Michael Azerrad

A couple of times, when the tension got to be too much, I visited Pat Smear in his hotel room. Pat is a kindly and serene presence, always ready with a smile and a cheery greeting of "Hey, fucker!" He'd seen it all already- several times over- and nothing seemed to faze him. He brought a portable record player on tour so he could play music in his hotel rooms. Late one evening, we sipped red wine, and he played me a record he'd been obsessed with for many years: a bootleg of a 1972 David Bowie live show at the Santa Monica Civic Auditorium, and it was fantastically good. Pat had been a massive Bowie fan for a long time and was not only the one who suggested to Kurt that they cover "The Man Who Sold The World" for the Unplugged show but also figured out the chords of the song.
When we reached Dallas, Kurt called my room and asked if I wanted to walk around downtown with him, Pat, and Frances. We rolled out with Frances in her stroller. It was eerie- a weekday in the middle of the afternoon in a major city, and there were no people on the streets. Where was everybody? As a provincial New Yorker, I was baffled. But it was great for Kurt because he could walk around and not get hassled.
After wandering around for a while, we walked down a wide boulevard and suddenly found ourselves at the edge of a big, open space. An absolutely massive flock of birds circled above it- I later learned they were grackles- forming a gigantic undulating disk so vast and dense that the sunlight filtering through them was turned gray. It looked apocalyptic. Except for the occasional car, there was not another human being in sight. It quickly dawned on me that this was Dealey Plaza, the site of the John F. Kennedy assassination. There was the former Texas School Book Depository and, surprisingly close by, the infamous "grassy knoll". It was a weird, staggering moment. Just like everybody else who visits there, we checked out the scene of the crime, considering the angles and weighing conspiracy theories. Then Frances needed some baby supplies, so Kurt split off and went to a drugstore. (p. 599)

Cloudy, rainy, dirty, and damp: there is a compelling argument that Northwest grunge was deeply influenced by the region's terroir. The dank, overcast climate fosters mold and moss everywhere, and all the rain means a thin layer of finely spattered mud tends to settle on things. It's also an incredibly beautiful place with vast, snow-capped mountains and towering pines.
"You gotta understand Seattle," Seattle native and Guns N' Roses bassist Duff McKagan told me for a 1992 Rolling Stone piece about the Seattle scene. "It's grungy. People are into rock & roll and into noise, and they're building airplanes all the time, and there's a lot of noise, and there's rain and musty garages. Musty garages create a certain noise." And that noise, as Sub Pop's Jonathan Poneman put it in that same piece, inspired grunge's "backwoods yeti stomp." (p. 92-93)