Unsolicited Thoughts / Notes On Everybody Loves Our Town

– other books may summarize with great aplomb exactly what the music of Nirvana and Mudhoney meant to a generation but nowhere else will you find a more detailed account of the fistfight that ended Cat Butt

– Courtney Love is the Richard Nixon of grunge; can you imagine how powerful she’d be without the pettiness and the insecurities?

– I laughed when Natalie Portman died of a broken heart in Star Wars but I cried in this book when the same thing happened to Layne Staley

– speaking of Layne, the only grunge myth the author fails to bust, prove, or even address is the one where the Alice in Chains singer was ousted from “Celebrity Jeopardy!” for giving Alex Trebek the finger (actually I think this was disproven years ago but I want to keep the idea alive that Staley was an expert on the Dead Sea Scrolls, the alleged subject of the question in question)

– according to Chris Cornell, Kurt Cobain only disassociated himself from Nirvana’s game-changing Nevermind after its release because that was the cool “punk rock” thing to do, but also according to Chris Cornell you should wear breakaway shirts at all your concerts and rip them off dramatically even if it annoys the shit out of all your other band members

– Ben Shepherd is still pretty mad some people used to call his band “Frowngarden”

– the singer from Candlebox (who are from Seattle!) did not sleep with Madonna when he had the chance, something his then-wife admonished him for when Candlebox’s career went down the toilet (this woman and Mr. Candlebox are now divorced)

– Everybody Loves Our Town presents a fairly complete and undeniably engrossing map of grunge from messy start to even messier finish; I only wish the book included a rebuttal from Glenn Danzig regarding the alleged $12,000 guarantee Jeff Ament claims Danzig’s band Samhain had for a show in Detroit in the mid-eighties