(ECW)

www.ecwpress.com

BY STEPHEN M. DEUSNER

Success was the best and the worst thing to happen to the Seattle music scene. On one hand, major-label deals for such 90s acts as Soundgarden, Nirvana, and Alice in Chains not only introduced metal thunder and punk fury to the arena-rock mainstream, but also put food on the tables of many struggling musicians. Hell, it even gave some of them actual homes.

On the other hand, it became nearly impossible to talk and think about such ‘80s acts as Malfunkshun, Green River, and Truly on their own terms. Instead, they entered the rock pantheon as merely way stations to bigger, more popular acts. Therein lies the need for a book like Grunge Is Dead: The Oral History of Seattle Rock Music, by Greg Prato, who has also authored books on Blind Melon and Tommy Bolin. By approaching the subject as an oral rather than a written account, he gives the story back to Seattle, allowing more than one hundred local musicians, label execs, designers, girlfriends, and assorted hangers-on to tell their own stories in their own words.

A few voices are notably absent. Of course Andrew Wood, Kurt Cobain, and Layne Staley can't tell their own stories anymore, but the passages on Wood's heroin O.D. and Staley's mother's reminiscences of her son as a hair-metal adolescent are surprisingly moving. Krist Novoselic, Dave Grohl, and Courtney Love neglected to contribute to Grunge Is Dead (one assumes for legal reasons), which means Nirvana's rise and fall is told from a distant third-person perspective. Prato wisely and judiciously organizes the book around such gaps, offering an admirable and informative range of voices and perspectives-often contradictory or contentious nearly twenty years later-but all creating a multifaceted portrait of the music that pretty much defined the decade.