Come As You Are

Grunge was always more of a construct than an actual movement -- a catch-all term that never accounted for the fact that the bands in said scene had little in common besides an eardrum-crushing appreciation for volume. The Zeppelinesque riffs of Soundgarden’s Screaming Life stood miles apart from the Stooges-style posturings of Mudhoney’s Superfuzz Bigmuff, which was, in turn, oceans away from the roughed-up Lennon/McCartney melodies of Nirvana’s Bleach.

 

It was the work of photographer Charles Peterson that stamped these disparate acts with an unmistakable iconography. His gritty, black-and-white pictures offered a view of 1980s and '90s Seattle as a netherworld populated by rock Sasquatches who subsisted on cheap beer, potent drugs, and power chords; his energetic photographic style transformed them into champions. The 39-year-old Peterson's new book, Touch Me I'm Sick (powerHouse Books), a collection of his most memorable photos, not only documents the sights of the grunge era, but also somehow telegraphs the sounds and the smells of its hard-working rock bands. Built around pictures of Peterson's "big four" -- Mudhoney, Nirvana, Pearl Jam, and Soundgarden -- the book also offers glimpses of rabid scenesters and Olympia riot grrrls and a presurgery peek at a Courtney Love nostril. Captions are nonexistent, with excerpts from period fanzines providing the loosest of narratives (though, for those who need it, the book has a handy index).

On just the sort of dreary, rain-sozzled Seattle night that first inspired some of the city's finest to plug into amplifiers, Peterson brought a trio of luminaries -- Soundgarden's Kim Thayil, Mudhoney's Mark Arm, and Pearl Jam's Eddie Vedder -- to his Capitol Hill home to put words to his pictures.

MARK ARM: Before MTV took full-on root and started showing videos with stage diving, the rituals were completely different in each town. The more isolated the town, the weirder it was. On the eastern seaboard, you'd have all these skinhead, punk-rock, intolerant sort of guys. Up in Seattle, you had guys and girls on MDA, rolling around with smiles on their faces. It was a totally different vibe. I remember going to England for the first time in 1989, and there was no such thing as stage diving. The next time we came through, people had figured it out. And -- this is so British -- they had this little platform in front of the stage where people would line up one at a time and politely plunge into the audience.

KIM THAYIL: Charles' photos also influenced bands. I think people would see Mudhoney or Nirvana record [jackets], and bands started behaving likewise. Bands that might have been more shoegazing and static became more animated on stage when they saw the potential presented in his work.

EDDIE VEDDER: It put pressure on us to be more exciting than we wanted to. We couldn't just stand at the mic. You had to create some movement there. Charles showed everything had to be exciting.

THAYIL: MTV didn't pick up on stage diving until probably your "Alive" video.

VEDDER: I wasn't going to bring that up.

ARM: It was in the "Smells Like Teen Spirit" video, too.

THAYIL: Well, I want to give Eddie credit. [Laughs]

VEDDER: I don't want the credit. I feel apologetic.

THAYIL: What are you apologizing for? Starting a dance movement?

VEDDER: I'm apologizing to [Minor Threat and Fugazi's] Ian MacKaye for every time he's had to stop a show, and I've been at many of them.

THAYIL: Charles, you were part of the audience, but you were also part of the stage.

VEDDER: All the other photographers got kicked out after three songs.

CHARLES PETERSON: Sometimes other photographers get in my way, and I'm more than happy to see them escorted out.

ARM: In a large percentage of these photos I assume that (a) you were drunk off your butt and that (b) the camera was nowhere near your eye. [Laughs]

PETERSON: Yeah, we were all drunk off our butts.

ARM: I remember being at shows where you'd stick your camera in the air in the general direction of the fans and take a shot.

THAYIL: It was like guerrilla journalism. It's not like you were being commissioned by Black Flag or the Meat Puppets. Most of the people you were shooting were friends.

PETERSON: A large part of that was where I was working. From '86 through '89 or '90, I was printing the little pictures of cars and trucks for Auto Trader magazine. One of my jobs was to bulk-load 100-foot rolls of film. So many of these pictures were taken courtesy of Auto Trader's film.

THAYIL: One of my favorites is the sequence of Kurt [Cobain] jumping on [original Nirvana drummer] Chad [Channing]'s drum set. You capture the speed and emotion. I can't imagine another visual image for the music that we were making back then.

PETERSON: People always laid me with this tag: the blurry photographer. But, really, not many of my shots are that blurry. I think it's part of enjoying the music and moving to the music.

ARM: I really like these weird audience shots from the '80s. It blows my mind how gothic people looked at that point.

THAYIL: That's because they're black-and-white photos. Hey, there's a slimming effect to being goth.

ARM: But the music didn't sound like that at all.

THAYIL: Remember when Black Flag came in here in, like, '83? That's when the punk-rock guys started to grow their hair out. The polarity between punk rock and metal was disintegrating. At our shows, we got the flannel guys, the goth guys, the metal guys, some glam people.

ARM: If you see pictures of hardcore shows from Boston or New York or D.C., it's all these dudes with shaved heads who look exactly the same. Here there were always dudes with, like, mustaches. It was an all-inclusive weirdo freak scene. Ultimately, there weren't enough people involved where you could have a scene of all one thing. If you only wanted to play to the hardcore skinheads, you'd have ten people at your show. And if you only wanted to play for people with triple Mohawks, you'd have one person at your show.

PETERSON: We tried to design the book for someone who'd never been to a rock show before and hadn't experienced any of that.

THAYIL: Do you think they would look at this? Will it end up on someone's coffee table?

VEDDER: Tom Hanks and Rita Wilson's. [Laughs, then looks at a photo of himself, sitting alone on a bus in Spain in 1996] I'm trying to think of the Bon Jovi song that was playing there.

ARM: If you played one show in front of ten people or you played the sports arena in Madrid, you can relate to that. You've seen a million faces, and you've rocked them all. No matter how big your band is.

VEDDER: I was watching R.E.M. play a street festival in San Diego just last weekend. I realized it was a reminder that we're not going to ever play again in situations where people aren't seated, after what happened in Denmark [where nine fans were crushed to death during Pearl Jam's performance at the Roskilde Festival in 2000]. People could handle themselves in the situations Charles documented. For all the madness and chaos happening in these photos, no one died.

ARM: The new blood that comes to see our bands gets to be less and less and less. And the audience gets old with us. I think it's going to be safe to take down the chairs eventually. But then the audience will probably demand the chairs back.

THAYIL: Ed, do you believe that [the Roskilde] situation might be analogous to a grunge Altamont?

VEDDER: In having dissected that situation so many times -- you know, I think about it every week, every day. It's unbearable enough to have just been standing there at the time. If we had been responsible for it, I don't think I could be talking about it now. All the families that were affected and knowing some of those people and communicating with them -- it's a reminder that you won't be able to re-create that [sense of security].

THAYIL: Are kids not like that today? At Lollapalooza?

VEDDER: I think the Vans Warped Tour is similar to that.

ARM: I'm so out of touch with what the kids are into today. And I don't really give a shit. [Laughs] I was out of touch with what the kids were into when I was a kid.

PETERSON: Ed, in your introduction [to the book], you talk about being bothered that you aren't more photogenic.

THAYIL: Yeah, what the fuck are you talking about?

ARM: Oh, that's just Ed being humble. You've got those eyes!

THAYIL: That voice!

VEDDER: I'd like to go with the voice. I was just uncomfortable with the whole deal. The bigger issue is trust. We always felt like we could trust Charles. There were all kinds of people we didn't know and ?didn't like making money off us.

THAYIL: They weren't taking your money -- they were making their money by exploiting you.

VEDDER: Right, right. You think, "Who are these people?" Then you find out who they are, and you don't like them. You're like, "How do I remove myself from this situation?" That's when you pull back from everything, but people don't understand, and they think you're a prick.

ARM: You know, we're still waiting to be fully exploited.