Everybody Loves Our Town_ An Oral History of Grunge - Mark Yarm [96]
EVERETT TRUE It’s kind of ironic that this music I absolutely despised and is anathema to everything I love about music, that is the one music I’m credited with inventing! To me, grunge is another crap musical form that MTV invented. The original grunge, the Sub Pop grunge, had nothing to do with the grunge that became popular, like Silverchair and Puddle of Mudd.
JACK ENDINO None of us is entirely sure about who used the word first. I saw it in a Lester Bangs record review in Rolling Stone in the ’70s. Mark Arm had used the word in the early ’80s.
MAIRE MASCO Desperate Times had letters to the editor, and Mark Arm wrote this letter complaining about his own band, Mr. Epp and the Calculations, being “pure grunge.” Before that, the word had been grungy, an adjective. Mark basically turned it into a noun.
MARK ARM (writing in to Desperate Times, July 22, 1981) I hate Mr. Epp & the Calculations! Pure grunge! Pure noise! Pure shit! Everyone I know loves them, I don’t know why. They don’t even wear chains and mohawks! They all look different, yuk! And they have no sense of humor. In fact, they have no sense. They’re all pretentious, older than the Grateful Dead, and love Emerson Lake & Palmer (my mother’s fave).
I love Philip Glass! While my friends listen to Mr. Epp & the Calculations, I listen to Mr. Glass. His music is repetitious, redundant, and repetitive. Pure art! It’s sooooooo intellectual, like me. I love to listen to Philip Glass over and over and over and over again etc. ad infinitum.
Mark McLaughlin
Mark McLaughlin
Mark McLaughlin
Mark McLaughlin
(Ed. note: Mark McLaughlin does guitar & vocals in Mr. Epp and the Calculations.)
MAIRE MASCO I actually remember when we got his letter, I said to Daina Darzin, the editor, “I don’t think grunge is a word.” And she said, “It doesn’t matter, it sounds cool.”
MARK ARM Am I the person responsible for coining the word grunge? I don’t think so. In 1981, I wrote a fanzine a fake letter from the perspective of a disgruntled person who happened to stumble upon my shitty band at the time, Mr. Epp. It was fake hate mail. You know, this publicity stuff is very tricky!
The word grunge was tossed around a little bit here and there well before I ever used it. Steve Turner picked up this ’70s reissue of a Rock ’n’ Roll Trio album, and the liner notes talk about Paul Burlison’s “grungy guitar sound.” That was written in the ’70s about a ’50s guitar player.
Grunge was an adjective; it was never meant to be a noun. If I was using it, it was never meant to coin a movement, it was just to describe raw rock and roll. Then that term got applied to major-label bands putting out slick-sounding records. It’s an ill fit.
RICKY KULWICKI (guitarist for Denver’s the Fluid) The first time I heard the word grunge? We had just started the Fluid, and we were opening for the Dead Kennedys at the Blue Note in Boulder, Colorado. Jello Biafra from the Dead Kennedys is from Boulder, and he knew us from when we were in punk-rock bands. Afterwards, while we were loading out, he comes up to me and he’s like, “Hey, Ricky, it’s good to see you guys are continuing the legacy of Denver grunge.” I’d never heard that word before in association with music. But I knew that it was a compliment. I was like, “Thanks, man.” This was in 1985.
DAVID DUET People keep saying I was the first one to say grunge in that scene. I know we were definitely the first ones to use it in anything. I’ve gotten a lot of hell for that.
The first thing I came up with was grungedelic, which is from a lyric for our single “64 Funny Cars.” We wrote the song in ’86, ’87. It was just stuff that came out of my mind while we were playin’. After that, I came up with Moto Grunge, which appeared on one of the early Cat Butt flyers. I was fascinated by biker patches, like Moto Guzzi. I was