I've had an off and on debate with a guy in my band about what counts as Grunge. Nirvana, Pearl Jam, and a bunc of the bands out of the Pacific Northwest in the late 80's early 90's are definitively Grunge but there is debate about Smashing Pumpkins and Stone Temple Pilots. Bands that are of the period. What about bands like Dinosaur Jr, and Sugar? I would also say that Sonic Youth, The Replacements and Husker Du though predating those NW bands could be classified as Grunge also. Pearl Jam has also credited Neil Young as a big influence and Neil Young and Crazy Horse's album "Weld" sound was very much similar and of the time as Grunge. What do Clutchfans music experts think should and should not be Grunge?
this is one of those eternal debates us gen-x'ers love to have! to me grunge is a very specific sub-genre and also geographically aligned with the pacific northwest and sub-pop record label. i dont see pearl jam or pumpkins as grunge even though they got lumped in with that sound. musically, i dont really hear them being grunge. pumpkins were more hendrix and psych rock and billy's hot-s*** guitar solos on gish were not really in line with the more primitive grunge aesthetic. pearl jam had a big arena rock/classic rock sound. that first STP record was rock radio-grunge (i dont mean that as a knock...its a killer album), but by the 2nd album they had evolved beyond that. i think of grunge as mudhoney, nirvana, tad, melvins, soundgarden, ect. as far as bands not from the PNW, i think of big black as kind of grungey. sonic-wise, the primary word i would use to describe them is "sludge". the whole thing was based around punk, but slowing it down and dirtying it up. the sound also conjures up images of PNW forests and sasquatch lumbering around, at least for me. it was huge, lumbering and chaotic music. i live in austin and there are many here who will credit austin with birthing the grunge movement...i think it was 85 or 86 when a couple seattle bands moved down here for a year or so and were playing shows. u-men was one of them. they went back to seattle and broke up, but they were a huge influence on all those grunge bands an austin band called poison 13 (former member of the big boys) was also a massive influence on all those seattle band. kurt cobain and soundgarden were big fans. they were one of the early punk bands who slowed the tempo down and were massively influenced by blues.
What jo said is correct (as usual) but a couple of other things I will add: Black Flag’s album “My War” was a monumental influence on grunge and especially on the Melvins. They along with Green River were some of the first true grunge bands. Mudhoney came out of Green River and that band (Green River) had some members that would later be in Pearl Jam. But another seminal influence were the U-Men as well as the Wipers. Also don’t forget about Malfunkshun which had Andrew Wood, future lead singer of Mother Love Bone. He was also Chris Cornell’s roommate- when he ODed, this led to the tribute band, Temple of the Dog (which was primarily Pearl Jam with Soundgarden thrown in). But the big 4 without question were Nirvana, Pearl Jam, Soundgarden, and Alice In Chains. Mudhoney, Screaming Trees, Tad, and Stone Temple Pilots (at least their first album and somewhat their 2nd) along with the Melvins were top notch grunge bands. L7 were an all female group that was better than the more well-known Babes in Toyland and Hole. The Smashing Pumpkins’ debut and their 2nd album were somewhat grungy (Gish more so than Siamese Dream) but thanks to the egomaniacal Billy Corgan, they lost the plot a long time ago. I think a lot of people label them grunge because their song “Drown” was on the Singles soundtrack. Grunge peaked after Soundgarden’s Superunknown album and Nirvana’s last studio album, In Utero. Pearl Jam became too busy fighting Ticketmaster and AIC were dealing with their own problems. Soon bands like Bush, Live, Candlebox, and Silverchair tried to keep grunge going but the death of grunge was when bands like Matchbox 20, Creed, and *sigh* Nickelback became popular on radio and got labeled “post-grunge”. Dinosaur Jr. was another influence as was Neil Young (but only his stuff with Crazy Horse) - DJ were also big influences on shoegazing music. Sonic Youth’s album “Dirty” was somewhat grungy but I wouldn’t consider them grunge (more like an influence). Husker Du and The Replacements were great alternative rock bands but they were influences on lots of bands, grunge and non-grunge. Sugar was more power pop and not really grunge, IMO. Also as jo said, Steve Albini was another influence with his noise rock groups in Big Black and Rapeman.
Good posts as expected @Manny Ramirez and @jo mama. I'm not familiar with several of the bands you mentioned and didn't know about the Austin tie to Grunge. I think Grunge though is a wider category than just what described and see it as a reaction towards the Hair Metal and the overproduced sound of much of the 80's. I think that sense of rawness, use of fuzz and emotional depth of lyrics applies to people like Dinosaur Jr and the Bob Mould. While their sound might be brighter than Nirvana or Sound Garden some of the other bands y'all listed have Grunge also have a brightness and uptempo to them.
i would argue that our claim to inspiring the seattle grunge movement is stronger than our claim to inventing the breakfast taco. i have tons of family in san antonio and its pretty f***ing embarrassing that our previous mayor started a taco war the alamo city.
Cleverly disguised as “I’m in a band” thread. What do you play instrument wise I agree with the posts above, wood add Alice in chains
Current critical thinking is, and I agree, that Soundgarden and Alice in Chains were wrongly categorized as grunge (Mudhoney, Nirvana) but leaned more towards hard rock and metal.
I’m a guitarist and singer with my band. We’re Gen X but don’t claim to be grunge. We’re the other Gen X trend of aging Punk.
i remember reading this article when it came out about 10 years ago. its pretty long so ill edit it down, but its worth a read... https://www.statesman.com/story/entertainment/music/2011/09/23/did-austin-invent-grunge/6660575007/ Did Austin invent grunge? Bands from Texas were influential on genre's early scene An iron-clad axiom in pop music applies to every popular art form: It's not the first person who does something, it's the second. When most music fans think of psychedelic rock, they think of 1960s San Francisco and bands such as Jefferson Airplane and the Grateful Dead. But every good Austinite knows that psychedelic rock started in the capital of Texas. Roky Erickson and the Thirteenth Floor Elevators practically invented the stuff and brought it with them when they headed out to San Francisco. With Nirvana's album "Nevermind" and Pearl Jam's "Ten" both turning 20 years old this fall, one wonders if Austin didn't do something similar with the fuzzy, post-hardcore music that became (extremely unfortunately) known as grunge. It's not a new question: Some say yes, some say no. Three Austin bands — Poison 13, Scratch Acid and the Butthole Surfers — had a complicated relationship with Seattle; the city didn't quite steal their thunder, but certainly learned a thing or three from their virulent Texas insanity. Poison 13 Tim Kerr spent a lot of the 1980s being ahead of his scene. His Austin punk outfit the Big Boys spot-welded funk to hardcore, something that was largely unheard of anywhere else. His late '80s band, Bad Mutha Goose, took the funk idea even further with a pan-racial band whose music was closer to Sly and the Family Stone, the go-go music of Washington, D.C., and Fishbone than, say, the Red Hot Chili Peppers. Between them came Poison 13, a band that did for blues and soul what the Big Boys did for funk. Kerr and former Big Boys roadie Mike Carroll drafted Big Boys bassist Chis Gates and guitarist Bill Anderson to find the places grimy punk, swampy blues and '60s garage rock sloshed into each other. "We were just doing the same thing that the '60s bands were doing, except we had come through Black Flag so stuff was louder and a bit more (expletive) up," Kerr says. Created in 1984, at the very height of hardcore punk at its speediest and most orthodox, the Austin punk scene was not wild about Poison 13's slower, bluesier vibe. "We were a lot more popular on the West Coast than we were in Austin," Gates says. "So we tried to play Los Angeles and San Francisco as much as possible." In 1985, Poison 13 played Austin's then-annual Woodshock festival. This was not a festival in the slick, large scale Austin City Limits Music Fest sense. This was 20 or so weird bands at the Hurlbut Ranch in Dripping Springs, including Poison 13, a vital, Seattle pre-grunge outfit called the U-Men and the San Francisco act Tales of Terror. Some swear that this was, to use a phrase that screams "marketing" at the top of its lungs, the birth of grunge. Gates remembers it as the birth of a lot of hangovers. "That was an insane weekend," Gates says. "The day before it was supposed to start, 25 people in bands from all over the country came to the house on 32nd and Lamar that Mike Carroll and I were living in, including the U-Men. It was a miracle anyone was walking the next day to go to Woodshock. But it was great bands all day and a ton of swimming. It actually got cold, so people were building fires out of anything that would burn. The U-Men were just stunning." Poison 13 never actually made it to Seattle to play live. As the legend goes, the U-Men returned to Seattle with Poison 13 and Tales of Terror records, which ended up on influential turntables. The garage aspects of early Seattle underground rock idols Mudhoney feel as much out of Poison 13 as anywhere else. After two albums, Poison 13 fell to pieces in 1987. Kerr started Bad Mutha Goose and spent the '90s playing in various bands (some with Mike Carroll) and producing countless records. Anderson went on to play in the Austin acts Meat Purveyors and Churchwood, Right after Poison 13, in 1988, Gates joined the Los Angeles glam-metal band Junkyard, which played a show with a very young Soundgarden. "This was before (Junkyard) was even signed. My first inkling that anything was up was when the Soundgarden guys all said, 'You were in Poison 13!' and I said, 'Uh, you know who Poison 13 was?' They played a Poison 13 song as an encore." Later, Junkyard played a gig with Green River and Jane's Addiction. The same thing happened. "Green River were huge Poison 13 fans, and they went on to be in Mudhoney and Mother Love Bone (the latter of which became Pearl Jam)." It wasn't too shocking when Kerr's first record with Monkeywrench — a band started with Mark Arm and Steve Turner of Mudhoney and Tom Price of the U-Men to revamp unfinished Poison 13 songs — arrived in 1991, the year Nirvana and Pearl Jam broke. In 1994, SubPop released "Wine Is Red Poison Is Blue," a compilation of both Poison 13 albums and an EP. "When I heard (the Seattle bands) I thought they were cool but didn't really hear the similarity," Kerr says. "I tried to explain to (Mudhoney) that nobody really liked us here and we were sorta fine with that." Scratch Acid When this 1980s Austin noise-rock act reunited in 2006 to play the Touch and Go Records 25th anniversary festival, the band — singer David Yow, bassist David Sims, drummer Rey Washam and guitarist Brett Bradford — played two warm-up shows, one in Austin and one in Seattle. "We went to Europe in December of 1986," Yow says, "which was weird for an art-punk band of our stature, but we still hadn't gone to the West Coast. And everyone said, 'You have to play in Seattle' and we were like, 'Yeah, right, sure, whatever.'" They booked a show and Yow was greeted with a packed house. "It was crazy, crazy sold out, packed to the gills, people were having to sit on the stage," he says. "Seattle friends told me that the Nirvana boys and Tad (Doyle, of the Seattle band Tad) were there. I have been told it had a huge impact on Seattle." It was, then, a no-brainer to do a Seattle show in 2006. "It was just a tip of the hat to how good that city had been to us." While Yow doesn't buy the comparison between Scratch Acid and Seattle bands, those bands sure loved him. Kurt Cobain wears a Scratch Acid T-shirt in an early Nirvana publicity photo, and the band ended up releasing the excellent "Puss/Oh, the Guilt" split single with the Jesus Lizard (Yow and Sims' post-Scratch Acid outfit) in 1993. It was likely as much Scratch Acid's on-stage demeanor — a sense of wild, chaotic possibility and danger — that influenced the Seattle acts as anything else. In an age of Google and instant access to millions of records at the click of a mouse, it's tough to imagine how vital and mysterious these bands seemed to one another, how limited their communication was. A tape made for a touring band, a live show in a basement, a group stuck in a town for a few weeks while their van was repaired — through these things, bands from Texas could change the lives and influence the music of twentysomethings in the Northwest. You can steal ideas from an MP3 of a punk record, but that's very different from having the lead singer pass out on your couch. But you can't pay your bills with street cred. Earlier this year, when Scratch Acid was asked to play the All Tomorrow's Parties festival in the UK, Yow was a little hesitant, but says he recalled how much fun the 2006 shows were, not to mention his stunning tour with the Jesus Lizard in 2009. "Also, I'm broke," says Yow, now mostly a visual artist. As Gates puts it, "being ahead of the curve means you're ahead of the curve," as in, the curve is where the money is. "I have plenty of friends in legendary bands, and they're all broke."
The mistake is thinking you can put a band in only 1 category. Pearl Jam isn't just Grunge. You could put Foo Fighters (or an album or 2) in "Grunge". Some bands were never Grunge - Built to Spill - but you could also stick them there if you wanted to (or an album or 2). Saying grunge is regionally-specific is too niche. Too snobby. Nobody cares about that except a few bozos.
The one thing I really liked about grunge is that it allowed me to dress like a total slob in college and still get laid.
