The musician Stone Gossard called “ground zero” for grunge
The massive rise of the Seattle music scene in the 1990s is something rarely captured in the music industry. After being inundated with thousands of bands trying their hand at playing massive hard rock out of Los Angeles, the authentic approach to rock music represented by bands like Nirvana and Soundgarden marked a drastic change for rock and roll, as many bands began to flock to Seattle hoping to make it big. Although Stone Gossard may have helped pave the way for grunge with Pearl Jam, he thought that one musician was responsible for the Seattle sound blowing up the way it did.
Before he had settled into his groove with Pearl Jam, Gossard had already begun honing his craft as part of the band Green River. Combining elements of hard rock and punk that they loved, the lineup would feature a ragtag team of future grunge pioneers, including an early lineup with Mark Arm of Mudhoney at the front.
Setting his sights on mainstream success, Gossard eventually split with bassist Jeff Ament to form Mother Love Bone with singer Andy Wood. Although the band dominated the club in the early 1990s, the death of Wood at the start of the decade led to them starting at ground zero again before finding Eddie Vedder for Pearl Jam.
While Gossard had already seen his fair share of rock star hangups in Seattle, one transplant had set his sights on Los Angeles before grunge blew up. After putting together various punk bands like 10 Minute Warning, Duff McKagan would eventually move down South to Los Angeles in search of stardom, where he came across the beginnings of Guns N’ Roses.
Despite being in the heart of Los Angeles, the band would become infamous for leaving every other band in the dust. Compared to the sleek sounds of guitar virtuosos, Slash brought a bluesy texture back into rock and roll, with McKagan serving as the punk rock side of the band, balancing their melodic hooks with down and dirty licks on songs like ‘Rocket Queen’ and ‘Paradise City’.
While the band would get ridiculed by artists like Kurt Cobain once grunge started to blow up, Gossard always had fond memories of McKagan’s influence on the city. Whereas most saw him as another LA hard rocker, Gossard knew McKagan was a punk rock kid looking to tear down the corporate side of rock from the inside out.
Despite not being from the grunge community, Gossard thought McKagan was pivotal to the sound of Seattle, saying, “Duff is, you know, really ground zero. I mean, as much as anyone could be ground zero for Seattle sound, I think Duff is really that guy because he was playing in all the bands that I was seeing, and then he left, you know, Seattle and started Guns N’ Roses”.
Once Guns N’ Roses laid the groundwork for authenticity in rock, the rest of the Seattle scene quickly followed their lead with one great band after another, culminating in one of the most significant musical movements of the 20th century. Artists like Cobain and Vedder may be the poster children for the death of hair metal, but a few years earlier, McKagan could take credit for single-handedly slaying the beast known as glam rock.
