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Text File | 1992-08-28 | 5.4 KB | 117 lines

                                                                                MUSIC, Page 70

Seattle's the Real Deal


With bands like Nirvana and Queensryche blitzing the charts, the
Puget sound is the hottest in rock

By JAY COCKS -- Reported by Patrick E. Cole/Seattle


    The great American music machine still maintains its twin
capitals in New York City and Los Angeles, but its epicenter is
inclined to shift as frequently and erratically as a tropical
depression. Athens, Ga., was the regional rage just . . . well,
was it yesterday? And there was Minneapolis only a few years
back; before that it was Philadelphia, Detroit, Memphis.

    These days -- these moments -- it's Seattle. One band
after another has sprung from the environs of the city's
fast-lane bar scene onto the national charts. The lyrical metal
band Queensryche has sold more than 2 million copies of its
album Empire. Alice in Chains, which lays down a kind of
altered-consciousness heavy metal -- the Doors, slamming -- is
approaching platinum-level sales with Facelift. Nevermind, by
the Seattle-area trio Nirvana, has sold 3.5 million, and the
group's single Smells Like Teen Spirit, with its arch lyric
ironies and crusher guitar chords, hit Billboard's Top 10 and
helped get the band on Saturday Night Live.

    Seattle boasts four thriving independent record labels;
six key music clubs, like the Vogue, in the downtown area
alone; and nearly that many recording studios. Representatives
of rival record companies prowl the streets in major-label wolf
packs, looking for the next bust-out band: Heard War Babies yet?
Checked out Mudhoney? Get on it, and get with it. As Steve
Slaton, regent of the local deejays, puts it, "Seattle seems to
be the center of the musical universe. It's just the real deal."

    The Seattle sound is cussed, aggressive, incisively
individualistic, and it comes, like matching tie and
handkerchief, with its own attitude: cut down on flash, look
regular, sound loud and sound off. "People here do what they
want," says Terry Date, producer of Badmotorfinger for
Soundgarden, which has toured with Guns N' Roses. "There aren't
a whole lot of love songs that come out of here. It's not happy
music. It definitely has a dark side to it."

    More than any other group, it is Nirvana that typifies the
new Seattle heat. "I feel stupid and contagious/ Here we are
now, entertain us," is one of Teen Spirit's more memorable
lyric refrains, fully characteristic of the band's spiky style.
The core members of Nirvana, lead singer-guitarist Kurt Cobain
and bassist Chris Novoselic, teened together in Aberdeen,
Wash., and teamed up to form Nirvana in 1987 (drummer David
Grohl signed on later). Both were fans of the brooding postpunk
musical musings of Husker Du, as well as of the shameless
theatricality of Kiss. Nirvana's first album, Bleach, was
recorded in three days at a cost of $600 and, when distributed
by an enterprising local label called Sub Pop, made the band's
members stars on the underground circuit.

    Seattle rockers take almost as much pride in their ornery
individuality as in their music. "I can't stand it when people
come up to me and say, `Congratulations on your success!' "
Cobain told a music magazine recently. "I want to ask them, `Do
you like the songs?' Selling 2 million records isn't useful to
me unless they're good."

    Despite all the prescribed attitude, the musicians are
benign about their surroundings. The Seattle area, says Geoff
Tate, lead singer of Queensryche, "is attractive to me because
it's home. It's a very good place to live from the standpoint
of reality." Says Layne Staley of A in C: "The bands support
each other. Here it's a little more lighthearted." Tate also
sees a link to an honorable British tradition. "There is a
blue-collar element, and it's a very moody place due to the
weather," he says. "It has the same sort of atmosphere as
Birmingham, England."

    It was, in fact, the ever trendy, famished-for-a-new-thing
British music press that first started seriously boosting bands
like Nirvana and the Seattle scene in general. "Sometimes
having the English behind you is the most important thing," says
Daniel House of Seattle-based C/Z Records. Says Damon Stewart,
Sony Music's A.-and-R. man on the scene: "Through the British
press, the whole pop scene really lit this fire."

    The Seattle sound is neither quite as original nor as
dynamic as its boosters like to claim. To anyone, for example,
who watched the Who trash the stage or the Clash spit into the
audience and split every eardrum within range, the sight of
Nirvana bashing instruments on Saturday Night Live looks all too
practiced, like a bunch of art-school wimps trying to act tough.
Still, A in C's Staley insists, "it's not about who's the
wildest. There are no gimmicks."

    But -- the impression persists -- perhaps there is some
secret. Says Geoff Mayfield, Billboard's associate director of
retail research: "What I'm hearing now is that bands from L.A.
or the Midwest are moving to Seattle and telling record
companies, `Yeah, we grew up here, and this is where we make our
music.' " But rockers around the country with the same idea
should be prudent. Before tearing up roots, they should think
about that shifting epicenter. It would be terrible to desert
the rehearsal garage in some town that was about to become the
next newest, neatest place.