Loser: The Real Seattle Music Story

by Clark Humphrey, Art Chantry (Design)

The Seattle music scene burst onto the world stage as the 20th century ended. Despite what clueless media said, there never was one "Seattle Sound." But there was a Seattle attitude. The best of our bands weren't trying to break into the corporate rock pantheon but to demolish it. The Seattle Scene was about decentralizing culture, about honest heartfelt expression. You don't have to be from NY, LA or SF to make music or art. "You're the superstar," as Krist Novoselic says. This is the tale I relate in The Real Seattle Music Story. Achingly detailed and lavishly illustrated, it chronicles two decades of pre-punk, punk, post-punk, and neo-punk music in Seattle and the Northwest. It includes all the bands who made it big and plenty who didn't but are still worth remembering. It tells the interconnected origins and spectacular rise of Nirvana, Pearl Jam, Soundgarden, Alice in Chains, Hole, Screaming Trees, Mudhoney, TAD, the Posies, Love Battery, Gas Huffer, Seven Year Bitch, Flop, Fastbacks, the Supersuckers, Sir Mix-A-Lot, Built to Spill, Bikini Kill, Sky Cries Mary, the Young Fresh Fellows, Beat Happening, the Presidents of the United States of America, and all your other early-'90s Seattle music favorites. Originally published in late 1995, it's back in a (slightly late) twentieth anniversary edition. It's got over 240 big pages with over 800 illustrations. The new version has even more pix and stories, an updated discography, and many "whatever became of" listings. LOSER remains the most lavish and detailed account of a phenomenon that rocked the world. • Selections from LOSER The spirit of the Seattle If there's a common message among these bands, it's that your life and your culture count. You'll find this message in almost everything done here, from Sir Mix-A-Lot's tales of young black men who don't sell drugs or shoot each other, to Bikini Kill's anthems about surviving abusive relationships with pride intact, to Nirvana's elliptical pop songs about emotional confusion.You don't have to be from a media capital, you don't have to belong to the proper demographics, to have something worth saying. Make your own scene; don't conform to anybody. The Bird, Seattle's first punk It was a dark, narrow, warehouse-like space with a makeshift stage and a second-hand PA. As many as 200 crowded into the room, whose official capacity was 99. Graphic designer Art Chantry later speculated that "the entire audience on opening night eventually formed their own bands." The U-Men, perhaps the first true 'grunge' They were slow, harsh, and (in the early days) clumsy players. They invoked a Dionysian orgy of mutual aggression and abandon that no cartoon-devil metal band could match. Kurt Cobain's early The early ['50s] rockers had been white guys appropriating the hip-outcast status of blacks; Cobain was a straight guy appropriating the hip-outcast status of gays. He took the glam fascination with gay culture into the realm of teen vandalism, spraypainting "God Is Gay" and "Homo Sex Rules" around town just to infuriate the local rednecks. Sub Pop Records' early [Founders Bruce] Pavitt and [Jonathan] Poneman boasted publicly about making Seattle the music capital of the world. It's no exaggeration to say few people believed them at the time. Indie-rock In Seattle, it was OK to seek commercial success as long as you didn't "act like a rock star." In Olympia, you weren't even supposed to think of music as a career. To these folks, playing your own music to your friends was the only real reason to start a band.

Genres: Music, History, Nonfiction

274 pages, Paperback

Published August 27, 2016

Reviews

[East Bay J · Rating 4 out of 5]

The subtitle of Loser should be, "Everything You Ever Wanted To Know About Seattle Music." It's ridiculous how much information Clark Humphrey packed into this thing. From The Sonics and Jimi to Queensrych and Metal Church, from The U-Men and Fastbacks to Nirvana and Peal Jam, this is the text book and bible of Seattle music.

Even better, Humphrey includes a huge amount of incidental information, putting a lot of the chronicled events not just in chronological order but in contextual order of the times. Did you know the term "skid row" originated in Seattle? Did you know post Vietnam war economics lead to an anonymous billboard near Boeing Field asking, "Would the last person leaving Seattle turn out the lights?" Did you know key Ministry members Bill Rieflin and Paul and Roland Barker started in Seattle in The Blackouts? How about that the seeds of The Screamers came from a Seattle band called The Tupperwares? Or that Pearl Jam's Mike McCready was in a metal band called Shadow? It's all in here. Tons of great pictures, too.

I've been told by people who were there that this book has a few factual errors. Subsequent pressings may have corrected this, however. Also, the index isn't one hundred percent accurate. What you should find on page 100 according to the index may really be on page 103 or so.

I will say, you have to be a little bit of a freak to get into this book. I spent almost eight years in Seattle and know or have met some of these people. Loser is a narrative (albeit a damned fine one), a play by play of what happened to Seattle music (not to mention a hundred other random and interesting topics) from the mid 1800's to the mid 1990's. But if that kind of thing interests you, you can't go wrong with this book.

[Andreas Rauh · Rating 5 out of 5]

Simply put it, the best written work on what happened musically in Seattle in the late 80s and early 90s. A classic read on the subject, full with information, first hand accounts and thoroughly documented. Highly recommended.

[Ian Robinson · Rating 5 out of 5]

I love this book.
the way it looks like a roughly photocopies fanzine, with articles and flyers and photos and anecdotes from the late 50s right through to that fateful summer of 1994, this is a social history of music in a city.

[Selena · Rating 2 out of 5]

i guess i was expecting a less detailed book with more of a cool twist to it than a really cut and dry history of music in seattle. i was also expecting it to address more modern bands and seattle music movements as opposed to its entire history dating back to the indians who inhabited this land, etc, etc, etc. not my kind of book, honestly.

[Cole · Rating 2 out of 5]

Incredibly detailed. Like reading a chronological dictionary of artists. This book is very name heavy, so it might be daunting for those who have a hard time remembering names. Yet, lots of usual info about NW music history. The people who made the NW exhibit at the Experience Music Project must have read this book.