Now Is the Time to Invent!: Reports from the Indie-Rock Revolution, 1986-2000

by Katherine Spielmann (Editor), Steve Connell (Editor), J Neo Marvin (Editor)

The definitive portrait of the vibrant indie-rock scene that emerged in the mid-1980s and reached its peak in the ’90s. Taken from the pages of the acclaimed independent music magazine Puncture and illustrated with many rare photographs, this extensive collection of interviews, profiles, and record reviews features more than forty of the principal contributors to an exceptionally creative period in modern music.

Puncture’s writers and photographers documented the growth of a rich and varied body of music, often made with minimal resources—and always with maximal inventiveness—by artists who resisted the lure of the mainstream in pursuit of a sound of their own. From indie rock’s origins in the early work of such bands as Throwing Muses and Camper Van Beethoven, to the critical triumphs of Sleater-Kinney, Neutral Milk Hotel, Pavement, and Belle and Sebastian, via such pioneering artists as Sonic Youth, the Pixies, Meat Puppets, My Bloody Valentine, Nick Cave, Sebadoh, the Breeders, Jeff Buckley, Fugazi, P.J. Harvey, Guided by Voices, Beck, Cat Power, Will Oldham, Hole, the Flaming Lips, the Magnetic Fields, and many more.

Genres: Music, Nonfiction

320 pages, Paperback

Published September 15, 2020

About the author

Katherine Spielmann worked as a journalist and editor in New York and in the UK before settling in San Francisco, where she founded the music magazine PUNCTURE with Patty Stirling in 1982. From its xeroxed, folded, and stapled early issues as "a magazine of punk culture," PUNCTURE evolved, along with the music that inspired it, into an unparalleled observer of indie rock as it developed over the next two decades. In 1998, Spielmann and her partner Steve Connell founded Verse Chorus Press, which publishes books on music and popular culture, as well as contemporary fiction.