Hey, welcome to the Grunge Underground Archive.
My name’s Nate Callahan. I’m 31, born and raised in Queens, New York. I moved out to Seattle in ’92 after a relationship went to hell, among other things, and I’ve been here ever since.
I work at a record store downtown during the day, which means I probably spend more money on records than I make selling them. I tend bar a few nights a week to make up for it.
This site is basically my personal archive. Nothing fancy. Just bands, records, tapes, shows and people that meant something to me back then. Some of it got called grunge, some of it didn’t. I never cared much about the name anyway.
A lot of the stuff here comes from records and tapes I’ve collected over the years. Some of it comes from shows I was lucky enough to see myself. And some of it is just stuff I remember — so don’t take every date and every story here as gospel.
I saw a lot of great bands in those years. Sometimes in clubs, sometimes in rooms that probably shouldn’t have been holding that many people, and sometimes at somebody’s house with half the neighborhood packed into the living room. I didn’t realize at the time how much I was going to miss it.
I’m putting things up whenever I have the time, so this place will probably always be a little unfinished.
Anyway, thanks for stopping by.
This site is dedicated to Mia Zapata (1965–1993).
Rest in peace, Mia.
The band that changed everything. Three guys from Washington somehow ended up turning the whole damn world upside down — and underneath everything that came afterward, there was still one hell of a band.
Posted: November 4, 2001Heavy, strange, psychedelic and never quite interested in staying in one place. And then there was Chris Cornell's voice.
Posted: November 10, 2001They got enormous and then spent half their time fighting against everything that came with it. Stubborn as hell, which is probably why I still like them.
Posted: November 17, 2001Dark, heavy and painfully honest without ever sounding helpless. When Layne and Jerry sang together, nobody else sounded like them.
Posted: November 25, 2001Messy, loud, vicious and impossible to ignore. Courtney could turn a song inside out and a room upside down before you knew what hit you.
Posted: December 2, 2001If you want to know what Seattle sounded like before the whole world showed up, start here. Fuzz, sarcasm and absolutely no interest in becoming rock stars.
Posted: December 8, 2001Four guys from Ellensburg making heavy psychedelic rock with Mark Lanegan growling straight through the middle of it. Too strange for the easy version of grunge and too damn good to reduce to one song.
Posted: December 15, 2001Big riffs, ugly noise and enough volume to rearrange your internal organs. One of the real cornerstones of the early Seattle scene, whether the rest of the world noticed or not.
Posted: December 21, 2001Fast songs, huge melodies and guitars that barely stopped long enough to breathe. Seattle could sound like pure fucking joy too.
Posted: December 29, 2001Fred, Toody and Andrew doing everything their own way because apparently nobody had told them they couldn't. Raw, stubborn rock 'n' roll with absolutely nothing unnecessary attached.
Posted: January 5, 2002Too weird, too heavy and too stubborn to fit anywhere properly. Which is probably why so many bands learned something from them.
Posted: January 11, 2002Punk rock with heart, guts and one hell of a singer. Mia Zapata could make a song sound wounded and fearless at the same time.
Posted: January 18, 2002Big songs, glam swagger and Andy Wood right in the middle of everything. They were gone before the rest of the world understood what was starting to happen in Seattle.
Posted: January 25, 2002Heavy, strange and there damn near from the beginning. Skin Yard helped build the Seattle underground while Jack Endino was busy recording a good chunk of it.
Posted: January 31, 2002Ben McMillan's voice over guitars with enough low-end weight to crack concrete. Heavy as hell, but never just another metal band.
Posted: February 5, 2002Sharp guitars, big hooks and Carrie Akre singing like she meant every damn word. Good on record, even better with a club floor under your feet.
Posted: February 10, 2002Tacoma punk played fast enough to leave scorch marks and melodic enough that the songs stuck. No gloom, no rock-star bullshit, just go.
Posted: February 14, 2002Too polished for some of the old crowd and way too successful for others. I didn't care — they wrote some damn good songs.
Posted: February 18, 2002One record made by friends trying to say goodbye to Andy Wood. It became something much bigger without ever needing a second one.
Posted: February 22, 2002Dreamy, heavy, psychedelic and just a little sideways from everybody around them. The kind of band that made more sense at two in the morning than two in the afternoon.
Posted: February 26, 2002Before Mother Love Bone, before Pearl Jam, before anybody called this stuff grunge, Andy Wood was already off in his own universe. Glam, punk, noise and absolutely no sense of embarrassment.
Posted: March 1, 2002Four people from Olympia who made punk feel dangerous and necessary again. Kathleen Hanna had plenty to say and absolutely no intention of asking permission to say it.
Posted: March 4, 2002Four women from Los Angeles who could walk into a Seattle club and fit right in. Loud, funny, filthy and completely uninterested in anybody's bullshit.
Posted: March 7, 2002Hard, furious Seattle punk from a band that survived more than any band should have had to. Grief and anger got into the music, but they never became the whole story.
Posted: March 10, 2002A New York poet and songwriter who found her way into the Seattle scene in the early '90s. Onstage, she was hard to forget.
Posted: March 16, 2002Fuzz, psychedelia and guitars that seemed to smear into the walls. Seattle had plenty of heavy bands; Love Battery found a stranger, dreamier way to make noise.
Posted: March 22, 2002San Diego, not Seattle, and they took plenty of shit for supposedly sounding like they belonged here. Then they kept changing until the comparison stopped making much sense.
Posted: March 24, 2002Definitely Chicago, definitely not grunge, whatever the magazines said. Billy Corgan kept making the music bigger, prettier and weirder until the band finally blew apart.
Posted: March 25, 2002What started as Dave Grohl making a record almost by himself became a real band pretty damn fast. Best part is, they never needed to become Nirvana again.
Posted: March 27, 2002