Anyone with an interest in the Seattle scene, grunge, and the whole Pacific Northwest raintown music revolution will find Loser: The Real Seattle Music Story a good starting point. You’ll find many of the bands, those that made it and those that didn’t, covered in detail that you won’t find elsewhere. Not just Nirvana, Pearl Jam, and the bands that went on to mainstream and made it with big hits, but an exploration of the early grunge scene, providing a historical perspective, the garage bands, the ones that went nowhere beyond the clubs and streets of Seattle. It’s the real scene, the whole story of Seattle music, start to finish, birth to commercial explosion to death. The heart of Seattle music was do-it-yourself punk and non-commercial by design and definition, so it can’t be understood by limiting one’s view to the bands that went commercial successfully.
The real story ends when the bands made it big
Loser: The Real Seattle Music Story goes beyond that limited view and is the definitive exploration of the Seattle music sound and scene. It includes great photos and cover art, plus interviews and recaps. It covers all the obscure bands from the punk scene – The U-Men, The Fartz, Fastbacks, 10-Minute Warning, The Accused, the Melvins, Green River. It includes bands that, most likely, if you weren’t there at the time you haven’t heard of, and some you may not have even if you were. The rise and fall of the Sub Pop record label is here. The Seattle sound began to self-destruct at the time it achieved commercial success in 1991, a self-destruction high-pointed by Kurt Cobain ’s suicide in 1994, so that commercial crossover is where the proper story ends, not where it begins. This is one of the few books to recognize that and deal with the Seattle scene in the days when it was obscure, independent, self-created, and not commercial. Here is the story of the roots from which Nirvana, Pearl Jam, and Soundgarden grew.
