0.12 Kidsplace  (Page 4/9)

The room instantly was filled with a rich, mournful, energetic sound that I recognized immediately without ever having heard it before. It was the translation into music of the dimness-driven mood every Northwesterner contends with, every day—rage subsumed by exhausting gloom. (Years later, a young friend of mine, Patrick Duhon , who settled here in the mid-1990s after growing up in Cleveland , would say in amazement, “I never got Alice in Chains until I moved here.”) All the dubious dark charm of a heavy-lidded Northwest day, tempting you to luxuriate in despair, is encapsulated in Facelift , particularly in the opening thundering thumping instrumental lead-in to lead singer Layne Staley ’s lamentations in “ Man in the Box .”

I spent the rest of the day (and, for that matter, the better part of the next two years) listening raptly to record after record— Nirvana ’s Bleach and Nevermind , Soundgarden ’s Superunknown and Badmotorfinger , Alice in Chains ’ Facelift and Dirt , Screaming Trees ’ Sweet Oblivion , and earlier records by Green River , Mother Love Bone/Pearl Jam …. I couldn’t believe that I had spent years condescendingly ignoring those kids upstairs from the Weekly while they were cranking out what sounded now like the best rock I’d ever heard.

This was in 1993, when grunge —a label indelibly tattooed on the Seattle music community by British rock critic Everett True in 1989—was at the apex of its fame outside of Seattle. The first known use of the term in connection with Seattle rock, according to Invisible Seattleite Clark Humphrey in his incomparable Loser: The Real Seattle Music Story , was in a letter to the alternative rock ‘zine Desperate Times in 1982. The letter was written by Mark Arm , later of Mudhoney , generally regarded as the seminal Seattle grunge band, and it read in part: “I hate Mr. Epp and the Calculations ! Pure grunge! Pure noise! Pure shit!” Arm was a member of the band at the time.

By 1992, grunge’s Seattle devotees had already declared it dead, killed by international acclaim. The shocking success of Nirvana’s Nevermind album was seen by everyone in the Seattle music community—particularly Nirvana lead singer/songwriter Kurt Cobain

The best-known and most compelling figure of the grunge era was Cobain , who had come north to Seattle from Olympia with his band in 1988—by which time the Seattle scene was already well established. By 1993, he had withdrawn into physical and psychological seclusion, either hidden in a home he bought with his wife, singer Courtney Love , or lost in the relatively comforting fog of heroin addiction, which was complicating the band’s touring and recording efforts.