Reprint. Originally published: Berkeley, California: Roaring Forties Press, 2016.

Chronicling the intertwined lives of members of core grunge bands, Grunge Seattle reveals the origins and inspirations of the grunge movement. Delve into the collisions between personalities and egos, artists and corporations, suburbs and cities, obscurity and fame. Explore the cafés, apartments and studios where Nirvana, Pearl Jam, Soundgarden, Mudhoney and Alice in Chains practiced and played. In this reprint edition, originally published in 2010 and revised in 2016, writer, surfer and longtime Seattlite Justin Henderson provides a unique guide to the key locations in the story of grunge.

Twenty years after the release of Nirvana’s landmark album Nevermind comes Everybody Loves Our Town: An Oral History of Grunge, the definitive word on the grunge era, straight from the mouths of those at the center of it all. In 1986, fledgling Seattle label C/Z Records released Deep Six, a compilation featuring a half-dozen local bands: Soundgarden, Green River, Melvins, Malfunkshun, the U-Men and Skin Yard. Though it sold miserably, the record made music history by documenting a burgeoning regional sound, the raw fusion of heavy metal and punk rock that we now know as grunge. But it wasn’t until five years later, with the seemingly overnight success of Nirvana’s “Smells Like Teen Spirit,” that grunge became a household word and Seattle ground zero for the nineties alternative-rock explosion. Everybody Loves Our Town captures the grunge era in the words of the musicians, producers, managers, record executives, video directors, photographers, journalists, publicists, club owners, roadies, scenesters and hangers-on who lived through it. The book tells the whole story: from the founding of the Deep Six bands to the worldwide success of grunge’s big four (Nirvana, Pearl Jam, Soundgarden and Alice in Chains); from the rise of Seattle’s cash-poor, hype-rich indie label Sub Pop to the major-label feeding frenzy that overtook the Pacific Northwest; from the simple joys of making noise at basement parties and tiny rock clubs to the tragic, lonely deaths of superstars Kurt Cobain and Layne Staley. Drawn from more than 250 new interviews—with members of Nirvana, Pearl Jam, Soundgarden, Alice in Chains, Screaming Trees, Hole, Melvins, Mudhoney, Green River, Mother Love Bone, Temple of the Dog, Mad Season, L7, Babes in Toyland, 7 Year Bitch, TAD, the U-Men, Candlebox and many more—and featuring previously untold stories and never-before-published photographs, Everybody Loves Our Town is at once a moving, funny, lurid, and hugely insightful portrait of an extraordinary musical era.

Grunge isn’t dead – but was it every truly alive? Twenty years after the height of the movement, The Strangest Tribe redefines grunge as we know it. Stephen Tow takes a second look at the music and community that vaulted the likes of Nirvana, Pearl Jam, Mudhoney, and Soundgarden to international fame. Chock-full of interviews with the starring characters, Tow extensively chronicles the rise of rock 'n' roll’s last great statement and contextualizes what the music really meant to the key players. Delving deep into the archives, Tow paints a vivid picture of the underground rock circuit of tattered warehouses and community centers. Seattle’s heady punk scene of the late '80s gave birth to a rowdy and raucous movement, influenced by metal, but wholly its own. Seattle made its own sound, a sound that came to be known internationally as grunge. Tow walks the reader through this sonic evolution, interviewing members of every band along the way. In 1991, Seattle’s sound took the world by storm--but this same storm had been brewing in the Pacific Northwest for a decade before it hit MTV. The Strangest Tribe is a reframing of this last transformative era in music. Not just plaid shirts, bleached hair, and angst, “grunge” is a word used to describe a rich community of artists and jokers.

Taking Punk to the Masses: From Nowhere to Nevermind visually documents the explosion of Grunge, the Seattle Sound, within the context of the underground punk subculture that was developing throughout the u.S. in the late 1970s and 1980s. The book serves as a companion and contextual backdrop to the Nirvana: Taking Punk to the Masses exhibition, which opens at Seattle’s Experience Music Project in 2011. This decade-and-a-half musical journey will be represented entirely through the lens of EMP’s oral history and permanent object collection, an invaluable and rich cultural archive of over 800 interviews and 140,000 objects ― instruments, costumes, posters, records and other ephemera dedicated to the pursuit of rock ’n’ roll. Taking Punk to the Masses focuses on 100 key objects from EMP’s permanent collection that illustrate the evolution of punk rock from underground subculture to the mainstream embrace (and subsequent underground rejection) of Grunge. These objects are put into context by the stories of those who lived it, culling from EMP’s vast archive of oral histories with such Northwest icons as Mudhoney’s Mark Arm, cartoonist Peter Bagge, design legend Art Chantry, Beat Happening’s Calvin Johnson, Sub Pop founders Bruce Pavitt and Jonathan Poneman, the Screaming Trees’ Mark Lanegan, Nirvana’s krist Novoselic, photographer Charles Petersen, Soundgarden’s kim Thayil, and dozens of others. From the Northwest’s earliest punk bands like The Wipers, to proto-grunge bands of the 1980s like Green River, Melvins and Malfunkshun, through the heady 1990s when bands such as Nirvana, Soundgarden, Pearl Jam, Alice in Chains and Mudhoney rose to the national stage and popularized alternative music, Taking Punk to the Masses is the first definitive history of one of America’s most vibrant music scenes, as told by the participants who helped make it so, and through the artifacts that survive.

Grunge Is Dead weaves together the definitive story of the Seattle music scene through a series of interviews with the people who were there. Taking the form of an "oral" history, this books contains over 130 interviews, along with essential background information from acclaimed music writer Greg Prato. The early '90s grunge movement may have last only a few years, but it spawned some of the greatest rock music of all time: Pearl Jam, Nirvana, Alice in Chains, and Soundgarden. This book contains the first-ever interview in which Pearl Jam's Eddie Vedder was willing to discuss the group's history in great detail; Alice in Chains' band members and Layne Staley's mom on Staley's drug addiction and death; insights into the Riot Grrrl movement and oft-overlooked but highly influential Seattle bands like Mother Love Bone/Andy Wood, the Melvins, Screaming Trees, and Mudhoney; and much more. Grunge Is Dead digs deeper than the average grunge history, starting in the early '60s, and explaining the chain of events that gave way to the grunge movement. The end result is a book that includes a wealth of previously untold stories and insight for the longtime fan, as well as its renowned story for the newcomer. Grunge Is Dead collects the whole truth of grunge music in one comprehensive volume.

Throughout the 1990s, Dave Thompson was the Seattle-based contributing editor to Alternative Press magazine—America's biggest-selling and most influential alternative rock monthly—and a regular contributor to other publications both nationally and internationally. Throughout this decade, grunge music ruled the world and Seattle was its birthplace and focal point. Thompson was an eyewitness to it all. His writings and interviews chronicled the entire history of grunge—from its roots in the earliest explosion of punk in the mid-1970s to its rise and ultimate fall from grace in the late 1990s. Drawing from Thompson's extensive experience and research—from personal files and journals and hours of interviews with both musicians and fans, other music industry figures, and a wealth of characters from the Seattle scene—The Grunge Diaries is an exhaustive account of this unique era. Featured are all of the major acts—Nirvana, Pearl Jam, Mudhoney, Soundgarden—and many lesser known bands and artists. But it's not only about the music, the fashions, and the personalities that still resonate today. The Grunge Diaries also tells the tale of the end of an era in American history—twentieth-century music culture's last hurrah before the dot-com monsters (many of whom were themselves based in Seattle) devoured its soul and faceless corporations rebranded entertainment. These were the days when fame was still within reach of anyone who knew three chords and had three friends.