Andrew’s Reviews > Everybody Loves Our Town: An Oral History of Grunge > Status Update

When talking about Nirvana, it pretty quickly devolved into, “Oh, how was Kurt feeling? What were his drug problems like?” But when Nirvana was onstage, that was not what it was about. It was not about drugs and depression and angst and death. It was about rock and roll as a great big joke.
- Craig Montgomery

I’m not a rock star, I don’t like rock stars, and I don’t want to be around them. That word rock star is really derogatory to me. There seems to be a malicious factor in calling someone that. It’s a put-down.
- Ben Shepherd

The next time I saw those guys, probably a few months later at the Moore Theatre, Eddie was climbing of the P.A. speakers up the side of the wall and jumping headlong into the audience off the balcony. He had acquired his wings. The next show I saw him at, I waded through the people and found him and said, “Hey, Eddie, I hear you can fly!” He just got this big sunshine grin.
- Nancy Wilson

Grunge was an adjective; it was never meant to be a noun. If I was using it, it was never meant to coin a movement, it was just to describe raw rock and roll. Then that term got applied to major-label bands putting out slick-sounding records. It’s an ill fit.
- Mark Arm

We were all starstruck by Kurt even before he was famous because you could tell that he was so gifted. Plus, you kind of just wanted to take him home and take care of him, he just looked so sad and lost at the same time.
- Kelly Canary

Soundgarden had this intensity—the best bands to me just are…in seeing them I thought, the die is cast. This is a band that’s gonna take over the world. Because even at that show, where there were maybe 40 people, you could tell there was a chemistry and a sense of inevitability.
- Jonathan Poneman

People made records entirely to please themselves because there was nobody else to please, there was no one paying attention to Seattle. It was like a little, isolated germ culture.
- Jack Endino