Three grunge luminaries who were once members of the band Green River — Pearl Jam’s Stone Gossard and Jeff Ament and Mudhoney’s Mark Arm — break down the origins of the genre in the latest episode of our podcast, Rolling Stone Music Now. Senior writer Kory Grow joins host Brian Hiatt to discuss the band’s importance and play portions of his interviews, which were previously published as part of an in-depth oral history of Green River and Seattle’s nascent rock community in the mid Eighties.
Reflecting on the group’s earliest days, in the podcast, Gossard said, “What we were doing was this spontaneous eruption of noise and energy, and if we drank enough beer and the crowd was right, we had these moments where suddenly we were in the middle of a sort of ecstatic punk chaos/celebration, whatever, bacchanal and we just wanted more of that.”
Arm spoke to the influence of Iggy Pop and the Stooges on him and his friends in Seattle’s music scene. “I was just getting into punk rock and reading about what came before,” he said. “Raw Power was a record you could find, because it was a cutout for four bucks. … I was just fuckin’ blown away. I couldn’t find anything else that sounded like the Stooges, especially Fun House. I don’t know anybody in Seattle who had Stooges records for a little while, except maybe Raw Power.”
And Ament discussed how the group never really thought about what genre they were fitting into. “I don’t know if we were thinking much about what style of music we were playing in,” he said. “Our scene was the hardcore scene, and at the same time, the thing we loved about a lot of the hardcore bands was that they were all dramatically different. All the big bands on SST were really different; think of Black Flag, Hüsker Dü, Saccharine Trust and the Minutemen. It was cool if it nudged things a little bit. I think that’s why the band even lasted as long as it did.”
The audio in the podcast includes thoughts and revelations that didn’t make it into the printed version of the story. Meanwhile, the full oral history, which coincided with reissues of their Dry as a Bone and Rehab Doll releases, includes interviews with Green River’s Steve Turner, Bruce Fairbone and Alex Shumway, as well as producers Jack Endino and Gordon Raphael, former Big Black frontman Steve Albini and former Sonic Youth bassist Kim Gordon.
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