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Everybody Loves Our Town: A History of Grunge Kindle Edition
Mark Yarm (Author) Find all the books, read about the author, and more. See search results for this author |
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Grunge, also known as the 'Seattle sound', is the sludgy fusion of punk rock and heavy metal that emerged from the Pacific Northwest in the early part of the 1980s. But it was the unexpected, seemingly overnight success of Nirvana's single 'Smells Like Teen Spirit,' in the fall of 1991, that made grunge a household word and launched an American music movement on par with punk and hip-hop.
Twenty years later, Mark Yarm captures that era in the words of those at the forefront of the movement (and the music's lesser-known champions). Everybody Loves Our Town will tell the whole story: the founding of originators like Soundgarden and the Melvins, the early successes of Seattle's Sub Pop record label, the rise of powerhouses Nirvana and Pearl Jam, the insane media hype surrounding the grunge explosion, the suicide of Kurt Cobain, and finally, the genre's mid-to-late-'90s decline.
- LanguageEnglish
- PublisherFaber & Faber
- Publication date8 September 2011
- File size3405 KB
Product description
About the Author
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books of recent years."
--Kirkus Review, *Starred Review*
"Hardcore fans of grunge will treasure this."
--Publishers Weekly
"Yarm, a former editor of Blender, interviewed more than 250 musicians, scenesters, and record business types
to deliver a personal, comprehensive history of grunge music...Highly recommended."
--Library Journal
Mark Yarm has assembled the gospels of Grunge music. Here is a warts-and-elbows refresher course for those of us who still find our memories of the era a little hazy.
─Chuck Palahniuk, author of Fight Club
A very noble record of the grunge scene--and an excellent addition to the growing library of oral history music books.
--Legs McNeil, coauthor of Please Kill Me: The Uncensored Oral History of Punk and the forthcoming Resident Punk
Great oral histories are rare. Hewing a narrative from all those chaotic and often conflicting memories with testimony alone and no guide-prose or stage direction is difficult. Making that somehow intimate and epic is nearly impossible. When a writer pulls it off, as Mark has with Everybody Loves Our Town, it's really a gift: the subject or scene finally gets its definitive record and the reader gains what feels like a room full of brand new friends. One of the best rock reads in a very long time.
─Marc Spitz (co-author We Got The Neutron Bomb: The Untold Story of LA Punk, music blogger VanityFair.com).
In Everybody Loves Our Town, Mark Yarm collects and dispenses remarkable insights about a genre no one even wants to claim as their own. As a child of grunge--who spent a humiliating chunk of the 1990s in an Alice in Chains t-shirt--I loved this book; it clarified so many things about a sound and a time I thought I already knew.
─Amanda Petrusich, author of It Still Moves: Lost Songs, Lost Highways, and the Search for the Next American Music
A deeply funny story, as well as a deeply sad story--the glorious Nineties moment when a bunch of punk rock bands from Seattle accidentally blew up into the world's biggest noise. Mark Yarm gives the definitive chronicle of how it all happened, and how it ended too soon. But the book also makes you appreciate how weird it is that this moment happened at all.
─Rob Sheffield, author of Love Is A Mix Tape and Talking To Girls About Duran Duran
A definitive, irreplaceable chronicle of one of rock-n-roll's greatest eras. It should sit tall on any rock lover's bookshelf.
─Neal Pollack, author of Never Mind The Pollacks
"In an attempt to trace the real roots of grunge, journalist Mark Yarm compiled an exhaustive oral history from the people who lived it. In his book Everybody Loves Our Town, there are interviews with everyone from the early adopters to those that were late to the party, but nevertheless helped extend [grunge's] shadow of influence by turning it into a look for the world to emulate."
--The Fader
"This massively readable tome gathers recollections from every grunge band you've ever heard of (Pearl Jam, Nirvana, Soundgarden, Melvins) and some you haven't (we hardly knew ye, Skin Yard)...The genre's first truly comprehensive insider history...It's gossipy...and fascinating, with so much backstabbing and death it's like Shakespeare, if Shakespeare had written about heroin addicts with bad hair."
--Revolver (4 out of 4 stars)
"An impressive display of reportorial industriousness... It's the feel-bad rock book of the fall."
--BloombergBusinessweek
"Oral history is an art in itself. It's why Everybody Loves Our Town will endure as a classic of monumental scale."
--Paste Magazine.
"For hardcore fans or people just curious about what the fuss was all about, Mark Yarm's excellent new book -Everybody Loves Our Town: An Oral History of Grunge" is well worth the read. Yarm has done an admirable job of assembling an engaging, funny and ultimately sad narrative by letting the people who helped create the Jet City sound talk about what happened in their own words.
--Seattle Post-Intelligencer
"Yarm's account captures the essential tension that made the era so compelling."
--Greg Kot, Chicago Tribune
We finished all five hundred and forty-two pages of this book in two days, abandoning all responsibility (this, friends, is why we do not have children; had there been any children about us, we would have locked these unfortunate creatures in the bathroom, so as to not be distracted) and staying up until two in the morning, reading whole chunks of it out loud to poor long-suffering Support Team.
--TheRejectionist.com
Mark Yarm's superb book, Everybody Loves Our Town: A History of Grunge details the dramatic rise of the grunge movement and all of its players, including Cobain, Love and Vedder, told through the voices of the people that lived through it.
--Hollywood Reporter
"I came away from this book with a big smile on my face. Lots of it is like a gray day in western Washington; you've been kicked out of yet another band, and your girlfriend is spending far too much time with the drummer from the Melvins or the Screaming Trees. In the end, though, "Everybody Loves Our Town made me want to be young, stupid and lucky again. Mainly, it made me want to be young."
--The Washington Post
"Everybody Loves Our Town should inspire new conversations about the unique culture and people that made grunge so unusual and unforgettable to so many fans. The book is timely, as 2011 marks the 20-year anniversary of Nirvana's "Nevermind" and Pearl Jam's multi-platinum debut album, "Ten." Everybody Loves Our Town is as good an excuse as any to put on an Alice in Chains CD and curl up with a good book about some great old friends with whom we haven't spent much time in a while."
--The Washington Independent Review of Books
"Everybody Loves Our Town is authoritatively researched and compiled, often very funny and always just a little bit sad."
--Buffalo News
Like a very extended and entertaining all-night bulls--- session among everyone who mattered during the late-'80s/early-'90s music scene.
--Seattle Weekly
The scope is encyclopaedic and the closeness to the subject unparalleled.
--Record Collector
A wild ride that is in turns uplifting and tragic.
--Your Flesh
Named one of the top music books of 2011 by UK Telegraph
Riveting, gossipy, and impossible to put down until the last quote has been read.
--New York magazine's Vulture blog
"This exhaustive oral history features unknowns, cult figures, supporting players and stars; each gets the time he or she deserves as Yarm pieces together the arc of a scene that built itself from scratch, blossomed beyond most people's dreams, and then crashed. Yes, there are plenty of Kurt Cobain stories. But there's much more, too-- indelible characters, weird scenes, creative chaos, laughs and tragedy and lots of cheap beer."
--NPR.org
Gen-X music geeks: Here's your holy grail.
--Tulsa World
The best book on music I've read this year.
--Omaha World-Herald
"This volume could have been a huge, snarky compendium of gossip and score settling from the inhabitants of a claustrophobically insular local music scene. And it is, but in the best possible way--and it's also much, much more.... Yarm has culled the story of grunge from the people who created it, and their testimony is remarkable for its eloquence and its passion and its fairness and its anger."
--Lev Grossman, Time (named one of the magazine's Top 10 nonfiction books of 2011)
"A Herculean work of interviewing and editing which gives everyone a voice, from the biggest stars to the lowliest foot soldiers... . Though the Seattle scene's stew of folly, feuding, rampant drug addiction and a startling number of fatalities might have made for a voyeuristic tale, Yarm leaves the reader full of empathy for young men and women swept up in a cultural moment they couldn't control."
--The Guardian (named a best music book of the year)
"Exhilarating ... Mark Yarm's brilliant and exhaustive oral history of grunge is full of ... vivid observations. Some 250 interviews with those intimately associated with the most unlikely musical sensation of all time piece together a story that is hilarious and tragic and utterly gripping."
--Sunday Times of London
A Gawker.com Best Thing We Read All Year selection
"[A] lively, funny, melancholy and exhaustive oral history ... For all its eventual compromise and dissolution, Seattle was briefly an exhilarating pop cultural moment to rank with the greats. Yarm's labour of love has well and truly done it justice."
--Time Out London
"If you loved the '90s and you haven't read this book, you MUST. I'm absolutely obsessed with Mark Yarm's masterpiece right now."
--USAToday.com's Pop Candy column
Full of so many entertaining stories and thrilling anecdotes that we have read it cover-to-cover TWICE. You should do the same!
--VH1.com
"The definitive oral history of the Seattle music scene, period." --Alternative Press
Product details
- ASIN : B005LVNEAQ
- Publisher : Faber & Faber; Main edition (8 September 2011)
- Language : English
- File size : 3405 KB
- Text-to-Speech : Enabled
- Screen Reader : Supported
- Enhanced typesetting : Enabled
- X-Ray : Not Enabled
- Word Wise : Enabled
- Print length : 594 pages
- Best Sellers Rank: 143,108 in Kindle Store (See Top 100 in Kindle Store)
- 56 in Music History & Criticism (Kindle Store)
- 102 in Popular Music (Kindle Store)
- 107 in Pop Culture Music
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However I dont think you have to necessarily be a fan of that sound to be entertained by the book. So well done... short stories and quotes by all who lived or passed thru Seattle at its peak... people in the industry and of course the epic bands. Reading it I cracked up laughing a lot and found out quite a bit I didn't know about my favourites. Very entertaining read indeed.



That is exactly what former music journalist Mark Yarm set out to do with with this project: to make sense of grunge by asking the bands, the roadies, the soundmen, the girlfriends and the hangers on: what happened? He did so by compiling an oral history, entirely told by `witness accounts' rather than by his own authorial voice. The result is a compelling read, which will captivate you right from the first chapter - on how The U-Men once set fire to the stage - right until the end, when the grunge supernova implodes, leaving a string of casualties along the way.
This collection of interviews, loosely grouped by band but expertly interwoven in chronological order, offers an almost seamless narrative which has the page-turning quality of the best fiction. Yarm pieced ELOT together from both existing and new material; by doing so, he succeeded in creating an incredibly comprehensive `bible' of grunge, with cross referencing questions and answers and whose protagonists often give their own version of events only described a few paragraphs before. The result is often very amusing, with discordant opinions on what really happened and all people in question offering their own contradicting version. Predictably, anecdotes involving Courtney Love seem to invariably be cause for disagreement.
There are a lot of books about `grunge' out there but ELOT stands out because it lets its protagonists do the talking, instead of attempting to draw the kind of pseudo-sociological conclusions so beloved by popular culture writers. If you never had the chance to experience the early 1990s Seattle scene in person, this book is going to be the next best thing.

Especially poignant was the death of Andrew Wood