Seattle's The Real Deal

By JAY COCKS

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.

With reporting by Patrick E. Cole/Seattle