Those Were(n’t) the Days

Like Damian at A Sunday of Liberty, I was unimpressed with Casey Chalk’s recent call to Make America Grunge Again. Let’s not and say we did.

When I moved to Seattle for college in 1991, I found myself accidentally standing front and center in the mosh pit of the “Grunge” era. Some of the music was okay (a song or two each by Mudhoney and Nirvana). Most of it sucked. Stone Temple Pilots? Alice in Chains? Soundgarden? No, thank you. The absolute worst, in my opinion, was Pearl Jam, whose god-awful song “Alive” was blasted down the hallway of my dorm on an hourly basis for what seemed like a year.

I didn’t really understand that grunge was more than a local phenomenon until I went on European Quarter in late 1992. One day in Strasbourg I was “helping” in a classroom of French twelve-year-olds (“try out your English on the dumb American”) when they asked me where I was from. “Seattle,” I said, and began to explain where that obscure provincial city was located. But it was like I’d set off a firecracker in the room. All at once they leapt from their chairs and began shouting and demanding to know if I was a personal friend of Kurt Cobain.

I was not. But I knew a university mailroom employee who sold marijuana to students on the side and who had once lived in the same apartment building as the guys from Nirvana, before they were famous. They lived like animals, he said. A few years later, after Cobain’s death, Dave Grohl was a late-night regular at the bookstore where I worked. When Foo Fighters (his new band) earned their first magazine cover, he bought up our stock.

The truth is, I didn’t care much for our local music in 1990s Seattle. I was more interested in bands like The Pixies, PJ Harvey, Morphine, Uncle Tupelo, The John Spencer Blues Explosion, and (forgive me) Pavement. I don’t kid myself, however, that these folks were doing anything really extraordinary. By my calculations, Rock and Roll died circa 1989. I was just enjoying the ghostly fumes of its afterlife.

I give Chalk credit, however, for recognizing in his article that the 1999 WTO riots seemed to mark the end of that particular era. I was there for the “Battle of Seattle” too, working downtown, and was swept up in the chaos. Tear gas seeped through the windows of our office building. Some of my coworkers went out for lunch and were herded onto buses and arrested. You felt like a rat in a maze trying to get past the blocked streets and back home to Capitol Hill, where cops drove up and down Broadway shooting rubber bullets at pedestrians and shop owners.

I do sometimes suffer nostalgia for 1990s Seattle, but not for the music. I miss the sense I had at the time (mistaken or not) that America was doing all right. We had won the Cold War, the clouds of nuclear Armageddon had parted, and our prospects seemed pretty rosy. There were so many possibilities, individually and collectively. It was okay to indulge your eccentricities, to shout unpopular opinions, to be a bit of a weirdo. Tolerance was the ideal. At least, that’s how it felt to me at the time – but what did I know?

The Virtue of Drink

Bernard DeVoto’s The Hour: A Cocktail Manifesto (1948) begins like this:

“We are a pious people but a proud one too, aware of a noble lineage and a great inheritance. Let us candidly admit that there are shameful blemishes on the American past, of which by far the worst is rum.”

On the other hand, if the American experiment had produced nothing more than bourbon and rye, DeVoto says, we would have done the world a princely service. For whiskey has ennobling virtues:

“Look, for instance, at the Irish, for many centuries a breed of half-naked cave dwellers sunk in ignorance and sin and somewhat given to contentiousness. Then gentle, learned St. Patrick appeared among them. He taught them to make usquebaugh and at once they became the most cultured people in the world. No one challenged their supremacy, certainly the Scotch didn’t, till inspiration crossed the Atlantic and set up a still in Pennsylvania.”

Here in Oregon the state holds a monopoly on the sale of liquor. If you want to buy a fifth of Wild Turkey, you must visit one of the few and far-between liquor stores licensed by the bureaucrats in Salem. These shops are privately operated but all the liquor they contain is state property – until, of course, it’s paid for or liberated at gunpoint by a citizen-philosopher.

It’s an old-school system, a relic (maybe) of prohibition sensibilities, which our neighboring states have already discarded. Across the river, in Washington State, you can buy your liquor at the grocery store.

Anyway, it recently came out in the local press that several high-ranking members of the Oregon state liquor control board have for years been using the privileges of office to hoard the good stuff for themselves. And by the good stuff I mean the expensive stuff, bourbons like Pappy Van Winkle that most of us are less likely to see this side of Paradise than to glimpse Sasquatch dancing in the ferny woods.

The bastards.

Not that yours truly would ever shell out the simoleons needed to secure some Pappy Van Winkle. Happily, there is consolation enough for me in the occasional bottle of Russell’s Reserve bourbon or Michter’s straight rye. But the affair nicely illustrates the dangers of generalization. It’s a fine thing to affirm, like DeVoto, that American whiskey is a pure and civilizing spirit, but we see that even pure and civilizing spirits may tempt men into corruption and brigandage.