Mark YarmEverybody Loves Our Town: An Oral History of Grunge

Loved it. LOVED it. If I could give more than 5 stars I would. This book just blew me away. Easily the best book on music I've ever read, and probably the best book I've read on anything in several years.Having grown up in Seattle, I've been a fan of the Seattle bands since the early 90s. Up until very recently I actually segregated my "Seattle" bands from all the others in my CD collection. I found out just how little I actually knew about them all by reading this book. First off, the drugs, wow. I knew there were a lot of drugs being used, but holy cow I didn't have any clue as to how bad it was. It's front and center here because it took such a horrific toll on the musicians and those around them, from Kurt Cobain and Layne Staley to Stephanie Sargent and Mike Starr. But the one that really seemed to kick the entire community in the gut was Andrew Wood. To hear about what these people meant to the people who knew them, in their own words, it just takes you way beyond the music, which is often secondary in this history.Grunge seemed to have exploded onto the airwaves when Nirvana released Nevermind, but in the long arc of its rise and fall that was actually nearer the end than the beginning. Yarm tracked down virtually anyone and everyone who planted the seeds with the punk bands from throughout western Washington, like the U-Men and Melvins. While the book has plenty of Nirvana, Pearl Jam, Soundgarden, and Alice in Chains, there is no shortage of other bands, including the Screaming Trees, Candlebox, the Gits, 7 Year Bitch, Mudhoney, and Green River. And don't forget Cat Butt. (How could anyone, with a name like that?) He also gives a lot of space to the guys at Sub Pop records, who were instrumental in helping a lot of these bands find an audience.The book is entirely told by the people who were there when it all happened, at least a couple hundred in all. Fortunately, Yarm included a handy alphabetical reference list in the back, which I was constantly flipping to to remember just who someone was and what their role in the music community was.It's alternately sad (lots of death), funny, and gossipy, almost to the point of catty, particularly whenever Courtney Love is involved. She really came across to me as an utterly psychotic bitch. So much so that I feel bad for liking her music. There weren't many others who had much nice to say about her. No surprise there. What did surprise me was how much everyone else hated Candlebox, a band I've always liked. I never realized what outcasts they were on the local music scene.I bought this book as a Christmas gift for my niece a couple years ago. At the time I thought, "I should read this before I send it to her." I didn't, but I finally got my own copy and am glad I did. Fantastic.

Being from Seattle, as a musician who knew many people interviewed in this book, I had no idea of some of the crazy-assed shit going on around me. For me, that period is a drug-fueled, alcohol drenched orgy of creativity in the prime of my life. It's nice to have had someone document it, because honestly, I don't remember shit. My last lucid memories were working at Tower Records in the U-District in '86-'88. The next 15 years were one long night out at the bars playing and partying like it was 1999, which it was at one point. I lost many good friends along the way, a couple mentioned in the book, but many more who weren't. It was a small scene in the beginning, and unusually supportive rather than competitive. Proud to have been there and survived it, crawling out battered, but alive on the other side. Good read, all in all.

I was in my mid teens/early twenties during this era of music, and I loved it. To me it was great time to be into rock and roll. So many different bands both Pop and Independent to be into. I've seen a lot bands and consider myself to be fairly knowledgable about music in general. So needless to say I was excited to hear of this book.The opening of this book chronicles a classic U-Men show from the mid 80's. Fantastic story and reads great. This period holds a lot of crucial information to the birth of this particular scene. It goes into good detail of how a lot of important people met and created the monster to be. After a while though I felt the subject matter kind of turned to issues that you would see on a VH1 or MTV style documentary....blah! I found myself reading about stuff that I already knew. Yes, Courtney Love is crazy and Layne Staley was on heroin...We know. But I kept on reading and was glad I did because it dove much deeper than I expected. A lot unexpected people turned up quoting on the issues too. VERY INFORMATIVE INDEED.I love the oral history style of this book. It reminded me a lot of Please Kill Me by Legs McNeil & Gillian McCain (great book about the birth of the New York Punk scene 60's-80's). Yes, this book is about a Rock Scene. Rock Scenes are the same in a way that they all have the tragedies, successes, blunders, unspoken heros, drugs, rehabs, and burnouts. But for some unknown reason you are still dying to know about it. Just read it already! It's a cool book about a great time in Rock and Roll History! Also remember that "Grunge" became popular for a reason other than the fashion and monster sides of it; and that is it simply Kicked Butt!

The pieced-together conversation style is jarring at first but done well. Sometimes I think that he pieces together interviews from different people done at different times to make it seem like they are having a conversation together. This is well-done but perhaps a bit misleading but allows for the narrative to flow.I really feel like I understand the scene and the people behind and within it after reading this. It does seem to focus a lot on some of the less-mentioned groups so if you are looking for a Nirvana/AIC/Pearl Jam/Soundgarden deep dive and don't care about learning where they came from and their peers then it's not really for you.

I was in my twenties as I hit the 90s and when the Seattle Sound (Grunge) came on the scene I was in love with it and the live performances of the bands that I was lucky enough to see from there.However I dont think you have to necessarily be a fan of that sound to be entertained by the book. So well done... short stories and quotes by all who lived or passed thru Seattle at its peak... people in the industry and of course the epic bands. Reading it I cracked up laughing a lot and found out quite a bit I didn't know about my favourites. Very entertaining read indeed.

Once you get used to the way this is put together this is a real treasure trove of nuggets from the Seattle scene. Its all written directly by the key players in their words and compiled together, chronologically, to show the early bands and how the likes of Soundgarden, Pearl Jam, Nirvana and all made their way onto the scene and exited it. At times its a little gossipy and there are a lot of people with axes to grind. However, its about as close to the truth as you will ever get and is essential reading for all lovers of grunge.

I wouldn't call 'Everybody Loves Our Town' a well written book, rather a superbly edited one, as Mark Yarm tells the story of Grunge through the voices of those who were there. Being a teenager at the time of Nirvana's 'Nevermind', I will always have a soft spot for grunge as it was the first genre that I could call my own. Very quickly I realized that I wasn't going to be able to put this book down, and so I finished it off in a couple of days. I also found myself riding the waves of emotions that I felt many moons ago. Firstly the exhilaration of seeing this gang of outsiders and misfits not only breaking into the mainstream, but actually coming to define a generation. Then the sadness and anger, as just as soon as it exploded, it started to fade, amid the usual cliches of rock and roll. Excess and greed, oh so predictable really! Hindsight, as it is, will tell us that as soon as the major labels got their claws into Seattle they were always going to bleed it dry, and they did. Though the lack of decent Seattle bands to follow in the wake of Nirvana, Pearl Jam etc. meant it was never going to last. All in all, it's a great book, though sadly one without a happy ending.

If you are (or were) a fan of `grunge', the chances are that you will recognise the title of this book from the Mudhoney song `Overblown'. `Everyboy loves us' - it begins - `Everybody loves our town/...it's so overblown' sang Mark Arm, aptly describing the media circus surrounding Seattle and the `grunge' phenomenon. Everybody looked at Seattle as the next Mecca of rock, but how did it actually happen? What was it like from the inside?That is exactly what former music journalist Mark Yarm set out to do with with this project: to make sense of grunge by asking the bands, the roadies, the soundmen, the girlfriends and the hangers on: what happened? He did so by compiling an oral history, entirely told by `witness accounts' rather than by his own authorial voice. The result is a compelling read, which will captivate you right from the first chapter - on how The U-Men once set fire to the stage - right until the end, when the grunge supernova implodes, leaving a string of casualties along the way.This collection of interviews, loosely grouped by band but expertly interwoven in chronological order, offers an almost seamless narrative which has the page-turning quality of the best fiction. Yarm pieced ELOT together from both existing and new material; by doing so, he succeeded in creating an incredibly comprehensive `bible' of grunge, with cross referencing questions and answers and whose protagonists often give their own version of events only described a few paragraphs before. The result is often very amusing, with discordant opinions on what really happened and all people in question offering their own contradicting version. Predictably, anecdotes involving Courtney Love seem to invariably be cause for disagreement.There are a lot of books about `grunge' out there but ELOT stands out because it lets its protagonists do the talking, instead of attempting to draw the kind of pseudo-sociological conclusions so beloved by popular culture writers. If you never had the chance to experience the early 1990s Seattle scene in person, this book is going to be the next best thing.

I love that you can just dip into this. Anecdotes and stories by those who were there at the time. Some stuff it’s great remembering, others it’s been great to learn.Especially poignant was the death of Andrew Wood