fashioned pentatonic guitar solo. Still impossible not to sing along with 20 years later.

• Go: From Pearl Jam's 2nd album, 'Vs', which perhaps fits more into what people expected of a grunge band than their first 'Ten'. This track, the album's opener, always puts me in mind of Soundgarden, with its detuned guitar parts, and its frenetic discordant development.

Soundgarden

• Hands All Over: Showcases one of the lasting characteristics of many of these bands: their social, and in this case, environmental, conscience.

• Jesus Christ Pose: This documents the moment at which Soundgarden were just starting to break big, notwithstanding the determinedly challenging lyrics and associated video (directed at religious hypocrisy, though that was no doubt lost on the song's detractors).

• Exit Stonehenge: The B-side to the huge-selling 'Spoonman'. Not actually a very good song at all, but how could we not include it!

Nirvana

• Sliver: I could never really get excited about Nirvana, but this song always makes me smile, perhaps because it contains the words 'mashed potato'. Bonkers.

• Smells Like Teen Spirit: Still the iconic track of the movement, and for many of us, our first introduction to Nirvana's trademark quiet-quiet-LOUD dynamic. Few of us kids knew the Pixies had already been doing this for years.

Screaming Trees

• Dollar Bill: Screaming Trees were a wonderfully odd phenomenon: they looked nothing like a rock band, and seemed to oscillate between foregrounding Mark Lanegan's gentle, whispery voice and spiky guitar parts. But Dollar Bill is just lovely.

Mudhoney

• Overblown: Not one of Mudhoney's greatest, but I include it here for the sake of its irony. It was included on the soundtrack of Cameron Crowe's film 'Singles', a romantic comedy set in early 90s Seattle, and in which one of the key characters is the singer in a grunge band. The soundtrack included many of the bands listed above, and a good number of them also make cameos in the film, which seems to have been filmed just before the whole scene went global. I love the fact that Mudhoney's contribution to a film that sold the Seattle mythology as much as anything that came before or after it, was a rant about excessive hype.

And a little bit of north-western heritage:

The Kingsmen

• Louie Louie (perhaps where it all started...)

The Sonics

• Have Love Will Travel. (is it stretching it too much to say that the Sonics were starting to sound 'grungey' even in the 1960s?)

Jimi Hendrix

• Little Wing. Compare the guitar part in this with that in Pearl Jam's Yellow Ledbetter, and it's clear that Hendrix's shadow is more than just geographical.

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