Everett True’s guide to the Sub Pop scene, 18th March 1989
July 20, 2008
Everett True’s guide to the Sub Pop rosta, 18th March 1989.
You can tell the grunge scene is still developing – check those cowboy boots on the crowd surfer! That said nothing would please me more than if someone from the gig photo got in touch.
UPDATE: Thanks to LameStain blog for linking and having plenty more to say about Grunge from a US perspective. This post also discussed with affection on the ILXOR forum
Archived Music Press 
April 16, 2009 at 7:19 pm
This article is how I remember “Grunge” as a genre beginning. Before this article, there was stuff on Touch & Go or SST we’d describe as “grungy guitars”. Or “like The Stooges’ Funhouse”. But we viewed those bands as part of the US Hardcore scene, or the New York noise rock scene. Green River was one of those bands.
Then there was the Sonic Youth/Mudhoney split, and it was like, “Who is this Mudhoney, and how do they know Sonic Youth?” Then Melody Maker published this spread, and it suddenly became a distinct sound. I wanted to hear all these bands, and I connected the dots back to the one’s I’d already heard: Green River, U-Men, Soundgarden.
When I heard “You Got It” with it’s Hendrix lead and blunt catchiness, it seemed ready to rise out of the underground and knock Def Leppard off the US Charts. Didn’t quite happen that way, but close enough.
Funny how this article kicks off describing the Sub Pop bands as “Thrash Metal” ’cause in retrospect, the pigeonholing didn’t work out that way. It’s hard to hear it as metallic now. But at the time, all these acts seemed ready to capture suburban America in a way Husker Du or the Replacements never did.
September 11, 2009 at 6:46 am
[…] Parte esencial de esta escena la tuvo Sub-Pop Records, quienes tenían en su catalogo a los artistas más importantes del grunge como a Nirvana, Mudhoney y Soudgarden, entre muchos otros, tal como lo muestran los archivos de música. […]
October 31, 2009 at 9:22 pm
[…] external authority such as Life writing about “Mystic Painters of the Northwest“, or Everett True writing about Sub Pop. I for one, was really excited to learn about what was going on, and next year I hope they include […]
November 2, 2010 at 8:21 am
That is I in the cowboy boot, my band CATBUTT might have played that show,not sure though.
October 10, 2011 at 10:59 pm
Why was Seattle the center of the grunge scene?…
A major factor was geographical isolation. Many people don’t remember, or don’t realize, that in the ’80s — before the Starbucks/Microsoft/Amazon boom era — Seattle was not the cosmopolitan place it is today. People in the rest of the country consid…
July 12, 2013 at 2:33 pm
[…] maniera indipendente e autonoma. True scrisse allora i primi pezzi sulla cosiddetta scena grunge (qui una scansione dell’epoca). Di certo, parte del merito di quella fioritura va alla Sub Pop, l’etichetta per cui […]
December 31, 2013 at 12:11 pm
[…] maniera indipendente e autonoma. True scrisse allora i primi pezzi sulla cosiddetta scena grunge (qui una scansione dell’epoca). Di certo, parte del merito di quella fioritura va alla Sub Pop, l’etichetta per cui […]
May 31, 2017 at 7:55 am
[…] There was regional interest, and then Everett True wrote that story for Melody Maker. I would say that was when the beginning of the international […]
April 25, 2018 at 1:01 pm
[…] reminiscent of San Francisco. Music started that process. In March 1989, before grunge broke, Sub Pop flew an English journalist named Everett True to Seattle to write a story for The Melody Ma…. The label packaged the region’s music and gave it a uniform sound and look that didn’t exist […]
May 11, 2024 at 10:27 pm
Great blog I enjoyed reaading