On April 8th, thirty years ago, the music died for the seventh time. We know where we were because we wrote it down. The ancient scrolls revealed that since the eighties we had been on a spiritual journey to find Nirvana. This is our story, mostly true and part legend.
The first six chapters were published in 1996 in a Seattle-based Zine called Sacred City. Our editors thought the most interesting aspect was “an East Coast perspective” on Nirvana. It was meant to be serialized, but the magazine had to cease publishing and the world was left hanging until now.
We even visited Seattle once in the fall of 1990, not knowing anything about where to go or what to do. We were totally confused by the lack of walkability and dependable public transportation. There were rumors of a scene wafting all the way out to New York by then, but without specifics we muffed it. And we probably missed Nirvana by about fifteen minutes.
We always had notebooks around. People would say things like, “Put that in the book,” so we’d write things down that seemed funny or insightful at the time. Even though some of it is unintelligible nonsense now, with a little detective work we translated it into something readable. It was a bit like putting Humpty Dumpty back together again. Fortunately, the Covid lockdown afforded us the time for this mammoth undertaking.
What we have here is part one of the strange and terrible saga (yes we borrow from the best).
We were asked by one potential reader, “Is it like the television show Friends?” To which we say (in our best imitation of Chandler), “Yes, it’s exactly like that.” Especially the episode with the wedding where Ross and Rachel moshed to the Dead Kennedys while Monica dropped acid.
Because in the wake of the O.K. Boomer craze, it is our sincere wish to lay to rest all notions Gen Z may have that all of Generation Jones indulged in elevated and earnest discourse until smartphones and AI came along. Don’t believe us? Do the names Joey Buttafuoco and John Wayne Bobbit mean anything to you? They will after you read this book.
But first we had to suffer through the eighties. Nobody can understand how great the nineties were without a slog through the Reagan years.
Welcome to the weird years between the sixties and the nineties.
I recall MTV covered this event like it was the Kennedy Assassination. They were the only news outlet to do so. Where are Kurt Loder and Tabitha Soren now that we need real news coverage?