Everybody Loves Our Town_ An Oral History of Grunge - Mark Yarm [95]
EVERETT TRUE There’s a quote of mine from the Sub Pop article that has been used more than anything else I’ve written, which is the earliest description of Nirvana in a British music paper—how “They’re four working-class guys from Aberdeen, blah blah blah.” What’s really kind of annoying about seeing that description everywhere is, although it’s attributed to me, they’re not my words. I was on serious deadline, and I wasn’t an experienced writer by any stretch of the imagination back then. So I was on the phone to Jonathan Poneman in Seattle and I was copying down word-for-word what he was telling me about these artists. That’s quite dreadful, really, but what the hell.
DANIEL HOUSE I was at Sub Pop during that time, and I understood what they were doing, but I was kind of appalled. Because they were basically providing Everett True the Sub Pop version of the scene, as if Sub Pop were the whole thing. They booked a whole bunch of shows with all the Sub Pop bands and promoted the hell out of them, so they made sure that his entire experience was like, “Wow! Look at the Seattle scene! I saw TAD this night, I saw Blood Circus that night, I saw Nirvana this night.” It wasn’t like all those bands would normally be playing during the same two-week period.
STEVE TURNER Seeing the article on us was like, Whoa! That was a big fucking article. Being in those magazines shifted things for us, and it made some of the straight press in Seattle pay attention. Patrick MacDonald, who was a clueless Seattle Times music critic, was dismissive of anything that was valid about Seattle music until people like Everett True and foreign magazines gave us the thumbs-up. Then he said, “Oh, great stuff here in town that I’ve been ignoring for years and saying was crap!”
AL LARSEN (Some Velvet Sidewalk singer/guitarist) I remember traveling in ’89 across the country with Mecca Normal and the Go Team and staying every night in some kid’s apartment. It’s March of ’89 and we’re in, I don’t know, Kansas. And the kid has the Sub Pop Flaming Lips seven-inch next to the stereo. And then we drive for 10 hours and we go to some other kid’s house, and he has the Sub Pop Flaming Lips seven-inch next to the stereo. We broke down in Pittsburgh, and we’re staying at some kid’s house, and their kind of hard-rock roommate lets us into his room and there he’s got the Melody Maker with the spread on Sub Pop. And I just remember being like, Whoa. We’re traveling around playing to no one and this other thing—grunge—has totally caught the world on fire.
BRUCE PAVITT Everett’s articles had a lot of impact. Also, John Peel was playing Sub Pop 200 right around the same time. And John Peel, in The Times of London, circulation two million, stated that Sub Pop had the most distinctive American regional sound since Tamla Motown. Now that’s a piece of hype.
EVERETT TRUE In my original articles, I’m supposed to have used the word grunge to describe the music. Lester Bangs certainly used to use the word. I used the word myself in the ’80s to describe the Happy Mondays. You know, “They got grungy guitars.” It was a description that was in the rock-journalist lexicon. I guess one of my subeditors at the Melody Maker picked up on the word and used it in a headline or something and all of a sudden the word started sticking.
JONATHAN PONEMAN I read the expression grunge many, many times in music journalism before Everett True used it. Everett took the word from the Sub Pop mail-order catalog description of Green River’s Dry as a Bone that Bruce wrote: “ultra-loose GRUNGE that destroyed the morals of a generation.”
FAITH HENSCHEL-VENTRELLO I worked in radio promo at Sub Pop. I remember Jon and Bruce looking through the thesaurus and coming up with grunge. I believe Bruce was the one who took it out of the thesaurus, who said, “Grunge! That word.”
BRUCE PAVITT I believe that’s the first time the word was used more as a marketing description. As with any adjective, you can go back and say, “Well, this was used in such-and-such zine,” but that came to me intuitively when