Seattle reeks

There’s a corner of the Pacific Northwest that stands to be an incubator for everlong brazen creativity. Washington has and continues to be a place that both attracts and cultivates minds that bend constriction and spark invention. A hub of human imagination stewing and formulating the thick sour-sweet stench of success. Despite modern-day Seattle being celebrated for its tech-superpowers and bionic coffee chains, it has fostered some of the most distinctive and influential music and artistry of all time. The mystique of the Seattle music scene begs the contemplation of human geography and childhood upbringing. It is more than an urban legend; the city practically breathes and writhes with life, vivacious with industrial, commercial, and cultural activity. More than the vibrating spirit of automation, the slapping sound of fish on each other’s half-dead backs, the smothering presence of bodies of water, and of trees evergreen. It is the people’s journey. It is the Oregon trail, rolling wood through the Walla Walla Valley, and triumphing the Cascades. It is the attempt to be a part of something larger, something grander, like forcing hands into the mobilization of war. It is fighting tooth and nail for menial jobs despite racial discrimination and suffocating amidst unjust economic adversity. Suffering hardship all because you came from somewhere else, to be somewhere inhabited by only outsiders and perpetrators in the first place. The land, home to the Suquamish and Duwamish people. Home to dancing, home to jazz, home to friction that made sound, that made grunge. Seattle Sound that causes friction not only in the Pacific Northwest, but every corner of the world. Seattle reeks, the ground coffee, the dead fish, the lapping of water, the sharp, fresh evergreen, the dirty clubs, and the stupid smell of success that creates greatness and coaxes greater creatures to crawl in. Washington possesses a darkness, a disaster, a concoction of scent and sound that transpires to lightness, to dreams, to music. 

What is it about Seattle and the surrounding regions that entices musical minds and hearts and more profoundly, what allows these musicians to flower? Ray Charles sprouted his roots in the kernel of Albany, Georgia in 1930, where he hopscotched, was blinded, and mused and ogled at the piano performances at Wylie Pitman’s Red Wing Cafe. With devout Southern charm, Pitman taught Charles how to play the piano and implicitly launched him abreast his life’s struggle and pursuit. He moved to a plethora of wastelands–Jacksonville, Florida, and then to Tampa to construct his burgeoning art. Charles considered moving to imperiums such as Chicago or New York, but it was Seattle that catapulted him amidst victory. Even Seattle’s very own Dave Lewis was an outlander that required Washington magic to make it big. Another pianist, born in 1938 in a Texas home, was one of the first African American rhythm and blues musicians to become wildly successful in Seattle. It was WWII that beckoned him to Washington, specifically to find work in Bremerton. He later moved to Seattle, bewitched by a prospering African American community, newfangled music scene, and unconventional culture where he was invigorated by melodies such as those of Ray Charles. Lewis attended Garfield High School, performing as a teenager for teenagers at sock-hops and house parties until he faded into adulthood and into fame. Lewis notoriously played a large role in the desegregation of radio stations and the Seattle music scene, being one of the first black artists to be commonly played on all white stations. Eddie Vedder is the incomer that betrayed San Diego and his Illinois birthplace of 1964 when wandering up the coast to a promised land forged by Pearl Jam. Even the marvel Dave Grohl, known for leaving deep grooves in Seattle history, was born in Ohio in 1969, growing up and ripening amid Virginia landscapes before stumbling into the Emerald City and finding majesty on Kurt Cobain’s couch. Grohl ruminates that he wouldn’t be here without Seattle and that “…there was something happening in that city that wasn’t necessarily happening anywhere else…there’s something about that place that welcomes you home like a small town- even if you haven’t been there in years…” It is almost because of Seattle’s intrinsic isolation from the pressurizing influence of other major cities and pop-culture as a whole which forces and allows it to be in a league of its own. Seclusion of aptitude, drawing in and creating exceptional talent, sparkling and flaunting at San Francisco and Los Angeles. 

While Seattle tempts the finest in the land, there is something that rings rugged and true about the ascendancy of the Washington born and raised. The wickedness, the shrewdness, the distress, that is married to the defiant talent. The babies rocked in cradles, doused and overpowered by the pungent stench. The success, sorrow, and sound that just dares you to take a stab. Jimi Hendrix was born in the eye of the storm in 1942, where as a child, he trudged around with a broomstick in his fist, pretending and dreaming it was a guitar. A neighbor took a chance and gifted Hendrix a drab, yet consequential one stringed instrument, his first real ax. The sonic apparatus allowed Hendrix to become one of the most notable electric guitarists of all time, as he played with feedback and distortion, with the strange, eternally with posterity, and most importantly playing like a Seattleite. Hendrix attended that same Garfield High School as Lewis, tempted the law and went to prison, begrudgingly enlisted in the military, moved to Tennessee, to London, but Seattle was the city that brought and grew his stardom. 

As you skid your fingers over Seattle windows, a layer of dust is left upon them. Fanciful finger painting only leads you to the dirt, an uncanny residue, a muck, a specific grime, and to the grunge. And after dipping your fingers, you never want to go back. This is especially true for The U-Men, a rock-band that spawned in 1980 and became rulers of the Seattle underground, the stepping stone for grunge itself. They were first to fill a room singularly for this new-found filthy sound, in honor of making music with dirty hands, dusty fingers. Chris Cornell’s boot was the fateful stride to step on this stone, born in the gut of Seattle in 1964. He sang anti-war ballads at Christ the King Elementary and was bred into a friction-inducing varnish that is Catholicism to inquisitive minds. Cornell attended Shorewood High School where he stumbled around listening to The Beatles as a self proclaimed loner, leaning on rock music to cope with his severe depression, anxiety, and substance abuse. He dropped out of this classic Seattle school to make the music that saved and killed him. The song-writer turned glorified rock-star heartthrob formed Soundgarden along with his bassist, Hiro Yamamoto in 1984. To layer yet another honor to hang on the region, Yamamoto is also notable for founding Screaming Trees with Mark Lanegan. Soundgarden was a catalyst for the grunge movement, but they did not find their place in the sun until a decade later in 1994 with their album Superunknown. In the meantime, Nirvana formed in Aberdeen, Washington in 1987 and took flight by 1991’s Nevermind on the sweaty back of these grunge trailblazers and understudies. They were stitched together by the previously mentioned Kurt Cobain and Dave Grohl, as well as Krist Novoselic. They were the ones that dispersed the stench of success, smelling like teen spirit and MTV. Cobain was born in Aberdeen in 1967 and spent most of his life there as the excitable child and a young cartoonist who was deeply overwrought by the divorce of his parents. A little body eaten away by a delicate darkness only known to children with separated guardians and rejected belonging. Cobain and Novoselic broke musical ground at Aberdeen High School and played for the first time as Nirvana in Tacoma. Cobain drifted, sleeping on a myriad of ottomans, sheltering in Montesano, Hoquiam, writing some of his most poignant lyrics in the depths of Olympia before moving to Seattle in 1992. At the time, Cobain felt he was too small for the grandiose enterprise, Seattle being too expensive for him. Later he would change the way Seattle viewed itself, the city twinkling swifter having inhabited such a troubled, windblown soul. Grohl wistfully watched Cobain flourish and then fall in Washington. Tumbling in tumultuous grief, Grohl followed his own dusty, sticky fingers, Cobain’s air of success, openhanded spirit, and the loose threads of his tired sweaters to a tiny apartment in West Seattle, where Foo Fighters was born.

The Washington that raised musicians destined to reach such great heights are not contained within alternative rock and timeless grunge. The new era brought new creatives brought up within the historic calamity. The likes of Modest Mouse, Death Cab For Cutie, Fleet Foxes, and many others roam those forests, a playground for misadventure. Brandi Carlile was born in Ravensdale, Washington in 1981, in wide open spaces, residing in the only house for miles, but also only miles from the boundless rain city. Stretches of life, snowballs stuffed with rocks, janky adolescent bike rides, and an innate gift for song writing, a capacity for story building. She holds an aptness in understanding and conveying that stories truly do not mean anything when you have nobody to tell them to. The little happenstance, the tiny destiny of being wrought in Washington of all places- molded Carlile into Americana, into a queer luminary, into inspiration radiating further than her home and yours, further than the soundwaves that bounce and reflect off the grimy walls and windows. Countless dreams born in the Pacific Northwest, ten grammys, and one restaurant called The Carlile Room indicates one thing: Brandi Carlile is Seattle. She beams with pride, “Seattle is my home… It’s in my soul. I travel the country now for the greatest job on Earth, but when I dream of Seattle, I hear Soundgarden in my sleep.” Seattle is a breeding ground for some of the best artists in the world– and it reeks– a smell that you can sense on every last one of them.

Article written by Katie Hulse

Cover image provided by Roadesque, 2018.