BEFORE: Yes, I realize there's a more recent documentary about Kurt Cobain, the "Montage of Heck" documentary that did play at Sundance a couple of years back, but since I didn't miss it there (because I didn't attend) I don't feel the same sort of urgency to watch that one. There's no "call to action" for me, to make up for a past incident, plus I think one movie about Cobain is enough, even if that one did perhaps distort the facts about Cobain's suicide - at least some were discounted by ANOTHER documentary later on, it seems. Nope, if the Beatles get three documentaries and the Stones get three and Hendrix gets two, Cobain gets one. Look, he's still going to make the year-end countdown with three appearances, I just don't care enough about his music to give him another slot.
Cobain carries over to this documentary, at least he appears in archive footage. This is one of those films that's technically in my collection and I've never watched it because I forgot about it - I taped it off cable and put it on DVD, must have been in 2005 or 2006, because my wife likes Pearl Jam, and it seemed to be about that whole scene. I only remembered about it again because I was putting this chain together, after I remembered about "Kurt & Courtney", and it seemed like it might help me with the linking, and sure enough, I was right. Though I suppose that if I hadn't remembered about it, I could have just skipped it and linked from "27: Gone Too Soon" right to tomorrow's film. But it's better to be inclusive, right?
THE PLOT: Documentary covering the growth and subsequent overexposure of the Seattle "grunge" music scene in the early '90s.
AFTER: Back in college, one of my roommates ran a music 'zine from our dorm room, so every few months his corner of the room would be stacked with a few thousand issues, which he then had to truck around to various record stores and head shops in NYC to get rid of, a few dozen at a time. This also led to the occasional band being interviewed in our room, or sleeping on the floor. I don't recall any of the names of the bands, but I remember cartoonist Pete Bagge trashing me in an interview based solely on the posters on the wall near my bed, but then when my roommate said I also read "Neat Stuff", immediately he changed course and said I was cool. (I know I've still got that issue in my possession somewhere...). Back then the big local NYC band was Yo La Tengo, but the band made up of students that lived in my dorm was called Hypnolovewheel. I want to say that the band Firehose slept on our floor, or maybe it was Firehouse? Anyway, the zine would feature cartoons from people like Matt Groening, and come with a small vinyl record inside, with tracks from Pavement or The Mekons, and the last I'd heard of that roommate, he'd made his way out to Seattle, possibly right around the time that the music scene was really starting to heat up there. Suddenly I've got the urge to track him down, though we haven't spoken in 30 years...
I sort of consciously jumped over 1980's music as well as the rest of the 1970's, and skipped ahead to the '90s, but I'm going to work my way back, I swear. I'm going to cover a lot of different musical artists here in the second third of the chain, although there will still be some classic rock like the Eagles and Springsteen, and then the final third will focus on whatever's left, from the Beach Boys to The Who to David Bowie, and then transition to some heavy metal to finish things up. I just couldn't find a way to do everything chronologically, because that would have meant ending with the most contemporary artists in my chain like Amy Winehouse and Lady Gaga, and there just wasn't a way back to narrative movies from there. So I've got to bounce around a little in time to cover the bulk of post-rock music history. (You may claim that rock is still alive, but I've yet to find any evidence to support that. Sure, I love classic rock, but after so many funerals, it's barely hanging on...)
As a result, though, this grunge thing just isn't my scene. It didn't speak to me back in the early 90's because I was still working my way through the classic rock catalog, learning all that I could about the music of the 1960's and 70's, mostly because I was a teenager in the 80's and in high school I listed to bands like Def Leppard, the Cars and ZZ Top. So I had a lot of catching up to do in the 90's, and I think that's when I stopped listening to anything contemporary. I regarded the music of the 90's as really stupid, and I didn't think it could hold a candle to the work of the Rolling Stones and the Beatles, and I still stand by that. Plus I was really busy trying to find a steady gig in the film industry, so I didn't have much time to listen to new music, anyway. I followed my bliss and then years later when I could afford to go to rock concerts, it was the older acts on the nostalgia circuit that I wanted to see - Boston, Journey, Hall and Oates, Styx, Foreigner, Chicago and REO Speedwagon. (All of whom were technically producing new material, only in concert people only wanted to hear the classics...).
Bottom line, I'm really out of my depth here, ignorant of what went down in Seattle in the late 80's/early 90's, but it seems like this documentary could have just listed names of bands for 90 minutes straight, and would have run out of time. Hundreds of bands formed in that area, if not thousands, and when Nirvana hit, even the ones that had moved to L.A. or San Francisco started moving back. It must have been like Liverpool after the Beatles broke, or Detroit after Motown became a thing, or San Francisco in 1969, just a case of the location, culture and talent converging to create something of a glut on the market. And footage of Nirvana's first performance of "Smells Like Teen Spirit" is shown here, it's kind of like the Cavern Club footage of the Beatles, only for Generation X.
But I do understand the impact of the climate on the grunge movement - what is there to do in Seattle when it rains, except to stay inside and learn how to play guitar? I'm more familiar with the scene in Portland, Oregon, which seems to have produced more than its fair share of animators and cartoonists, like Matt Groening, Lynda Barry, the late John Callahan, and others whom I've worked for or with. In Portland people just decided to stay inside and draw, rather than play music.
But what happened to grunge? Did it just become so integrated, so co-opted by big business selling plaid shirts and wool hats that it just dissolved into the mainstream? Or did people get tired of dancing in mosh pits and punching each other out - did those concert-goers all get steady jobs where showing up the next morning with a black eye would be bad for their careers? Or did the grunge kids somehow morph into the hipsters of today, famous for rejecting anything that is enjoyed by the masses, including music? It's tough to say.
Or, maybe after the deaths of Kurt Cobain, those two guys from Alice in Chains, and more recently Chris Cornell, it became just as sad to listen to grunge as it is to listen to classic rock?
Also starring Eddie Vedder (last heard in "Into the Wild"), Mike McCready, Chris Cornell, Nils Bernstein, Art Chantry, Jack Endino, Steve Fisk, Frank Harlan, Daniel House, Megan Jasper, Calvin Johnson, John Nelson, Bruce Pavitt, Charles Peterson, Jonathan Poneman, Martin Rushent, Susan Silver, Susie Tennant, Mike Vraney, Blake Wright, and members of the bands Pearl Jam, Soundgarden, Mudhoney, The Melvins, The Young Fresh Fellows, The Posies, Screaming Trees, The Supersuckers, Seaweed, 7 Year Bitch, Hammerbox, Gas Huffer, The Fastbacks, Coffin Break, TAD, The Gits, Love Battery, Flop, Mono Men, Some Velvet Sidewalk, Zipgun, Hovercraft, Blood Circus, The Walkabouts, Dead Moon, Crackerbash and archive footage of Dave Grohl (last seen in "27: Gone Too Soon"), Krist Novoselic (ditto), Jerry Cantrell, Layne Staley, Mike Starr, Kurt Loder, Ron Reagan Jr., David Letterman, Calvert DeForest, Adam Sandler (last seen in "The Meyerowitz Stories (New and Selected)", Rob Schneider (last heard in "Norm of the North"), Chris Farley, Emilio Estevez (last seen in "Bobby"), and Andy Rooney.
RATING: 3 out of 10 stage dives
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