Q: “So what exactly makes something grunge and how was the Deranged Diction song the beginning of it?” by Tom Kipp

One night in December [12/4/1982, if memory serves] the Diction boize played a show in a cleared out used clothing/used record store called Urbane Renewal that ended much too early, so I asked to sit in for a two-song encore. I knew that, as Sex Pistols fans, they likely knew how to play “No Fun” and “Johnny B. Goode”; in fact a pal named Deb Scherer had told me they’d played “No Fun” as an encore six months before w/ their by-then-long-gone, original California-bred singer.

Anyhow, I went over the lyrics in my head, got up and sang those two songs, and they pretty immediately decided that I would now be their third vocalist [inside of one year], though they didn’t get around to telling the poor second fellow for about six weeks or so! LOL

What happened next was that I brought along the music I thought was cool [and that would work with what the DD boize were doing]—The Stooges and Flipper—and grafted it onto what they already knew [Dead Kennedys, Circle Jerks], with the common ground between us being Sex Pistols, Clash, Ramones, and Black Flag.

And then began to write lyrics of at least moderate wit, insight, outrage, and unpredictability [of some INTEREST, in other words!] to replace the trite Hardcore equivalents of “Reagan Sucks!” and “I Hate Everything!” that they were previously limited to.

By the end of January 1983, Jeff Ament and I had written 4 or 5 songs together, two of which [“Periscope” and the somewhat similarly-bass-driven “Contempt”] constituted the proto-Grunge anomalies—much slower, more fluid, more songful, and driven by simple, Postpunk-sounding bass parts semi-derived from some of the Flipper singles and album that I was insisting to everyone who would listen were the best music anyone had released in years!

Those two songs were also 3 to 4 minutes long, which made quite a contrast with the rest of our 20-second to 1:30 repertoire. Not “Sister Ray”, perhaps, but still!

The fact that I was capable of nothing more than intoning, shouting, and screaming [however precisely, or occasionally, even anthemically!] made the transition complete—these particular songs were not poppy punk [Ramones, Buzzcocks, Pistols], nor sophisticated punk turning into eclectic rock/funk/pop [The Clash], nor dark, “experimental” PiL/JD/Gang of Four postpunk, nor in any way “just like” the proto-punk bands [The Stooges, MC5 and New York Dolls] whom I’d loved for years, and that Jeff, Bruce, and every later-famous Grunge musician based a good part of their music and “look” on for the next 20 years.

They most notably resembled Flipper, but then Flipper was the so-called “Hardcore” band that grooved, that refused to play fast [or even “medium” tempo a good bit of the time], and that loved to make ugly, random noise until they’d driven nearly everyone outta the room. They could certainly, quite demonstrably, write catchy, if very noisy, near-“pop” [“Ha Ha Ha”, “Way of the World”], but “Sex Bomb” was more the norm—deliberately as Stoopid as Humanly Possible, making blatant fun of every warm, cozy social convention they could, most especially including “Love”, and generally making as big a hideous racket as has ever been captured on vinyl disc!

But “Periscope” and “Contempt” [and Diction more generally, to my frequent consternation] lacked any notable aspiration toward Flipper’s Grimy Comedy or Artiness or Experimentalism or, in the end, Rampant Hostility toward “Success”, despite Jeff and Bruce being actual U of Montana Art Majors at the time, all of us being broke, and despite my own intermittent wit and [already] jaundiced perspective.

We were trying to be “good”, and to find fans who would “like” what we were doing, though I never imagined that could or would amount to more than a hundred people in Missoula, or than the 400 or so folks who turned out [along with John Kappes and me, who drove 1000 miles round-trip for the privilege] to see The Mythic Punk Bill of Black Flag, The Meat Puppets and Nig Heist a year later [April 1984] in supposedly mega-cool Seattle, to which Jeff and Bruce had moved the previous June.

But Flipper never pretended to learn how to “play”, not even with the [relative] precision of a Black Flag or Husker Du, much less a Toto or Journey.

So when a bit of “musicianship” was injected into the equation by the very earnestly-acquired “chops” of Jeff, Bruce Fairweather, and, later, Stone Gossard, Kim Thayil, Matt Cameron, et al., it made for a curious hybrid of the anarchic music Mark Arm and I preferred and championed [The Stooges, Flipper] with the sorta sexy early-Seventies Heavy Metal [Zeppelin, but especially Sabbath] that all those “musician-types” amongst the early-’80s “punks” gravitated toward as they moved past mere replication of Sex Pistols and/or Black Flag licks/riffs toward something that might have a chance in hell of “selling” by the end of The Reagan Decade, or at least getting them more local gigs and/or a record deal by the time “Hair Metal” was interfering with their careerist goals of making a living being in bands, whether influenced by The Cult, Bon Jovi, Motley Crue, Motorhead, or whomever.

Then one day Young Hick from Nowhere Kurt Cobain [a worshipper of Mark Arm, of The Melvins—who are the “wild card” in this deck: decidedly (lowercase) grungy, but not interested enough in being “accessible” to bother much with distinctive or catchy songs or hooks, and of RAW POWER] brought inadvertently World Class Pop Songwriting and an instantly recognizable and credibly-pained Voice/Face to the proceedings, and of course the rest is History, and/or an upcoming exhibit at Experience Music Project!

So, far from being the MOST primitive style of “Rock” that it’s often advertised and/or remembered as, (uppercase) Grunge is most definitely an expedient hybrid of many conflicting and competing Rock/Punk/Noise styles, in variously-alloyed recombinations, all with at least an eye toward “commercial success”, or, failing that, toward “getting attention” and/or laid and/or doing whatever the hell one wants and having a good ol’ drunken time doing it!

I’d also say that Grunge is supposed to be “funny”, as “Periscope” certainly IS, at least in my opinion; as Iggy and Flipper usually WERE/ARE; as those fabled LOSER t-shirts once were; and as even Nirvana could certainly be on occasion.

This theory/explication of mine doesn’t account so well for the nearly unremitting grimness and/or earnestly anachronistic aspects of Major Grunge Stars Soundgarden [aside from the really/actually DUMB “Big Dumb Sex”], Pearl Jam or Alice in Chains.

And so fucking what. [I’ll never be able to explain how those South Seattle somnambulists Candlebox went Multi-Platinum either, or got Madonna hot & bothered enough to sign ’em to her vanity label!]

But, as inadvertent “co-inventor” of the genre, I feel that I can speak to what Grunge MIGHT have been, and was in fact INTENDED to be, before Heroin Chic and misunderstood young men looking for Psychotherapeutic Understanding and Rock Star Posturing and tons of Corporate Money and far too many Young Deaths skewed Grunge into something barely recognizable as the loud, catchy, bitchy, outlandishly “fun” and “frustrated” American Postpunk music it started out to be!

The TK Grunge Bottom Line—