Seattle is the birthplace of grunge. This town was the cradle from which awesome bands such as sleater keaney, pearl jam, soundgarden, alice in chains and of course Nirvana. Pictures of seattle street life from the late 80's and early 90's depict several scenes of apathetic youth and vagrants kicking about it heavy make up torn jeans and yes flannel shirts. The vibe on the street is so incredibly different today- with most of seattle super urbanised and well heeled. Apart from the Experience Music Project- a seattle music museum there is little to remind anyone about the pivotal movement in music and lifestyle that originated here- Grunge is mostly dead. The live music scene for guitar based grunge bands used to be huge- and now it' actually majorly restricted to weekend gigs.
So to explore and pay homage to the grunge scene and the seattle sound- we headed to the experience music project. This place was great- an awesome history of the guitar gallery-replete with every model of guitar made since the early 1900s focussing on the evolution of gibsons and rickenbackers. Needless to say Sam was in guitar heaven!
IN addition to this awesome music memorabilia - the highlight seing Nirvana's demo tape and kurt cobain's guitar.Cool and a little sad- its fun to think about how much more great music Nirvana could have made- and if they would have kept to the grunge rock genre or changed tack completely.
YOu can also have your own rock star moment at EMP too- we took over the drum and bass sound room - and did a rocking rendition of peter gun theme - me on bass and sam on drums (see pics below).
Happily we have found lot's of great record stores- and picked up a really early pressing of a Ramone's album and much to my delight found a record of Portishead's All mine- ive never seen any portishead singles on LP so this is a great find!
Fun!
