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(SNIPPETS OF MUSIC AND TALKING)

(MIC FEEDBACK)

Punk rock should mean freedom,

liking and accepting anything that you like,

playing whatever you want, as sloppy as you want,

as long as it's good and it has passion.

(GUITAR FEEDBACK) WOMAN: The person said, you know,

'What do you call the type of music?' And he said, 'Grunge!'

WOMAN 2: It was this little secret society.

MAN: You get so much freedom to just be as weird

and out there as you want to be.

We're doing what we want to do when we want to do it,

the way we want to.

And that's what everyone should do. And that's what it's all about.

MAN 2: This conglomeration of people seeking something beyond

what the music industry had been feeding them at the time.

MAN 3: You're not just capturing musical data,

you're trying to make magic happen.

MAN 4: You know, Seattle created a scene and a network.

There were record labels here. There were places to rehearse.

Lots of places to play shows.

MAN 5: We didn't know what we were creating.

We didn't know what was going to happen.

We were just doing our thing.

(CHEERING AND WHISTLING)

It was just pure energy.

MAN 6: The human side of those things is much more exciting

than the mythological aspect.

# It's a beautiful day

# It's a beautiful day #

But I like things to sound...lively.

I like it to have a spark. I like it to jump out at you.

I don't like music that is boring.

In the middle of the '80s, the only way you could hear...

guitar-oriented, loud, hard rock was on your radio,

and it was dominated by...

overproduced...

..what we called hair metal bands, at the time,

that basically came from the Los Angeles record industry.

Grunge, I think, sort of came about...

somewhat organically here in Seattle,

but I think it reached people outside of Seattle

because it was kind of a reaction to this overproduced...

..somewhat syrupy pop music masquerading as rock and roll

that was dominating the charts in the middle of the '80s.

PETERSON: Yeah.

For me, the word 'grunge' is just an umbrella term

to sort of, you know, make sense out of that time and place in music.

There was no master plan.

There was no real industry, so to speak.

We had a few little record stores, a monthly news print magazine

called The Rocket, and that was pretty much it.

So, at the same time, the bands were kind of experimenting,

finding their way and sound initially,

maybe on a Thursday night in a little club with 50 people.

I was at the same time, with my photography,

doing that, finding my way.

And it was great because I wasn't beholden to anyone,

so I could just do whatever. I wanted to cut somebody's head off,

or I wanted to just put my camera out in front of me and shoot away.

So I was able to sort of develop my style.

It is a bit of a miracle when you think about it.

I don't know if 'miracle' is the right word.

It was just all very fortuitous, you know?

I guess there was this really...

..mix of luck and talent.

And we all just...

The fact that there were so many that came out of Seattle,

though, you know, is pretty amazing.

There was a huge punk rock influence on Seattle,

both musically, but also in the way of doing business.

Punk rock can apply to any style of music.

You make the record on your own, you put it out.

You either put it out yourself or put it out on an indie label,

and you get in the van, and you go play shows.

That's punk rock. There's no major label involved.

There's no corporation. It's just you...

the music, your band, and...and you go play shows.

And sleep in a van.

When I was on tour with Skin Yard, with Jack Endino -

it was one of the early grunge bands -

we had this school bus van, which the engine...

I rebuilt the engine because the engine had blown up.

Any time we had to spend the night somewhere,

one guy always had to sleep in the van to just guard the equipment.

So we rotated, and we'd get one hotel room

and put four guys in the hotel room and one guy in the van.

And that's when we got a hotel room.

Most of the time we just stayed on...

you know, slept on people's floors and on their couches,

friends that we knew from around the country.

(PHONE NUMBER BEING DIALLED)

(DIALLING TONE)

SPARKS: (ON VOICEMAIL) Hi. This is Donita Sparks from L7, baby.

# L7: 'Till The Wheels Fall Off

# You and me Till the wheels fall off #

L7 and a lot of the other early grunge bands

were from the underground scene.

That's years of rehearsing and practice

and paying for your instruments and paying for your rehearsal studio,

as well as keeping a full-time job,

or whatever kind of job you have, and paying your rent. And also,

it's years before you even might get a gig.

Then it's years of local gigging,

and then touring locally and touring regionally,

and then touring nationally and then touring internationally.

L7 took a very long time to get um...

the little bit of fame that we got.

MC: Suburban, middle-class, white America,

get ready for the most dangerous women...

in the country. (CHEERING)

They are L7!

We started in '85.

There was kind of a punk Hollywood scene

that had a lot of different genres going on.

It had roots Americana, rockabilly,

hardcore punk and stuff like that.

But I would say that the sensibility from the guys in Seattle

who were doing early grunge stuff,

it was more progressive, for sure.

When the whole thing was exploding worldwide,

we're still in a little town.

Like, it feels very...just local.

We're here with a bunch of friends, you know?

One day we're over at Nils Bernstein's house,

drinking beer with the Mudhoney guys, the Nirvana guys,

the Fastbacks band, like...

everybody's friends, everybody's hanging out.

It was really a smalltown vibe here.

BLAIR: Seattle is a music town. I mean, think back.

I mean, we got Jimi Hendrix's spirit here. You know?

I mean, how cool is that?

In the '80s, because I was a photographer in Los Angeles,

and I'm shooting, you know, Guns N' Roses and Great White

and whatever, Faster Pussycat and all them.

And they're, like, big hair and eyeliner. And... (EXHALES)

'Do I look good?' And I'm like, 'Mm-hm, yeah, OK.

Yeah. You look great.' Click, click, click.

And then you come into grunge, and they're like, 'Oh.

I don't even like getting my picture taken.'

And they wouldn't do makeup, and they wouldn't...

They just wouldn't at all. So I had to come up with this new lighting.

I called it 'yummy lighting', and I would put a filter on the camera,

and a filter on my light so that they would look good without makeup.

Why we call them garage bands is because we practised in the garage.

You know, I mean, that's for real. And why we wore flannel

is because we were freezing in the garage cos there was no heat.

I believe the grunge movement was, like, 300-500 people.

But what blows my mind is the depth of talent

that was in the 300 people that we're talking about.

It was the Dave Grohls and the Kurt Cobains

and the Eddie Vedders and the Chris Cornells.

Clearly, we did not know it. We were just having so much fun.

And, you know, we know that we loved the music.

We just didn't realise that the whole world would love the music.

You would come here, like, here to the Central or whatever,

and you'd walk in, and that would be Alice In Chains onstage.

And I'm standing next to Nirvana. The next week, Nirvana's onstage,

and I'm standing next to Alice In Chains.

And that is how the movement started is that we had to support our bands

because otherwise, venues were not going to book live music.

(CHEERING AND APPLAUSE)

(DRUMMER COUNTS BAND IN)

I moved to Seattle in 1987, and I started playing.

I could hear right away that there was a new sound emerging.

Being able to do that, being able to reinvent

and create your own music - somehow...

every generation has to do that.

When you're 23, 24 years old, you're young, you have all this energy,

and you have all these ideas that you want to express.

You want to convey these ideas that are inside of you,

and you just do it.

There was something about Seattle,

the fact that it was a little bit insulated

from the rest of the country. We're up here in the Northwest.

When I grew up here, I mean,

it felt like you were living in the Wild West.

We didn't really have contact with other cities.

So you have all these musicians in Seattle. Everybody knows each other.

Everybody's playing the same five or six clubs.

It was a community. And that's the difference between a music scene

and a city that just has a bunch of musicians.

# I nearly

# I nearly lost you there

# And it's taken us somewhere

# I nearly lost you there

# Well, let's try and sleep now... #

The grunge thing came about because he suddenly we had...

a couple of local entrepreneurs, shall we say,

Bruce Pavitt or John Poneman, who decided they would try

to start an indie record label.

So all these things started developing at the end of the '80s.

We started having Sub Pop, and there were other labels

like C/Z and PopLlama.

And um...Empty Records. There's...

I'm probably forgetting quite a few of them. Sorry, everybody.

So these little indie labels were starting to become viable.

There was a national scene developing of clubs.

Sort of a touring network where bands could book their own tours

and play, like, a small club in every city

and interact with small college radio stations

or independent record stores in each of those cities.

So toward the end of the '80s,

a sort of an ecosystem of non-commercial rock music

began to develop organically all over the country.

# MUDHONEY: Touch Me I'm Sick

# Whoa!

And I'm self-taught as a record producer,

and I just didn't...

I didn't have anyone to copy.

I just had my own aesthetic, really, as a guy. And...

my memory of all the classic rock records

that I had grown up listening to as a guy.

# Touch me, I'm sick...

There's a reason a lot of the grunge music

sort of hearkens back to the '70s in some ways, and that's because...

those are the records those people grew up listening to. As did I.

# I'm full of rot

# Gonna give you, girl...

A lot of the bands wanted to make something raw,

and I simply sensed it and did what they wanted me to do.

# Touch me, I'm sick #

At the same time, my music taste comes into play as well,

because I happen to like that kind of music.

I like records that are not overproduced.

So, you know, obviously, it worked synergistically.

In Seattle...

there is a law against grunge.

I can't say the word.

But we live it when we're here,

and we're away from Seattle, we say 'grunge' every day.

We love to say 'grunge' because we're free to say it.

My first day I came to the Sub Pop office,

it was super busy. It was really chaotic. And Bruce and John asked me

if I could come back the next day, and I did.

And they put me to work as an intern.

So I stuffed some music - Cat Butt records -

and they offered me a job being a receptionist,

and I felt so lucky. I felt like I won the lottery.

I totally struck gold.

I got this job that paid me $5 an hour answering phones,

and I was in fucking heaven. I was so happy.

I loved so many things immediately about Sub Pop.

I loved all of the people that I met,

I felt like I was around like-minded folks.

People really cared. They were funny. They loved music.

They were smart. They were curious.

But also, they...

they were really good to each other. Like, they were good, kind people

that really seemed to care for one another. And I loved that.

But on top of that, the spirit in the office,

it was a kind of creativity that I'd never experienced before.

I wanted to be part of it.

PETERSON: I really wanted to portray that emotion and energy

that the bands were projecting themselves.

It could just be a club with a hundred people in it.

But if I framed it right, and the audience was going crazy,

it looked like, wow. This is just the most exciting thing ever.

And Bruce and John from Sub Pop,

they picked up on that early on,

seeing my photography for the first time.

Some of the pictures, the audience pictures were like...

stray dogs from every village, you know?

Cos you had this sort of Gothy-looking person

and then this punky-looking person,

and then this person that just obviously didn't care.

And then a preppy person. So it was really more about

this attraction of outsiders to this music.

They didn't want to, you know,

hove to a certain cliche of dress or whatever.

And of course, then it became its own cliche eventually.

But at first it was, yeah, just this conglomeration of people

seeking something beyond what the music industry

had been feeding them at the time.

My photographing of audiences, I guess, came from the fact

that growing up in the suburbs,

looking at magazines of the punk scene in England and elsewhere,

the pictures that always attracted me the most

was where you saw the club and the audience.

And it gave it this sense of time and place

versus it just being about a celebrity or a star.

So I wanted to incorporate that as well.

It really gives it more emotion

than focusing on just the individual players.

I really wanted to set the scene and what was happening.

Here's L7,

and you have to really look at it to realise what's happening -

the guy on the floor and Jennifer's over him. Yeah.

SPARKS: Charles Peterson's photographs of the Seattle scene,

and of us, really, I think,

visually encapsulated grunge in the strongest way of anybody.

I think we visually had a little more style

than some of the bands.

We were kind of a little more... a little weirder.

But I've always appreciated a band that had style,

like the Ramones, like The Rolling Stones,

and we also had a sense of humour about our style.

We just wanted the experience of being in a rock band.

It was very unusual

for women to be in bands and stuff.

You had the late '80s, and you had those hair bands,

and you had Madonna and Michael Jackson

and stuff like that. But if you watched MTV,

a lot of the times, any time you saw women, it was very sexual.

And then you switch to Kurt Cobain and Eddie Vedder.

They would speak about equal rights for women

and making sure women were treated well.

And there's the famous Unplugged,

and Eddie's writing 'pro-choice' on his arm.

It seemed to be a very big pendulum swing

from women as this material sexual object in music videos

to not only being respected and having their rights fought for,

but their place as artists, as just being just as valid,

and being just as important.

I think it's one of the things that maybe gets glossed over

in the discussion about Seattle

and everything that happened is that it...

it was huge for female artists.

VANDERPOOL: I think it was also very influenced by the scene

down in Olympia, which was the Riot Girl scene, which was very political.

The feminist, political, vocal thing

was right...neighbours to us, but definitely a different scene.

I think that also reverberated into Seattle.

That was just my feeling as and when I became aware of some of that.

I thought, 'Yeah, this is... not only the emotional honesty,

but it's realising that there's...

there's more that you can do with your music

than just tell your own story.

You can infuse it with messages in a certain way.

But you can also use the fact that you've built a community,

and then connect it to political causes or things that are important.

I think Pacific Northwest feminism, for example,

is always about, 'If it matters to women, it should matter to men

and to all of us.' And then, of course,

that cracks open other issues of sexuality.

There was real acceptance of all sexualities.

There wasn't a sense of it being hetero,

or even just guy music or girl music.

It was music for all.

Kids are a lot smarter. I'm totally convinced.

A lot smarter?The average 18-year-old is a lot smarter

than they were when I was an 18-year-old.Do you think so?

I'm convinced.I sort of wonder. MAN: In what way?

What kind of smartness? They're just more aware.

They're more jaded and cynical.

They're more aware of injustice.

They've learned from their parents' mistakes.

There was a lot of emotional maturity, and a lot of...

really strong intellects and curious people.

And people that were open to...

..people that weren't like them, and were...

..wanted to look outside whatever...

wherever they grew up, like,

the whole thing with Kurt Cobain and Aberdeen or whatever.

He saw that he was different from...

..just the average people in his town.

And he very much wanted to see the world

and experience other types of people and other ways of thinking,

and broaden his horizons.

BLAIR: Kurt Cobain was a total feminist.

He wanted to work with women. You know?

And same with Chris Cornell. And their manager, Susan Silver,

was a woman in a male-dominated industry...in the '90s.

And so, in some way,

I got gifted a really beautiful place, you know, to start.

I ended up moving to Los Angeles,

and that whole Me Too thing was alive and well down there.

And I just remember walking out of this manager's office,

and I was like, 'How am I ever gonna get anywhere in Los Angeles?'

So I moved back, because I was like,

'I can't... I don't even know...

You just asked me to do the grossest thing. I'm not doing that.

And my career is not gonna come from some corrupt person.'

And so I was like, 'Well, I'm out of here.'

Then I come back, and then grunge takes off.

MAN: It's illegible, Chris. Sure.It's in your handwriting.

One...

God!You have to go, like... That kind of thing.(LAUGHTER)

Dilute. Dilute. Dilute.

Dilute. I want a dress! Wear this?

I want a dress.

(INDISTINCT CHATTER)

We can turn these coats into miniskirts.

Button up and put a belt on. You'll be fine.You need a little mascara.

Yeah, I think so too.

(LAUGHS) OK.

JASPER: Nirvana broke down a lot of barriers.

And I think when a band has a spotlight on them

as bright as Nirvana had,

and you have the power to really actually influence people in culture,

it's pretty amazing what can happen when...

a lead singer, who is a man, decides to wear a dress and just say,

'Fuck the world.' I mean...

'This is what I want to wear today. This is who I am.

And this is how I am going to be in the world.

And for anyone else who thinks differently,

or is different, or isn't normal, it's all OK.'

I mean, that's huge.

And that is a fucking great message to send out to folks.

ALL: (CHANTING) Read my lips, pro-choice.

(CHANTING CONTINUES)

SPARKS: I will say that I think because I was brought up

with left-wing parents who were politically involved,

socially involved, I kind of brought that sensibility into the band.

You know, there's always been political swells in music eras.

There wasn't really one going on when grunge hit,

and we kind of helped bring that into vogue.

Because I think a lot of grunge's legacy

was feminism coming into the fold in music.

(CHEERING AND APPLAUSE)Did you all sign the pro-choice petitions

out front? (CHEERING)

All's it takes is a signature.

So many women started playing and started bands around that time.

And um... I think for a lot of young people,

that was an era that they felt that they were represented in

because there was a lot of women representation.

And there was some political activity going,

like, Rock for Choice, for example.

(GUITAR FEEDBACK)

I think that there was a very um...

a very intense feminist...

ideology that the women that I knew had.

And then, especially with um...

when we started Home Alive, that was...

that felt very militant feminist.

WOMAN: Are you comfortable talking about how Home Alive started?

Yeah. Yeah, sure.

Well, Mia Zapata had been found murdered

on July 7th 1993.

The guy was still out there. We didn't know who it was.

And the police were investigating our friends,

and it was a real change of vibe.

Valerie Agnew, drummer in 7 Year Bitch,

a friend of mine, called me.

She was on tour. I was working at C/Z Records.

The Gits were on C/Z Records.

And she said, 'We got to do something.

We got to get all our friends to get guns.'

I was like, 'Um... I don't want a gun.'

It was really freaky, and we didn't feel safe.

But we also felt really strongly that...

we didn't want to change anything about our lifestyles.

And we liked going to clubs,

and we liked drinking, and we liked being out late.

So we all met at Valerie's house, all being about...

I don't know, there was probably about 17 or 20 people

who met at first, and we just had this idea

that we have to do something.

And we thought... how about we put on a show?

And we can raise money at a show, and we can get enough money

to have all our friends take self-defence classes. (LAUGHS)

Some people wanted to learn how to do jiu-jitsu,

and some people wanted to kickbox. Some people wanted to own a weapon.

And so we just wanted to offer all of it,

and to figure out how to... And it just perpetuated.

And the community was really powerful in...

in supporting it for the most part.

It was a mindset where people were looking out for each other

and making sure they were making good decisions for themselves.

And they weren't walking down an alley late at night...

by themselves. It was a big life change.

(GUITAR FEEDBACK) Huge life change.

Listen to 7 Year Bitch, and they have that song, Dead Men Don't Rape.

And my band Danger Gens

made a record called Life Between Cigarettes

after Mia was killed, and all the songs are after Mia was killed.

And so it was that,

the ripple effect of that,

and what it did to us. So...

you can't just let the world crush you.

You have to... You have to rage. You know?

You have to fight back and...

and take care of yourself and each other.

There was very much a sense of taking care of each other.

# Pull me out of this warm ground

# Into that terracotta pot

# Shove me in a closet

# And leave me #

MCMURRAY: Seattle in the mid-80s, just a decade prior,

was ambivalent at best towards its local music scene.

At worst, it was really antagonistic towards it.

But because of what happened in the early '90s in Seattle

and the subsequent sort of media spotlight on the city,

I think that really changed the way we thought of ourselves as a city,

of one where we can celebrate the music that's coming here.

Bands don't need to travel to LA or New York,

or wherever, to make it big. That, you know,

there's a viable something here

that is worth being celebrated.

KLAUSEN: I came out here in 1999.

I never thought I'd be involved in it,

or live in Seattle, or have any sort of connection to it

other than just being a teenager. Just being a fan,

and responding to it the way the rest of the world did.

(ALL CHANTING)

I arrived, I think, a week before those WTO riots and the protests.

And that was another introduction to Seattle, and the activism.

There's just cops in riot gear on the street. It's everywhere.

There's tear gas, and you're driving around.

It was kind of another perfect introduction to the city,

and to the atmosphere, and to what the people in the Pacific Northwest

are passionate about and interested in.

It did end up impacting... It made me realise that I could,

in my own artwork, address a lot more themes and ideas

that dealt with serious issues.

And code that, and put that imagery into artwork and discuss it.

And it was great to have...

the guys in Pearl Jam encourage any time I made artwork

that had political ideas or that was controversial.

# Expecting perfection

# Leaves a lot to ignore

# When the past is the present And the future's no more

# When every tomorrow Is the same as before #

I can look at, like... Every poster I've made,

I remember why I made that image.

But that was the sketch for that poster.

And you can see that they're not really entirely the same,

or that you can even tell what's happening in the sketch.

But it was just supposed to be this big waterfall

that became much different than...

You can see, even like, her face is really dumb and bad and goofy.

And it gets changed. Like, you can see the way that stuff changes.

Like, those are the letters, which would originally be pencils.

So do the pencils first, and then print 'em out, and then do the inks.

And then I bring it into Photoshop, and manipulate it

and change it all around. Then it's, like, the little...

that stuff, which starts off as those.

And then the elephants.

Every time I see an artist, I want to see their sketches.

I want to see how it was crappy, and then it got better.

So to me, this is... The most interesting thing to me

are all the sketches.

COLLINS: We signed the radio station on in 1991.

The first two records handed to me when I came into the station

was Nevermind from Nirvana and Pearl Jam's Ten.

I remember the first time I really realised,

'Holy shit, this is much bigger.'

We had a party for when Nirvana played SNL.

And everybody was drunk and having a good time and out of control.

The moment they came on the television, the room was silent.

You could hear a pin drop, because this was everybody's friends.

You know, there's Kurt, there's Chris, there's Dave...

up onstage, creating history.

And it was a very... I still get chills thinking about it.

Everybody was happy when somebody had success.

It was great. When Nirvana's record exploded,

It was great for everybody because now, you know...

And Pearl Jam - Pearl Jam and Nirvana both broke in 1991.

(CHEERING)

Screaming Trees and Soundgarden had been making records

for a number of years. But then, all of a sudden, we got our chance.

And Soundgarden had a huge record a couple of years later,

and we had a big record the year after Nirvana.

So we all benefited from each other's success.

So I would say that's a lesson for everybody -

that community and mutual support, and kind of, like,

being a cheerleader for somebody else is cool.

(INDISTINCT CHATTER) (MAN SOUNDCHECKING)

How do you feel?

How should I feel? (SOUNDCHECK CONTINUES)

We never played for that many people before. It's really something else.

It's all just a crowd. And then you channel energy.

And to play between Lou Reed and David Byrne,

and after Soundgarden and all these people we've listened to for years,

it's really something else.

Tell me, you look like mixed up.

Look at these pictures. I'll show you these pictures.

I'll show you why I feel the way I do.

It's a little bit overwhelming to see this many people.

I mean, I'm sure you've been looking at this...

..all day.

It's a lot of people. (LAUGHS)

We're used to playing small clubs, you know?

And we want to go back to playing small clubs.

After the Nirvana explosion...

and um...

Alice In Chains and Screaming Trees

and Pearl Jam,

there were a lot of industry people here.

And they were scouting the clubs to find the next big hit.

And that...that changed... that started changing the vibe.

Because it went from a very um...

a feeling of friendly camaraderie to um...

'Oh, we have to play that slot

because there's gonna be an A&R guy here.'

A lot of bands got signed and dropped,

and a lot of hearts were broken.

A lot of dreams were shattered.

And the dreams that were shattered were dreams that before it happened,

nobody would ever admit having. (LAUGHS)

And I think that that was a big part of that era.

You know? It was all kind of against corporate music,

and against the macroculture.

It wasn't against it, it was just in opposition to it somehow.

You know, it was just, 'This isn't for me. We're doing this over here.'

And then the spotlight came on, and,

'Oh, maybe I really do want to be a rock star!' You know?

First it was kind of exciting, and then it was kind of weird.

Because there was a lot of...

things that happened

where some bands got interest

and some bands didn't.

And then there was jealousies where they never used to be jealousies.

Or bands would kind of maybe try to morph their style,

like, 'Oh, they want that.

They want that grunge scene. And we're not quite that.

So maybe we have to do that.'

And when you have a scene that's sort of unadulterated,

and there isn't a sense of an outside world

that wants that but not that, there was a lot of variety in the scene.

And things kind of got more homogeneous

as there was more people coming to look at the scene.

Because certainly everybody wanted a little piece of that action.

When youth culture becomes monopolised by big business,

what are the youth to do?

Do you have any idea?

Hmm. (CHUCKLES)

I think we should destroy...

..the bogus capitalist process

that is destroying youth culture by mass marketing

and commercial uh...

..paranoia, behaviour, control.

And the first step to do

is to destroy the record companies. Do you not agree?

When all of that happened, the world changed.

We had news crews constantly in Seattle.

Like...fashion changed.

Like, music and art changed the world.

That's a weird thing to have happen in your backyard.

And it was traumatic for people like Kurt Cobain,

for people like Eddie Vedder.

For people that were in the middle of the fucking spotlight.

You know? Be careful what you ask for.

Eddie's talked about that. He wanted to be a rock star.

And then, all of a sudden, he was the biggest rock star in the world.

And those pressures... well, you gotta rethink things.

You know? Those pressures are pretty intense.

And clearly, they got to Kurt.

For all of the wonderful things that happened,

we had all kinds of tragedies, you know, as we talked about.

A lot of people died, and it was horrible.

I mean, it's absolutely the worst thing

when one of your best friends that you wrote songs with,

that you had, you know, made great albums,

maybe even had hits with, and they die.

They died young, before they were old enough to, like,

really reflect on the work they did.

They did the work, and then they passed away.

So that's why I wish people like Kurt Cobain, and Layne Staley,

and Chris Cornell, and Ben McMillan from Skin Yard,

and some other people I know - I wish they were here now

to reflect on the work they did

and how much it meant to the whole world.

The other side of it, though, is that they do live on in the music.

Those are their voices. Those are their words.

That's the message that they left for everybody else.

And in a way, it's not any different than reading classic literature.

Those were the words of the great writers, the great poets.

You know, the great singers and the great musicians,

they left messages too.

MAN: And how do you see Nirvana in ten years?

I see us onstage playing in dorky clothes,

and uh...

just totally wrinkled and uh...

just, like, having... trying to relive our past.

Trying to remind people of the good old days, how things used to be.

You know, cruising in your car,

or smoking pot and listening to music.

'Hey, those were the times.' You know?

It's called Children Of The Revolution -

20 of your greatest hits by Nirvana.

I feel like there was a lot of focus

on the dark side of what the movement was, for sure.

I mean, people talked about drugs all the time.

People talked about depression all the time.

People talked about the loneliness that the weather will bring

because it's rainy and people are indoors.

And so they're maybe a little more isolated than some other folks.

But...you know,

all of those things did exist.

But nothing is black and white in the world.

And, you know, along with all of those things,

there is also joy and happiness,

and great shows to go to,

and sunny, beautiful Seattle summer days.

And I think, also, so much time has passed

that people have a perspective now.

And they can talk about it in a different kind of way...

..you know, and with emotions that have been processed.

So, yeah, it is a little different.

But, yeah, it really,

it truly impacted people's lives in such a profound way.

But people don't always talk about the lives that were saved.

And there were so many, so many in the process.

(BIRDS TWEET)

I mean, music is everything.

When I was a teenager, grunge didn't exist.

But when I was a teenager, I was a punk rocker.

And...music and punk rock was my lifeline.

I mean, that was my saving grace.

That was my sanity. That was my community. That was...

That was everything that made me feel like I mattered in the world.

I mean, it really, really was a lifesaver for me.

If we don't have that, what have we got?

We're just cogs in a machine,

you know, working for a living,

eating, sleeping, dying.

You got to have art.

And music is a participatory art.

It takes place in real time with real people. It's social.

It's communal. It's loud, it's fun.

There's no rules. There's nothing like it.

That's what I chose to do with my life.

I know the importance it has because I was a very depressed teenager.

I was not happy, and music was kind of a refuge.

It was a focus for me. I could uh...

I could concentrate on something artistic...

that was intensely interesting to me,

which took my mind off a lot of dysfunctional things

going on with me at school and so forth.

So I think I understand that.

Music is important to me as life force.

(STATIC CRACKLES) (HORN HONKS)

(RADIO FLICKING BETWEEN MUSIC AND CHAT)

DJ: 90.3 KCMU Seattle. (HOWLING)

COLLINS: KXP was KCMU back then.

When I was on the radio,

there was no internet.

I kind of had a captive audience, you know?

All these kids listening at home

while they're doing their homework at night.

Radio became a centre for communication.

When Kurt took his life,

we hired counsellors to be on the radio and talk to people,

taking calls live on the air

from people that were depressed, people that didn't understand.

People that also felt like they might want to take their own lives.

Those counsellors also answered the phones off the air

and counselled listeners, and they were there for days.

He was a tortured soul, for sure,

and he was singing about stuff that people could identify with -

that a younger generation that had been tired of bullshit

could identify with.

So when the Nirvana exhibition opened up,

we had one room that is no longer part of that experience,

but one room that had an area

where you could go in and you could actually uh...

sort of tell your Nirvana story. And it would give you little prompts,

like, 'What's your favourite Nirvana song?' Or, you know,

'Did you ever see Nirvana?'

We had, like, maybe a dozen question prompts.

But then it really allowed the visitors

to kind of tell their own story,

which we internally called the Nirvana confessional.

There were a good number of folks -

mostly individuals that had seen Nirvana

during the height of grunge -

and were sort of reminiscing on those experiences.

And then a lot of kids that were, like, in middle school

that had never seen Nirvana live.

But still, clearly,

Nirvana and Kurt Cobain had a huge impact upon them.

(INDISTINCT CHATTER)

You know, I think with popular culture vectors,

you have something that starts in the underground,

and it goes to the mainstream.

And it either stays in the mainstream and gets sort of embedded

in our popular consciousness, or it, you know,

subsides back into the underground again. And it's kind of forgotten.

I think, with a band like Nirvana,

where Kurt Cobain passed away at 27,

it's frozen in time.

And turning him almost into something more than human...

..I think there's something in that that kind of cements things

into the popular consciousness for generations.

The exhibition is really focused on the humanity of that band.

And to me, it's...

the most fascinating story is this idea

that this is a story about some guys

that didn't have a whole lot of opportunity.

But with a lot of talent and ambition and luck,

they became the biggest band in the world.

I think the legacy is...

music as a way to express everything,

and to be honest, and to...

open yourself up to others.

And the legacy is of, I think, fearlessness,

but also of saying things that are important.

Not... Not... There's nothing trite about it.

(STAMMERS) It's music that is heartfelt

and is trying to connect with people

and be extremely emotionally open.

I can feel and listen to music from younger people

that are hearkening back to some of the guitar tones.

A lot of young people are always going to feel attracted to that...

(GRUNTS) You know? That sound.

That guttural...

down at the lower part of your solar plexus,

you know, kind of feeling of music.

Bands like Soundgarden, Nirvana, Pearl Jam,

Alice In Chains, Mudhoney -

the bands that we now consider to be classic Seattle bands -

those records, they hold up after 30 years.

When those records came out in the 1990s,

I didn't have an email address,

and then much later, I got a cellphone.

And I would start to get emails from fans around the world,

and they would say, 'Hey, man, I just want to say...

that Mad Season album - that saved my life.'

And I would write back, like, 'Man, that's awesome. I'm so happy.'

Ultimately, it's a healing device.

When you're 22 years old and you're full of anger,

and you just want to play loud rock and roll,

you're not necessarily thinking, like, 'This is gonna heal somebody.'

Maybe it heals yourself. Maybe it allows you to get something out,

or say something that you need to say to heal your own soul.

But um...

as the decades have gone by, I've seen...

I've seen how it actually has healed other people.

And, I think, in pretty profound ways.

SPARKS: Once we started getting a little bit of attention,

I was like, 'Oh, I'm on a fucking mission.'

And then we all became aware of being role models.

We were very proud of that. We helped people gain strength,

in some little way,

to get through their tough teenage years.

And...women in particular, and homosexuals and trans kids.

So we usually sign autographs near our bus

as we're departing the show.

People will tell us very nice things,

or a short story about how we affected them.

MCMURRAY: Seattle is so good at erasing its history.

And I think there's been such growth in Seattle over the last 20-30 years

that Seattle today is unrecognisable

compared to when Pearl Jam's Ten came out.

# ..to commotion

# What love is to our devotion...

We try to celebrate that history and preserve that history

by collecting that material, that ephemera from those times.

# So save your predictions

# And burn your assumptions

# Love is friction

# Ripe for comfort

# Endless equations

# And tugging persuasions

# Doors open up To interpretation... #

I don't think we would have a museum like this

without what happened in the early '90s.

We wouldn't have a thriving music scene like we do now.

We wouldn't have a thriving all-ages music scene.

But 50 years from now,

I'm hoping that this will continue to be

a resource for people to access and to dig into.

(SEAGULLS CAW)

Punk rock will never die...

because punk rock is angry kids.

There's always gonna be angry kids,

always gonna be upset teens -

upset at school, upset at the status quo, wanting change.

That's part of being a teenager.

So, yeah,

kids are still gonna get that.

Kids are gonna get that energy. How do you not?

RICHARDS: How are you doing, Seattle?!

(CHEERING)

I'm John Richards from KEXP.

I couldn't be more honoured to be here today with all of you.

(CHEERING, WHISTLING)

Alright, are you guys ready for some music?

DRUMMER: One, two, three, four!

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