‘Swallow My Pride’: The overlooked 1988 song that built grunge
There’s no real way to describe grunge to anyone if you really broke everything down.
The Seattle sound may have been the thing that everyone gravitated towards whenever they started talking about what wiped out hair metal, but you’re going to need to seriously get your ears checked if you think that Alice in Chains sounds anything remotely like Nirvana or if Melvins sound anywhere close to Soundgarden. All of the bands were congregating around the same area, but sometimes it took the right song for people to have something to latch onto.
But when the late 1980s started, Seattle seemed like the last place anyone would look for one of the biggest movements in music history. Most people on the touring circuit would usually skip Seattle as just another no-name city, so all that anyone had to hope for was local bands to make their own fun. So why not have a band like Green River try to make their own version of rock and roll. And if you don’t know that name, I assure you that you know the names of the band members.
Before Mother Love Bone or Pearl Jam started, this was the hub where Stone Gossard and Jeff Ament cut their teeth, and on vocals in none other than Mark Arm of Mudhoney. This would have made for one of the greatest grunge supergroups not named Temple of the Dog if people knew what they had on their hands, but even with a few decent tunes under their belt, it became clear what was wrong with the band from the first time they started jamming.
Because listening to both Mudhoney and Pearl Jam, neither of them sound like each other. Arm thrived off of making music that was deliberately abrasive in the same vein of bands like The Stooges, whereas Ament was never afraid to layer on the stadium-rock cliches every now and again. And if you want to hear what both of those genres furiously slammed against each other, ‘Swallow My Pride’ is ground zero for what grunge was going to sound like.
The production isn’t necessarily the best by any stretch, but when you look at both aspects of the song from Arm and Ament, each of them are putting together the building blocks of the genre. Melvins often get cited as the band that everyone followed when the genre started, but when you think about those massive choruses that the movement was built on, ‘Swallow My Pride’ sounds like it’s trying as hard as it can to be that kind of mammoth chorus, even if Arm isn’t the right vocalist to handle this kind of tune.
But if you want to hear what this kind of music sounds done right, look no further than Soundgarden’s version of the tune that they did only a few years later. Yes, it’s a bit odd to see a band start covering someone else’s tune only a few years after the original, but that’s how the Seattle scene. No one was worried on stepping on each other’s toes, and by this point, they were making music just to amuse themselves half the time.
When you look at what happened when Kurt Cobain turned the city inside out, though, a lot of what could be categorised as grunge feels indebted to what Green River was doing. Ament and Arm may have been the ones to dissolve the band only a few months later, but each of them seemed to take a few lessons with them, with the bassist taking Gossard and trying to make more radio-friendly material and Arm creating even more abrasive tunes that sound like the more avant-garde songs Nirvana would make a few years later.
Green River were a beautiful contradiction in many ways when they first got started, but the fact that they made something that summed up the city perfectly in only a few minutes makes them deserve at least a cursory mention among the other legends of the genre. None of them knew what they were doing compared to legitimate rock stars, but when it comes the slacker attitude in rock and roll, this was the sound of the Pacific Northwest discovering themselves.
