Reading Rebel

I had very few goals when I got to college, but one of them was to be a part of the campus radio station. For Christmas a few years prior, two of my five cousins both unknowingly gave me books on Nirvana. Being fifteen, that provoked a silent reaction of “Wow guys, thanks for really getting me.” One of the books was just about Kurt Cobain’s lyrics, doing an analysis of every Nirvana song that had been put out. It was one of those glossy covers you spot cause of the weird font on the title is in that basically reads like the proposal that made a publisher green light it. Now that there’s the internet, any of us really could have written this book since it mostly was just the work of a guy who took the time to sift through years of interviews with the band and just sorted which quotes had to do with which songs. To be honest, that may even be giving the author too much credit. A lot of the book’s material may have come directly from the Michael Azzerod biography “Come As You Are” (which is totally legit.)  Not that I’m talking shit—the way that the lyrics books was written is actually not that far from what I do for a living now.

The second book, from my cousin Kirk, seemed like it was going to be a lot cheesier. It was called Route 666: On the Road to Nirvana by Gina Arnold. Route 666, yeah cause we’re all a bunch of devil worshipers who get depressed thinking of Kurt and fight back by getting into Marilyn Manson, right? Its title reminded me a lot of the book my Mom used to leave around the apartment a lot during my adolescence, Why Good Parents Raise Bad Children (sometimes stacked above Smart Women, Foolish Choices). But right after Christmas, my Mom and I were visiting my grandfather in Georgia and being that I turned out the lyrics book in about an hour and a half, I figured I might as well give this ooga booga Route 666 a try since I had nothing better to do.

Well the book’s not really about Nirvana at all. If the lyrics book just rode the coat tails of Nirvana’s post-mortem aura in order to get a book published–any book published, then Gina Arnold used it to get her book published. Being a teenager in 1995, the idea of “punk” was being sold to me pretty ruthlessly. Green Day and the Offspring were being hailed by magazine covers as the return of “punk rock” and had just sold about 13 million records combined. The way the story was told, these bands were a return to the last time the media had made a fuss about punk rock twenty years before when The Sex Pistols, The Clash and The Ramones were making a name for themselves. But something about that scene felt corny to me in a hurry and after seeing Green Day at my first concert (fourteen years ago today actually,) I quickly jumped ship.  Now Nirvana would occasionally be referred to as “punk” as well—specifically in this tour documentary of them, Sonic Youth and a bunch of other bands I listened to called 1991: The Year Punk Broke, but I didn’t seem to understand the connection between the two punks. I knew I had been just a kid and all, but what the hell happened in the eighties? Gina Arnold filled in the gaps.

She did it as a fly in the wall. The book was not some exploration of “the underground rock movement” by someone who became fascinated in finding out where grunge came from. This was the tale of the girl who had bands sleep on her floor when they came thru town throughout the decade, who sat in the college station in Olympia and watched the Sub Pop guys do their weekly show and who sat across from the apple of her eye, The Replacements’ Paul Westerberg and played hangman with him (making him guess the title of his opus, “Unsatisfied”.) And aside from flipping back to the title page and writing down the name of just about every band Gina mentioned (with an understood “note to self: get into all of this”), the biggest thing I took away from Route 66 was that this was definitely the sort of life I wanted to live. Someday I wanted to be a small part of something that might never be a big deal to begin with.

So when I got to college, one of my first orders of business was to seek out the radio station. Just that summer KSCR had gone from sending out its signal on 104.7 throughout campus all the way into downtown LA to getting kicked off the air and becoming an internet only station (which in 1998 pretty much guaranteed it next to no listeners). The show I got assigned to intern at was on Friday afternoons from two to four. The first hour was run by this dude named Keenan who would always wear a fitted baseball cap backwards, play some poppy punk and goof around with Jed and some of his other buddies who would come down to the station. The second hour, this girl Kara would take over the controls. She would often seem bummed out, the way that teenage girls are depressed in sitcoms. One week a news Belle and Sebastien album came out (The Boy With the Arab Strap?) and she spent her hour just letting the whole album play. And we all just sat there in silence, listening to this exercise in melancholy, as no one else did.

And yet that was about the best thing I had going for me at the time.

Tags: mapping