So Very Few Survive

So very few survive.

This story by Lisa Whittington-Hill is a very good read. It's a history of the female side of grunge, and how the bands like L7 and Babes In Toyland, among others, fit in to the story that's so rarely told.

Remembering back... I was in the age group of very young musicians that got hit by the Seattle rumors starting in about 1985. Something was happening there. Bam Bam was part of that rumor mill, but none of us ever caught anything other than the name; we did catch The Melvins, though, at least via cassette trades and someone "with family in Seattle sent me this t-shirt and a tape".

L7 cassettes came down at about the same time that Soundgarden's UltramegaOK bootlegs did. And that particular pairing was significant for some of us far from the Emerald City: my best friend at the time, a bass player, asked me if I thought he and I should go up to Seattle and try to break in up there. Just for a summer, throw your guitar in and let's see if we can, you know? (why we didn't came down to a simple problem, two years into high school and he'd already been through rehab once. Given that the other thing we knew of Seattle was heroin, that's what stopped us. That, and I ended up getting marching orders from my mother to move again just a couple weeks later.)

So L7 was right there from the beginning, to our ears. Babes In Toyland came a little later, late enough that Nirvana and Alice In Chains had now entered the picture.

Here's the way it used to work. When noise got around of a "new sound", and the major labels started showing up, then what they were really looking for was, as it became, "The Next Nirvana". It's a manufacturing line, they wanted the closest sonic and visual equivalent to knock off of their own studio line, no more no less. If you fit the bill, and were early enough in line, great.

If you didn't, hey tough luck kid, try maybe Chicago, I hear there's a scene coming up there?

If you tried for the brass ring, you knew damned well what you were signing up for. The labels always fucked you, and good. Sure, yeah, Slash could ride around L.A. for two years working a good deal for Guns N' Roses, but could you?

But the labels never defined what the sound actually was. Mainstream success, that they could more or less offer, at least for a short time. Artistic credit? Naw, wrong door kid, try that with the longhair professors down the street.

Which is why Lisa's article is important, of course. Otherwise meaningful stories would be forgotten.

And that takes us up to circa 1995, at least in terms of the immediate swirl following Nirvana blowing up the world. Really, it was that quick, three years and grunge had already morphed fairly away from whatever it had been in the popular imagination.

In my own personal timeline, in that year I suddenly realized that teenagers, especially female teenagers who had an interest in performing music, dj'ing, or a certain type of clubbing, had discovered No Doubt.

And then, a year later, The Craft, and it's fantastic soundtrack, came out. With Letters To Cleo, Juliana Hatfield, Jewel, Heather Nova, and Elastica.

And yes, in between, just like with No Doubt, Garbage came along.

Now, you being a keen scholar of music, will note that these bands are not "grunge" in the sense of L7 and Babes In Toyland. They used what they learned from those who went before, yes, but they had found their own sound, their own niche. And, somewhat uniquely for the time, they'd been encouraged by their labels to do so, rather than being shoved into the pre-made box that the studios had shaped to convenience for the grunge bands.

And, from my observation, these bands and others of their time tapped into what their audiences were after. Here we have that most elusive of popular music goals: the zeitgeist.

So, let's say I and my best friend had done what Dave Grohl did, drop out of school and head off to join the circus in Seattle circa 1988? Where would we have been?

Either desparate to hope to be in the second wave of signing after Soundgarden and Nirvana. Or, after a couple years, maybe still hungry enough to step away and dream our way to a new sound. This is the major label cycle: three years was time enough for the Beatles to record Sgt. Pepper's, The White Album, and Abbey Road. So why are you still playing that same old shit, give me something new?

And look, we've gotten this far into it and you let me get away without even mentioning Hole? I adored Courtney Love and Hole, as musicians. No, I have no comment on her relationship. But as grunge musicians, Courtney and her bandmates have their own place in this story too.

All artistic movements have their histories, and rightly so. I'm very glad that folks like Lisa are tackling this stuff.

I'll add one little oddity that I turn over in my head whenever I think about that era: what was it like to be a teenaged musician who caught onto Iggy and the Stooges, or the New York Dolls, long before even the Ramones were formed.

And then find out about "This New PuNk RoK Craze From Jolly Olde England!"

The reason that comes up for me in this context is that, not long after Kurt Cobain's death, a friend of mine from the day life, some years older and originally from England, told me that their response to grunge was something like "Americans finally have their own punk movement".

I'm still scratching my head over that one. If nothing else, it's a reminder that artistic movements, outside of Arlo Guthrie's classic description, are strange beasts only ever roughly described. And probably for the better, at least in terms of leaving the next one, hopefully, far out of reach of manufacture, rather than discovery.