Originally Posted by kane

My post was based on my own perspective from that time. At that time (the early 90's) I was writing for a music magazine called The Rocket. Anyone from the Pacific Northwest that was into the music scene probably has heard of it. Anyway, Yes, Alice In Chains was the first band from there to get national recognition. However the amount of recognition they got was pretty small at first. They didn't get really big until the entire scene got big. The same with Soundgarden. Soundgarden had probably been around longer than most of the bands in that area, but they were a lot heavier than many of the other bands and were actually one of the last ones to explode on the scene nationally. By explode I mean move into the mainstream with top 40 radio play and national press coverage. Nirvana's Nevermind came out and was a national hit almost from the first day it was released. They were all over MTV and the radio. I was at the CD release party for it and remember hearing the guys from Sub Pop records talking about how, once they heard the record, they knew the band was going be huge. After Nirvana's first wave of success came Pearl Jam who became, arguably, even bigger. Ten and then Vs were huge records. Ten actually came out a few weeks before Nevermind, but wasn't the immediate success that Nevermind was. By the time Pearl Jam were staples on rock radio you pretty much didn't hear from the hair metal bands anymore. After Nirvana and Pearl Jam got huge the other bands in the area like Alice in Chains and Soundgarden grew and then exploded.

Stone Temple Pilots was a San Diego band that basically wanted to be a Pearl Jam clone. They were the grunge version of Poison to Motley Crue. They had a few catchy songs, but history will forget them.

There are other bands that you mentioned that were instrumental in paving the road. The Pixies, Sonic Youth (although they had been around awhile already) and Mudhoney were pioneers. Mudhoney was probably the first of them to be big with their single "touch me I'm sick." Smashing Pumpkins was also a major player in that time frame, but they were not a huge band until Siamese Dream came out. Tool were around at that time but weren't really a player until the mid 90's and by then hair metal was long in the grave.

My post was probably a little too overstated. There were other bands that were big in that time frame and helped to propel that type of music into the mainstream, but I feel without the initial success of Nirvana, much of it may not of have happened. It is possible that if Nirvana never existed Pearl Jam would have still been as huge and the other bands of that time would have still been big, but I think Nirvana's Nevermind fundamentally changed the direction of rock music and helped to move a genre of music from the small clubs into the mainstream.

for me it has a lot to do with gut reaction. I was a music critic at the time ( and still am somewhat of a music snob) so I'm kind of jaded. I would hear things and think they were good, but the first time I heard "smells like teen spirit" I thought it was the coolest thing I had ever heard.