In 1990, ‘grunge’ was the soapy residue found in hard-to-reach cavities of washing machines. For those of us who frequented laundrettes at the time, grunge was simply one of a cavalcade of hazards that came with doing your laundry in an appliance that didn’t belong to you. Fast-forward twelve months and the term ‘grunge’ meant something else entirely.
In 1990, ‘grunge’ was the soapy residue found in hard-to-reach cavities of washing machines. For those of us who frequented laundrettes at the time, grunge was simply one of a cavalcade of hazards that came with doing your laundry in an appliance that didn’t belong to you. Fast-forward twelve months and the term ‘grunge’ meant something else entirely.
Whilst hipsters with their fingers fixed to the popular culture pulse, would surely nominate an earlier date; for me the release of ‘Nevermind’ by Nirvana marked the moment that grunge music announced its arrival by kicking down the front door of the musical establishment. The impact of that record cannot be overstated, unless, of course, you claim it cured the common cold and developed the perfect non-stick saucepan.
Like a comet that hurtled to earth, grunge music resulted in the sudden extinction of rock dinosaurs. In the 1980s, hard rock usually meant big hair and spandex pants. For reasons that cannot now be explained, this was somehow regarded as masculine. In an instant, those bands all appeared quite foolish. It was as if the people had risen up and overthrown a brutal dictatorship – one in which the evil overlord had imposed sub-standard soft rock on a repressed people. They would tolerate it no more. In the new order, many bands disappeared as surely as a magician’s assistant or, even worse, subjected themselves to the ultimate indignity of trying to ‘go grunge’. Without exception, they failed, and were relegated to the underbelly that is reality television from where they would plots their glorious resurrection as a nostalgia act.
The grunge trend wasn’t just about music. For a time in the early 1990s, there was also ‘grunge’ literature. What made these works of literary endeavour ‘grungy’ was never entirely clear. Mostly, they were plain unhygienic and not very interesting. Then there were the clothes – lumberjack shirts, torn jeans and big boots. These items of apparel were the tie-die of our generation. I would say that we wore these things with style, but that was simply not possible.
Let me be honest and say that I was not ready for grunge at first. In fact, its sudden emergence saw me being placed on the musical equivalent of the endangered species list. For in the golden year of 1991, I was not playing in a three-piece guitar band, bathing in swathes of distortion and wailing as though I had just accidentally severed my own toe. No, sir. I was playing in a five-piece funk band. And perhaps the only thing worse than playing in a funk band in the year that grunge broke was to be its keyboard player.
It seemed desperately unfair. In the eighties, along with big-haired soft rock galloots, the decade was ruled by keyboards. At one point, keyboards threatened to make guitars completely redundant when the revolutionary keytar emerged. The sight of Jan Hammer pumping out the ‘Theme from Miami Vice’ on a Royalex Probe was enough to cause a generation of youngsters to turn up their collective nose at Stratocasters and Gibson SGs in favour of a keyboard. The future had arrived, and it looked like a synthesizer. Suddenly, years of piano lessons meant I was poised to reap the benefits. But as grunge took over, it became apparent that I had backed the wrong horse. Melbourne quickly became a grunge city and bands that did anything else were considered perversions. Trying to get a gig in the early 1990s for a funk band was much like being a typewriter salesman in 2012. The odds and Marshall amps were stacked against us.
For a few weeks, we had ourselves a residency at a place called ‘The Royal Derby’ hotel. The idea behind a residency is that you build an audience. Instead, we built a compelling case for a jukebox. Over those weeks we supported another band, called ‘No Junk Mail’. Sometimes there were people at the venue and we successfully disrupted several games of pool. Most weeks, however, we were each other’s audience.
If it was hard being a five-piece funk band in the early 1990s, then the predicament of ‘No Junk Mail’ was more dire still. They were somewhat older than us and had their sights firmly set on stardom. But they were wearing spandex. Obscurity beckoned. For us, we continued on but the jig was up one night when we arrived at a venue in the Western suburbs to find that it had special parking for trucks. It was clear that we had come to the end of the road, and it had plenty of parking.
I believed in grunge then. There has not been a moment like it since. Ultimately, grunge could not survive itself and was eventually cannibalised by bands that wore the uniform whilst sounding like the hair metal bands that had been so unceremoniously overthrown. Perhaps it’s a sign of age when you hear new music and start to speak of how much better things used to be. If you said that to a kid today, they’d look at you funny. It’s enough to make you say, never mind.