“Grunge is Dead”
Posted on Apr 23, 2009 @ 02:19PM - Add a comment
It was 15 years ago this month that Kurt Cobain took his own life in his greenhouse in Seattle, joining the 27 Club with the likes of Jim, Jimi, Janis, and Brian before him. And appropriately there’s a new book to mark the occasion—Grunge Is Dead: The Oral History of Seattle Rock Music (ECW)—that offers up another look at the Seattle scene, this time strung together in the words of those who lived it, like successful rock history tomes Please Kill Me and Andrew Loog Oldham’s Stoned before it.
Author Greg Prato talked to 130 people who were there when—there being Seattle, of course, and when being in the ‘90s when grunge ruled the music world—including, most impressively, Pearl Jam’s Eddie Vedder, along with members of Soundgarden and Alice In Chainsand the founders of seminal Seattle record label Sub Pop. Going further behind the music, the book includes interviews with the women in the rock stars’ lives—Kurt Cobain’s pre-Courtney girlfriend Tracy Marander (and the inspiration for “About A Girl”), Susan Silver, Chris Cornell’s ex-wife and –manager, and the mother of late Alice In Chains singer Layne Staley, who speaks about her deceased son’s drug problem.
