Everybody Loves Our Town—An Oral History of Grunge
By Mark Yarm (Crown Archetype, 2011)
This book is over 500 pages long, but somehow it’s not fit to hold the plaid shirttails of Peter Blecha’s Sonic Boom: The History of Nortwest Rock from “Louie Louie” to “Smells Like Teen Spirit”—which is under 300 pages and only devotes two or three chapters to that scene known as grunge.
Context is everything. Everybody Loves Our Town is great on perspective and detail–all that interband bickering, all that chafing under the labels and media glare. But ultimately it’s not the story of a local scene that it wants to be. It’s driven by the rise and fall of a few key bands, at which point the book veers well away from Seattle and into a storybook vision of what it was like to be a rock star (or for a whole tier of Northwest bands, nearly to be one). At which point it all becomes clichés and entrenched attitudes about what makes rock & roll important. Sonic Boom is about where things come from, but Everybody Loves Our Town, despite its title, loses its place.